Woman of the Day =Prince Philip's Mother
Princess Alice of Battenberg, born in 1885 in Windsor Castle, resisted the Nazi Occupation of Athens both openly and covertly during WW2. She was posthumously recognised as a Hero of the Holocaust and Righteous Among the Nations. It wasn’t her first experience of wartime. During the Balkan Wars in 1912-1913, and living in Greece, she volunteered as a nurse despite being pregnant with her fourth child. She left her young children behind to travel to the front lines, where she organised and staffed battlefield hospitals, assisted in surgeries on wounded soldiers, and provided direct care to the injured. She felt it was her duty; her husband was serving in the Greek Army.
Great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria and the mother of Prince Philip, the late Duke of Edinburgh, she was congenitally deaf and learned to speak and lip-read in English and German as well as speaking Greek and French. When Germany invaded Greece on 6 April 1941, the Princess remained in Occupied Athens, living in humble conditions with her sister-in-law in a central Athens house. The city was subjected to severe food shortages and she worked for the Red Cross, helping to organise soup kitchens for the poor and starving, and organising two shelters for orphaned and displaced children to provide them with essential care amid the chaos.
She made a daring flight to Sweden on the pretext of visiting her sister Crown Princess Louise of Sweden and smuggled medical supplies back into Athens where she set up nursing care in impoverished neighbourhoods. Princess Alice was in the unusual position of having sons-in-law fighting on the German side while her son was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. The Nazis assumed she was pro-German but when a German general asked, "Is there anything I can do for you?", she retorted, "Yes, you can take your troops out of my country." (I think we can see where her son got his forthright manner from!)
She sheltered Jewish widow Rachel Cohen and two of her daughters in her home from 1943 onwards, evading Gestapo roundups and deportation to concentration camps. She considered it to be a debt of gratitude, as Rachel's late husband had aided the Greek royal family decades earlier. The entire Cohen family survived the war due to her protection, part of broader efforts that saved multiple Jewish lives.
When Athens was liberated in October 1944, Harold Macmillan visited the Princess and described her as "living in humble, not to say somewhat squalid conditions". In a letter to her son, she confessed that in the last week before liberation, she had had no food except bread and butter, and no meat for several months. Despite liberation from occupying German forces, Athens was still a dangerous place to be. Communist guerrillas waged their own war on the British but during the fighting, Princess Alice insisted on walking the streets distributing rations to children and police officers in contravention of the curfew order. When told that she might be struck by a stray bullet, she said, "They tell me that you don't hear the shot that kills you and in any case I am deaf, so why worry about that?"
In 1949, she sold her jewels to found the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary (although she saved one or two so they could be used in her future daughter-in-law’s engagement ring) and became an Orthodox nun. She wore a nun's habit for the rest of her life, and that included during her daughter-in-law’s coronation in 1953.
She went to live in Buckingham Palace in 1967 where she smoked in secret - "My son, bring me a cigarette!” - and delighted in telling her granddaughter unfiltered and lighthearted anecdotes from her extraordinary life, and making her laugh. Princess Alice died in 1969 at the age of 84 but it was not until 1988 that her remains were transferred to the Church of Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, in accordance with her wishes and much to the chagrin of her daughter, Princess Cecile, who said it was too far away. “Nonsense,” her mother had said. “There’s a perfectly good bus service!"
From the Attagirls on x
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( I can't seem to open the tiktok links)
