Women of the Resistance: Cristina Luca Boico

During the research for my upcoming series, The Resistance Chronicles, I found countless stories of brave women who served in resistance groups around the world. Some joined groups within their native countries. Others like Cristina Luca Boica, today’s featured resister, fled their homelands and joined organizations within their new country.

Born Bianca Marcusohn on August 8, 1916 in Botosani, Romania, Cristina and her family were part of the Jewish middle-class. According to several sites, Romania is a “deeply Francophile country," with French being the language of the Romanian elite since the 18th century. At the time of her upbringing, French was a mandatory language taught in schools, and she and her sister grew up reading French literature.

While attending Carmen Sylva High School, an elite school with an excellent national reputation, Cristina experienced her first antisemitic encounter that she later described a some of the non-Jewish students “maintaining a certain distance from us.” Additionally, the school had a dorm specifically set aside for Jewish students that was often attacked by non-Jewish students. She spent quite a bit of time at the dorm, Schuller, debating the merits of communism with Zionist students. She, and many others, argued that communism could end antisemitism because it “promised a better world for all, and thereby the genuine liberation of the Jewish people, allowing for a complete flourishing of its potential, dissolving nationalities, religions, and ethnicities.”

In 1937, she was expelled from university because of her political activities, and she left Romania to

continue her schooling at the Sorbonne. Three years later she participated in the 1940 demonstrations to protest the arrest of Paul Langevin, a French physicist who was outspoken about his opposition to fascism. She was arrested but quickly released.

The following year she joined the Organisation Spéciale—Main-d’Euvre Immigrée (OS-MOI), the armed group of the Immigrant Labor Force and came up with her first nom de plume: Monique. By 1942, she’d lost her job as a translator and went to work for the OS-MOI full-time. Shortly thereafter, the organization merged with two other groups, and she changed her name one final time to Cristina Luca. Her role was extensive, and she became an intelligence officer. She selected targets for resistance attacks and collected information. Reportedly with the knowledge of her professors, she stole chemicals from the school’s lab that she gave to the partisans. With her knowledge of chemistry, she constructed Molotov cocktails for sabotage missions.

In the first six months of 1943, there were fourteen train derailments, thirty-four acts of arson or bombings, and forty-three assassinations. It is unknown how many of these activities involved Cristina. By 1944, she was assigned to combat duty and participated in several partisan attacks. During the liberation of Paris in August 1945, she was part of the revolt, and after the city’s liberation, she joined the French Army as a lieutenant.

After the war Cristina returned to Romania, eventually married, and worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Due to the change in political climate, she was dismissed from her job in 1952, and her husband was “purged from his position” a few months later. They eventually left Romania and settled in France where she passed away in 2002 at the age of 85.

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Spies & Sweethearts

She wants to do her part. He’s just trying to stay out of the stockade. Will two agents deep behind enemy lines find capture… or love?

1942. Emily Strealer is tired of being told what she can’t do. Wanting to prove herself to her older sisters and do her part for the war effort, the high school French teacher joins the OSS and trains to become a covert operative. And when she completes her training, she finds herself parachuting into occupied France with her instructor to send radio signals to the Resistance.

Major Gerard Lucas has always been a rogue. Transferring to the so-called “Office of Dirty Tricks” to escape a court-martial, he poses as a husband to one of his trainees on a dangerous secret mission. But when their cover is blown after only three weeks, he has to flee with the young schoolteacher to avoid Nazi arrest.

Running for their lives, Emily clings to her mentor’s military experience during the harrowing three-hundred-mile trek to neutral Switzerland. And while Gerard can’t bear the thought of his partner falling into German hands, their forged papers might not be enough to get them over the border.

Can the fugitive pair receive God’s grace to elude the SS and discover the future He intended?

Purchase Link: https://books2read.com/u/m0Od9l

Sources:
https://publicseminar.org/2016/08/antifascism-as-political-passion-in-the-life-of-cristina-luca/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristina_Luca_Boico
https://jewishlink.news/debunking-the-sheep-to-the-slaughter-myth-resistance-heroism-marceau-and-mime-in-occupied-france/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romania_in_World_War_II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Romania
https://bmmhs.org/romanian-military-experience-during-the-second-world-war
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/ACFAF5.pdf

Photo Credits:

Cristina Luca: By unknown - Original publication: Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org

Sorbonne: Pixabay/Pexels

Resistance Members: REX Shutterstock/Roger Viollet

Stockholm, Sweden: Casablanca of the North

Shortly after the United Kingdom declared war on Germany in September 1939, Sweden announced its neutrality, a stance they’d held since the Napoleonic wars. However, with its continued business relationships with Germany, the allowance troop transports through the country, and “less than friendly” policies toward Jews and refugees, scholars disagree as to whether the Sweden was truly neutral.

If you’ve watched the 1942 classic Warner Bros. movie “Casablanca,” you have a sense of what Stockholm, Sweden was like during the war, and more than a few sources refer to the city as “Casablanca of the North.” Every major intelligence service of the war was represented, some with agents, most with double agents. Germans, Americans, Britons, and Russians lived, worked, and played side by side. Official legations employees (both Axis and Allied) mingled with members of the Abwehr, Office of Strategic Services, and Special Operations Executive trying to ferret out information to aid their cause.

An intriguing aspect is the number of women who on the surface were singers, actresses, dancers, journalist, secretaries, and housekeepers, but in reality, were spies. Of the Allied female spies, many served to bring Germany to its knees or to make money while others were backed into it to save relatives left behind in an occupied country. The women observed, infiltrated, and reported their findings using any means necessary to obtain the information.

Another “piece of the pie” is the use of downed British and American airmen.

Crews from Allied planes that crashed in neutral Sweden were required to register, then interned in one of several areas within the city. However, these men had run of the city as long as they adhered to curfew and a host of other rules. A large percentage of them were given jobs with their legation that included administrative tasks and handling the logistics of tracking the hundreds (and eventually thousands) of airmen.

However, given their freedom of movement, more than a few of the crew members were recruited by the OSS and SOE to act as agents (which, of course went against the rules, but who said those in war played fair?). There is a reason Churchill’s SOE was called the Department of Ungentlemanly Warfare, and America’s OSS referred to as the Department of Dirty Tricks.

Rather than involve the airmen in sabotage, they were generally acted as messengers and observers who reported the comings and goings and conversations of the Germans. Liberty Lady is a well-written biographical account of author Pat DiGeorge’s father whose plane crashed in Sweden and ultimately found himself assigned to becoming friends with Swedish “businessman” John Lonnegren who was eventually arrested, then convicted of unlawful intelligence activities and sentenced to two years of hard labor.

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Linda Shenton Matchett writes happily-ever-after historical Christian fiction about

second chances and women who overcome life’s challenges to be better versions of themselves. A native of Baltimore, Maryland, she was born a stone’s throw from Fort McHenry (of Star-Spangled Banner fame) and has lived in historical places all her life. She is a volunteer docent and archivist at the Wright Museum of WWII and a former trustee for her local public library. She now lives in central New Hampshire where she explores the history of this great state and immerses herself in the imaginary worlds created by other authors.

The American World War II Home Front in 29 Objects:

Unlike Europe the American mainland escaped physical devastation during World War II as it was not subjected to full-scale invasions. However, that didn’t mean the United States wasn’t impacted by the war. The ramifications of large economic, cultural, and societal changes forced Americans to reconsider entrenched beliefs and traditions.

Artifacts collected from across the nation tell the stories of the American people whose lives were shaped by this second “war to end all wars,” World War II.

Purchase link: https://books2read.com/u/47pLxR

Photo credits:

Map of Sweden: Encyclopedia Britannica

Georgia Rebel, first American plane to crash in Sweden: National Archives

John Lonnegren: National Archives

Sources:
https://wwv.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206061.pdf
Liberty Lady, Pat DiGeorge, Beaver’s Spur Publishing, 2016
https://journals.openedition.org/diacronie/4709
https://www.sverigesradio.se/artikel/3230619
https://reveal.world/sv/story/german-counter-espionage-bureau-wwii