TRIED AS SPY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 January 1943, Page 4

TRIED AS SPY

COLONEL MARY BOOTH. EXPERIENCES WITH GESTAPO. From the window of her cell in a Brussels gaol, Colonel Mary Booth, of the Salvation Army, on trial for her life, watched a German firing squad assemble, says Gordon Yound in the “Daily Express.” Like Nurse Cavell had done 27 years before—Nurse Cavell. whose former house Colonel Booth had used as headquarters—she waited for her orders.

They did not come. And because they did not come, Colonel Booth, granddaughter of the Salvation Army’s founder, is now safe and could tell me her story. Colonel Booth said: “I went to Belgium 18 months before the war for the Salvation Army. I was using Nurse Cavell’s old home as headquarters. When the Germans invaded Belgium I tried to escape with some Belgian refugees. “We reached a bridge outside Brussels just as it was about to be blown up. The British officer shouted: ‘Hurry, you can just make it!’ “Eut I decided I couldn’t leave my refugees behind. So I stayed where I was.”

She was arrested by the Gestapo and tried as a spy. “For weeks it ddin’t seem that the trial was going well,” she said, “and then one day I saw the firing squad outside. I felt sure it was for me.

“But they went on somewhere else . . . . ”

She was finally acquitted for lack of evidence and sent to an internment camp on Lake Constance. She was later transferred to Liebenau, in Czechoslovakia, where conditions were better. All the time her secretary, Miss Smith, stayed with her. But Miss Smith lost her memory; the shock of experiences in prison was too great for her.

Colonel Mary Booth was recently repatriated to Istanbul with a party exchanged for Axis internees and is now in Britain.