Code Name Hélène

Code Name Hélène, Ariel Lawhon

This 2020 novel is the fiction-based-on-fact story of a real person, Nancy Wake Fiocca who was a spy and a fearless leader of the Maquis, the French Resistance during WWll. She was also known by the code names Hélène, Madame Andrée, Lucienne Carlier, The White Mouse.

Nancy Wake, New Zealand-born (1912), Australian-raised, the youngest of six children and a nurse, left home at an early age to seek out a life for herself. She came to France, needed a living, so enrolled in a secretarial course and upon completion was able to get herself hired as a freelance journalist by Hearst Corporation. Her stories were published but never with her byline – the common practice at the time being to publish articles by men, never women. Her journalistic career found her visiting Germany and Austria during the rise of the Nazi Party and she witnessed such brutality that it changed her forever. When war broke out and France was occupied, she was determined to do her part against Nazism.

Wake, an extremely determined young woman, was not inclined to take no for an answer and knew her own mind with a confidence that is admirable. She left behind the journalism career upon marrying her French husband, industrialist Henri Fiocca, moving to be with him in Marseille. By this time she spoke French expertly, well enough to pass for a native. In 1939 Henri left to go defend the Maginot Line, a string of concrete fortresses that the French Government guaranteed would protect France from a German onslaught. Nancy wasn’t far behind, bringing her own truck, converted to a make-shift ambulance to the same northeast part of France to help as much as she could in the war effort.

When eventually in May 1940, the Maginot Line was bypassed by the German army and France became occupied and divided, Nancy Wake headed home to Marseille and while waiting for her husband to return became involved in clandestine work, delivering fake id papers to people needing to escape. This work eventually led to a need for her own escape in a treacherous trek over the Pyrenees to Spain. From there she went to the UK where she was accepted and trained by the British Special Operation Executive who paraachuted her back into France to assist and train the Maquis, coordinate the ordering and delivery of much-needed supplies and to ensure that post-D-Day and other targets set by the Allies would be carried out on the pre-arranged schedule. Sadly, Henri Fiocca was killed by the Gestapo in 1943.

All of the work Nancy Wake did in France she did not only with supreme confidence in her own abilities but with a spiritied vivacity that won her compatriots' respect as leader of the Résistance. She stayed with them through D-Day in June 1944 as well as the landing of the Allied Forces in the south of France in August 1944.

I don’t usually give this much away about books I review but this story really grabbed me and stayed in my mind. The author, Ariel Lawhon, carried out a great deal of research, reading numerous biographies and even Nancy Wake’s autobiography to get the facts straight. In the author’s note at the end of the book, Lawhon confesses that she has bent some of the times and facts for the furtherance of the novel. I think we can forgive her! Nancy Wake’s story is expertly told. I couldn’t get my nose out of the book, but at the same time, some of the events were so graphic and intense, I often had to look away.

Ariel Lawhon leaves Nancy Wake's story at the end of the war but in fact, Wake remarried, recieved many accolades and honours throughout her life, had several more careers, including as an aspirational politician, wrote her autobiography and lived into her old age, dying in England in 2011. 

A surprising note: I ordered Code Name Hélene through the curbside service at my local library. Despite it being newly-published and only recently acquired, there were no other holds on it and last I checked, still no holds on this story of a remarkable accomplished and courageous woman. That's really surprising!

Highly recommended.