Lydia Lova – The Naked Heroine Who Survived Ravensbruk to Strip In Soho
“My dear Lydia Lova – You will not remember me but I remember you
so well. We were at Ravensbrück together. I just want to say how
very happy I am for you that the French Government have recognized
all the good you have done for France and for all of us. I read
yesterday that you were given the Légion d’Honneur by General Masson.
We who remember are very proud of you. Good luck to you, our
little heroine, always and all my love”
—On July 3, 1963, Lydia Lova arrived in London to perform at Soho’s Casino de Paris Striptease Theatre.
Booked into the Mayfair Hotel, Lydia was “The Naked Heroine”, the
alluring Polish dancer (née Lydia de Korczak Lipski on January 8, 1925)
who fought the Nazis as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Fighting French Forces
Unit Resistance Deportee (unit of foreign born resistance fighters),
survived torture at the hands of the SS in Ravensbruck
concentration camp and become a showgirl at the hymned Paris nightspot,
the Folies-Bergère. In 1960 she was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the
Légion d Honneur.
Lydia’s is a remarkable story. How did the daughter of Irenka de Korczac Lipski and Poland’s Prince Wladimir de Korczak Lipski, a direct descendant of Prince de Korczak, King of Hungary in 1120, end up stripping in Paris and London?
In his book The Naked Heroine, John Izbicki explains how a small notice in the French Press on a young woman being awarded a medal for courage intrigued him:
Who, I thought, was this woman and what had she done to
help the Resistance movement while France was under Nazi occupation? I
searched through the other French papers on my desk and found the same
brief announcement in the pages of France Soir and Paris Presse.
I decided to investigate further and discovered from the Journal
Officiel that Mlle de Korczac Lipski had already been decorated with the
Croix de Guerre with Palm and numerous other medals, including the
Croix de Combattant Volontaire Résistant and the Médaille Réconnaissance
de la France Libre. Lydia de Korczac Lipski, it transpired, was the
most decorated woman in France. I was growing increasingly interested in
her. Who was she? What did she do in the Resistance? And what was she
doing now? I had to find out…
I desperately needed a break and it came soon enough when the
telephone in my office began to ring. My Journal Officiel contact had
phoned me back to tell me that Mlle Lipski was better known as Lydia
Lova and she was the top-billing nude dancer of the Folies-Bergère.
Within one delicious minute, an interesting little story had turned into
a sensational scoop.
Would she be keen to tell her story? No. She told the writer: “If you
want to write about my dancing at the theatre, then please go ahead. I
have no objections. But please forget the other matter. It is in the
past and I’d rather forget it.”
How could she forget her past? Lydia Lova was no self-regarding diva. Far from it.
Her reluctance to speak freely to me or any other
journalist was that she refused to have the name Lydia Lova connected in
any way with her real name – Lydia de Korczac Lipski, daughter of a
Polish prince. The very idea that people might think she was drawing on
her background for cheap publicity was totally abhorrent to her.
Soon after she talked., Izbicki had material for four features in Britain’s The Sunday Graphic.
After some negotiation, Lydia agreed for Izbicki to write her life
story. In an apartment on Paris’s Left Bank she talked and talked.
Ibicki was profoundly affected by what he heard. Anyone sane should be.
One of Lydia’s most famous dances showed her in a
pas-de-deux with the devil, a physically magnificent young male and
almost nude dancer, both of them cavorting across a blood-red stage with
real-looking flames licking the edges of a deep pit in the centre of
the stage hell. The devil plays a haunting melody upon a glass violin,
whose tune is taken up by the orchestra in the theatre’s own and very
real pit. Lydia, a beautiful fallen angel, pirouettes around the stage,
enticing the devil who, of course, falls madly in love with her. He
lures her ever closer to him and closer also to the fiery pit and, as
they dance together, the flames leap ever higher until these two hellish
lovers are engulfed by the flames and disappear into the pit.
This particular ballet always proved one of the most popular with
audiences at the Folies-Bergére. But to Lydia, who never failed to make
her exit into the wings and back to her dressing room with the tears
streaming from her eyes, that ballet brought back her most dreadful
memories. It symbolised her past, her childhood. It conjured back the
nightmares of Fresnes Prison and Ravensbrück Camp where she had been
confronted by the devil incarnate and almost engulfed in the flames of
the crematorium. And when Lydia used to return to her apartment in the
rue HegesippeMoreau, high over the rooftops of Montmartre in Paris, she
used to drink a large glass of milk and go to bed with a prayer that
this time perhaps, she
would not be visited by those dreadful dreams of death. But they did come. They almost always did.
No medal, however golden, could have ever have wiped clean the past
for Lydia or manage to interpret fully the true heroism of that naked
dancer of the Folies-Bergére.
The Press descended on the Mayfair Hotel for a reception.
Brian O’Hanlon, who was our PR at the time, pulled all the stops out.
She was in every single paper in England and her story was syndicated
throughout the world. Lydia was ecstatic about the results, and so were
we. Rehearsals began on the 5th of July and went really smoothly. Up
until her opening day and between rehearsals she was being interviewed
all the time by various member of the press.
Her story was so intriguing. This young girl had been in the French
Resistance during the War and had been captured and sent to Ravensbruck
Concentration Camp. She had finished up in the experimental wing of the
camp, where they tried out all manners of vile tortures. She was
injected in November 1944 by Dr.Hans Gerhart, one of the camp’s butcher
doctors. When she asked what it was for, she was told not to worry, and
that she would find out in about 20 to 25 years. This was the inhuman
way the Germans treated their prisoners. The miracle was how, through
all that she had endured, there emerged this glamorous and charming lady
who wowed the Press with her Parisian style and elegance.
Lydia’s act was a smash hit. We staged it so that she appeared
onstage between the covers of her book, “The Naked Heroine.” She sang,
danced and finally stripped with such elegance that even the most
prudish would have found her performance enchanting.
The three weeks just flew by, but during that time we had become firm
friends and she left with the promise that whenever she wanted to come
to London she would come and stay with Ray and myself at Marston Close.
The house was quite large and she would be a welcome visitor.
One Sunday later that year when she was staying with us, Lydia and I
were lounging around the house. Ray had gone off in the car with his
mother to see her mother and sisters so that she could boast to them as
to how well her son was doing.
We had a manservant at the time called Carl Coffee who was a
wonderful cook and a very amiable person. I couldn’t understand why he
was not around pottering in the kitchen. I said to Lydia, ‘I suppose
he’s been out on the tiles and stayed with friends. He’ll most probably
be back soon.’ So I thought nothing more about it and we had our
breakfast. A little later the doorbell went and there on the steps were
two uniformed policemen. The first thing I thought was that there must
have been an accident. ‘Does Mr. Carl Coffee live here?” asked one of
the officers. ‘Well, yes,” I asked. ‘Why?’ ‘I’m sorry to inform you that
he is dead,’ he replied. ‘As you were the last person to see him alive,
you must come and identify him.’ I nearly shat myself.
Apparently Carl was in a cinema in Edgware Road for the last
performance. When they played ‘God Save the Queen’ and the audience
stood up, Carl was the only one sitting! I began to think quickly. I had
never seen a dead person. I really had no desire to see a corpse. I
thought that maybe I could palm the task off on Ray when he got back. I
told the policeman that I had no transport, but he informed me they
could take me in the police car. I didn’t like the idea of that. It was
bad enough that the neighbours knew that Ray and I owned a strip club.
God alone knows what they would think if they saw me being dragged off
in a police car. After I explained that I couldn’t leave the house until
later that afternoon the policemen agreed to come back at 3p.m. I
breathed a sigh of relief and shut the door.
I turned to see Lydia, who had heard the conversation, standing there
ashen and shaking. I said to her, ’Why are you shaking? You must have
seen loads of dead people in Ravensbruck.’ When I added, ‘ As a matter
of fact, you know what Carl looked like, you can go and identify him!’
She nearly fainted. I was trying to palm it off onto anyone. To cut a
long story short, it was decided that I would go, if Ray hadn’t returned
in time. Of course, he didn’t, but I made Lydia promise that she would
come with me and stay outside whilst I was in the mortuary.
The police car came back right at 3p.m. When Lydia and I got into the
car, a few of the neighbours were hanging out their windows. Oh the
shame! Lydia and I sat in the car not uttering a word. It was all a bit
of a haze thanks to the half a bottle of whisky we had got through while
we were waiting. All I remember of the mortuary was that it was
freezing cold. There on a slab was poor Carl. My eyes really focused on
the label that was hanging from his toe. After I had identified Carl’s
body, the police thanked me and buggered off, leaving Lydia and I to
find our own way back to Swiss Cottage. So much for helping the police
out!
Ray and I would see Lydia whenever we were in Paris which was very
frequently and she also spent Xmas and New Year with us in London in
1964.
At the conclusion of the “The Naked Heroine,” John
Izbicki wrote, “The effects of the injection which she was given in
Ravensbruck have yet to make themselves felt. What they will be, no one
can guess. Doctors have examined Lydia thoroughly but they have been
unable to make any conclusive diagnosis. But until then, Lydia Lova will
go on dancing and praying and living with her memories-the memories of a
Naked Heroine.”
Lydia Lova died on the 3rd of February, 1966, 22 years after being injected.
how Lydia became a freedom fighter.
interallié was the creation of a determined Polish staff officer, Roman Czerniawski,
who chose to stay behind in Paris after the fall of France. He built up
a formidable intelligence organisation across Occupied France and
became an invaluable source for MI6,
but in November 1941 he and more than fifty of his agents were arrested
by the Abwehr. Some agreed to collaborate, but Czerniawski held his
nerve and cleverly conned his interrogators into sending him to London
as a double agent. There was one condition to his freedom, however: as
insurance against any further treachery, Czerniawski’s agents would be
held as hostages. If he cooperated, his comrades would be safe. If he
decided to change sides again or renege on the deal in any way, they
would suffer the consequences.
But once in England Czerniawski did turn again, and as MI5’s agent
“Brutus” he became one of the heroes of its double-cross system and a
crucial player in the success of the D-Day deception strategy. His MI5
case officers did a tremendous job in fooling Czerniawski’s handlers,
and to the end the German High Command’s faith in Brutus’s reports
remained unshakeable. But what happened to those he had left behind in
France? In his recent book Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day
Spies, Ben Macintyre states that “When Paris was liberated, so were the
hostages”. Unfortunately the truth is much darker.
The Abwehr did not keep its promise. Beginning in March 1943, a total of
forty of Czerniawski’s agents were packed aboard trucks and deported to
concentration camps in Germany; classed as “Nacht und Nebel” (Night and
Fog) prisoners – political opponents of the Nazis – they could expect
the most brutal treatment and were unlikely ever to see France again.
Among them were two Polish émigrés, Wladimir de Korczak Lipski and his
teenage daughter Lydia, both of whom Czerniawski had personally
recruited. For nearly a year they had worked together as a team,
collecting details of troop movements, noting the positions of
anti-aircraft batteries, running errands, quietly doing whatever was
asked of them. Lydia’s passion was for dancing but she also discovered a
talent for technical drawing and often copied blueprints of factories
and German military installations for Interallié’s regular courier to
London; the network codenamed her Cipinka.
On 18 November 1941, Czerniawski was arrested with his mistress, and the
collapse of Interallié soon followed. Within hours his deputy, the
extraordinary Mathilde Carré, began giving up nearly everyone she knew,
and four days later she led the German secret police to the de Lipski’s
Montmartre apartment. Not yet seventeen, Lydia would spend the next
eighteen months in miserable conditions in La Santé and Fresnes prisons,
sometimes in solitary confinement. Smuggling in notes to her, Wladimir
tried to keep up her spirits; in one he wrote, “Do not forget that you
have great talents, and that one day you can have a beautiful and happy
life”. They were reunited briefly at the fortress at Romainville on the
outskirts of Paris, but in July 1943 Lydia was deported to Ravensbrück
concentration camp. There she spent several months in the punishment
block, which regularly supplied human guinea-pigs for medical
experiments. She later recounted how she had received a mysterious
injection from a doctor (possibly the prominent SS surgeon Karl
Gebhardt, who was later tried at Nuremberg and hanged) who told her that
its effects would not appear for at least twenty-five years.
In April 1945 she was saved when a Red Cross transport evacuated her
to Denmark (a later one also saved SOE agent Yvonne Baseden) and
Wladimir, having himself endured two years in Mauthausen, was reunited
with his daughter at a convalescent home in Switzerland. Remarkably,
only seven of the forty Interallié agents deported did not return:
Wladimir’s friend and fellow agent Lucien de Rocquigny had been beaten
to death in Mauthausen’s dreadful quarry, while others had lived to see
liberation only to succumb to typhus before they could be repatriated.
Still only twenty-one, Lydia slowly began to live again. She regained
her health, gave birth to a son, and returned to her first love,
dancing. By 1950 she was appearing at the Folies Bergères as “Lydia
Lova”.
