Don’t Call Me Madeline

Noor stepped into a puddle of silver rainwater just as the ragged procession received the command to halt. The previous night’s storm left shimmering pools dotting the path, the gravel so well trodden and compacted that it couldn’t drain the moisture away. Noor’s hair fluttered in the morning breeze as she dropped her chin and looked down at her brown alligator pumps. Noor loved these shoes. Remembering the small shop in Paris she had discovered them in, her stomach knotted with bitterness. Then, the feeling, and the memory, faded as she realised the state of her shoes was no longer of consequence. Soon, they would be on the feet of another woman.

Behind her, the guards marshalling the column conferred—hushed comments, a chuckle of mocking sarcasm. Their hostile whispers found Noor’s ear, but she paid their mutterings no mind.

Arbeit Macht Frei. Those were the words, the carefully crafted lie, twisted in wrought iron above the gates of Dachau that were swirling in Noors thoughts.

Work shall set you free.

Work she had. For months since her capture and imprisonment as a member of the French resistance, Noor toiled in a dank and solitary cell within the bowels of the Nazi stronghold in Pforzheim. The walls wept with damp, the air thick with rot and despair. Forced to labour, under lash and torment, as a prisoner of Nacht und Nebel, night and fog, she had tilted against the one principle she held most dear. Unwavering belief in veracity and honesty.

Betraying her father’s Sufi teachings and undermining his lessons pained her deeply. She had often heard his voice, measured and gentle, reciting the poetry of Rumi beneath the dappled light of their garden.

Even if you lose yourself in the storm, hold fast to the truth, for it will guide you home.

But where was home now? Certainly not within the walls of Pforzheim that had mocked her, stripped her of morality, where she had been forced to swallow and spew lies, to shape them as armour. Each falsehood she uttered felt like another fracture in her soul.

And absolutely not here, not in Dachau. This is not a place where truth matters, where the soul can remain intact.

In this camp, the air was too thick with death, the soil too saturated with the weight of deception. Here, honesty was a brittle thing, crushed beneath the boots of men who wielded power mercilessly. As she herself had done, diluting her integrity, her own spirit. Countless times.

But the war demanded it…this bloody war that uprooted my life… forced me from my home.

Noor closed her eyes for a moment, willing herself to remember the warmth of her father’s study, the scent of ink and jasmine drifting through the open window. But the memory was a fragile refuge, offering no shield against the cold of Dachau. The camp that did not mock but simply absorbed, swallowing cries, secrets, and names that would never be spoken again.

Now I will be one of those names, one of those secrets…

Just two years earlier, a few steps ahead of the German war machine marching its way through Paris, Noor and her brother had travelled to the coast, to Bordeaux, and evaded the encroaching shadow of terror. They secured passage on the last boat to Cornwall and, during that voyage, filled with sorrow and rage, the pair formed a vow. An oath spoken not in loud declarations but in quiet, unshakable resolve, to fight back against their oppressors. After arriving in London, they both kept their promise, he by enlisting in the Royal Air Force and she in the Women’s Auxiliary.

“Marsch, schnell!” came the call, and Noor resumed her bone-weary drudge toward the crematorium. Three other women marched with her, one English, Yolande Beekman, and two French, all operatives of the Special Operations Executive. Noor didn’t know the French agents but had met Yolande in London during her espionage training.

The head cryptologist, Leo Marks, introduced them at the Baker Street headquarters. They had formed a quick and easy friendship, in which they had whispered over cups of weak tea, laughing at the absurdity of their double lives—at the way men underestimated them.

A tear rolled down Noor’s cheek as she recalled Leo. He was kind and patient, and she had grown quite fond of him. He was the one who rectified Noor’s tendency to code or decode messages improperly by meticulously reviewing her evaluations.

Leo discovered Noor had refused to lie. How she explained to her instructors that always adhering to the truth was her father’s greatest lesson. After reasoning with her that incorrectly coding communiqués amounted to lying and the potential outcome was people losing their lives, Noor mastered the task and flourished. Tenderly tracing a fingertip over each completed line and whispering a prayer, her messages never again bore an untruth.

Leo and Yolande saw Noor off when she deployed to France. They had all embraced, fiercely, as if imprinting their existence upon one another. Each of them was aware that the life expectancy of a radio operator behind enemy lines was only six weeks. Despite the statistic, Leo had often quipped he was confident Noor would defy that truth.

“Please don’t get caught,” Yolande had murmured against her shoulder.

But she had. They both had.

Now, to Noor, London was merely a shadow, a misty reflection of a bygone age, another life. She had been so resolute then, filled with bravado. Following her arrival at Dachau last night, that self-assurance had all but vanished. It had wilted and withered away with the isolation. Noor had not spoken to anyone other than brutish SS guards and stone-faced Gestapo interrogators since her escape attempt from the Sicherheitsdienst headquarters in Paris. After that, they transferred her to the prison in Germany, and then yesterday, unexpectedly, they transported her here to the concentration camp. Noor, confined to a windowless cell with no way to track time, estimated a year had passed after her capture.

The breeze, infused with the tang of damp spruce trees, caressed Noor’s face as they entered the courtyard. It smelled of September. She lifted her chin to it. Beyond the concrete wall, Norway maples with their soft leaves tinged in yellow and red towered like silent sentinels, contrasting the gunmetal-grey razor wire coiled along the top of the barricade.

In another life, I may have stood beneath such a tree, book in hand, feet planted in warm grass.

But her feet were not nestled in the warm grass. They were sinking into the sodden, blood-soaked mire of the execution grounds. Despite her determination not to weep, one more tear rolled from Noor’s eye. She wiped it away in resolute defiance of her fear.

The camp Lagerkommandant, Eduard Weiter, and Obersturmbannführer, Wilhelm Ruppert, stood beside a small earthen hillock in the centre of the yard. Pressed forward by the SS guards, Noor heard Ruppert speak as they drew closer.

“She’s a princess, that one,” he said with a nod and a sneer.

The cold air and his mocking words nipped at her skin, and she thought of the heat of Mysore—the land her great-great-grandfather Tipu Sultan once ruled. That history, once a source of pride, now seemed distant and inconsequential, a mere echo of a life that was no longer hers.

Weiter stepped forward and regarded the four women with a frigid mask of superiority. Noor was familiar with this facade, having faced it many times before. The rancorous expression of disdain worn by countless Gestapo interrogators, indifferent men draped in long, black coats with gloved fists, gripping riding crops. He glanced down at a sheaf of tan paper in his hand and methodically repeated the women’s sentence, replacing only their names and call signs in each reading.

“By the authority granted me by the Führer, I declare Noor Inayat Khan, also known by the code name Madeline, guilty of high treason against the Fatherland. Her involvement in espionage and covert communication with enemy forces has proven her to be a threat to the Third Reich. In accordance with German military law, her punishment shall be death by execution.”

How absurd it all is, me, a spy. I used to be a writer, a musician.

At one time, long before she joined the war effort, Noor found solace in the stories she translated—the Twenty Jātaka tales that whispered of benevolent sacrifices and endless cycles of rebirth. But somehow, now staring into the abyss of her own morality, they held no comfort. Months of torment and lies left her insides dried, turning her into a wasteland, a barren landscape devoid of love, fear, or sorrow. Her father instructed her that death was merely a veil, a gateway to liberation beyond the physical realm. She wondered at this point if he would even recognise the woman she had become. Noor’s altruistic lifestyle stemmed from his wisdom. His teachings, along with that way of life, paved the path that led to this moment.

“May we appeal this sentence?” Yolande asked.

“No,” Weiter barked. “You cannot appeal the will of the Führer!”

The SS guards herded the SOE agents forward, then, one by one, forced them to their knees facing the small hillock. Ruppert followed. It appeared he would handle the executions himself. The women were side by side, an echelon of condemned spirits, and kneeling at the end, Noor understood she would be the last of them untethered from this plane of existence. She felt the moist earth soak into the fabric of her rough cotton dress. The morning air became still and silent, and then, slicing through it, a sparrow hawk screeched three times. A cry of solace veiled within a warning klaxon foreshadowing the horror to come. Noor spied it, circling high above the camp, untouched by the brutality unfolding below. She sensed the bird’s sharp eyes casting over them all—the guards, the prisoners, the executioner—weighing their souls against some unseen measure.

Will it remember this place? Remember me? Will it ever return here to visit the echoes of my death?

Noor released a slow, measured breath, reaching deep within herself, searching for a last thread of acceptance, some muted solace to soften what was to come.

The first shot cracked, splitting the silence like an axe through softwood. Yolande grasped Noor’s hand, and weeping, whispered a prayer.

With the pistol’s second discharge came, there was no peaceful calm of acceptance that warmed Noor’s blood, and the discordant buffeting in her chest redoubled. Ruppert shuffled behind them.

“I need a priest,” Yolande breathed through a sob.

“There are no priests in Dachau.”

Are the last words I hear to be another lie? Will they forever steep me in them?

The third retort rang out, a brutal crack, and suddenly, Noor’s hand was empty and cold. A terrible stillness followed—Yolande’s warmth, her presence, snatched away in an instant. Then a moan, raw and fractured, spilled from Yolande’s lips as her limbs twitched. Noor flinched as Ruppert stepped closer and fired again. A dull, sickening thud of a bullet meeting Yoland’s flesh sent a shiver through her bones.

The acrid scent of gunpowder now mingled with the sharp bite of pine in the morning air. The world itself had narrowed to only the tremor in her own hands, the erratic pounding in her chest. Then, without ceremony, the Luger’s muzzle pressed into the base of her skull—cold, emotionless, final. A breath hitched in her throat, and time stretched unbearably thin. A wire drawn so taut it threatened to snap like every nerve end in her body. She forced herself still, refusing to give Ruppert the satisfaction of seeing her fear.

“Farewell, Madeline,” Ruppert growled.

It was then, hearing that final falsehood, that peace and affirmation found her. She smiled.

“Don’t call me Madeline. My name is Noor Inayat Khan,” she said. “Liberté.”