At Gestapo headquarters, her face inscrutable but her heart pumping so hard she thought it would burst through her chest, she was made to sit before the desk of a Gestapo major. “You are Mademoiselle Veronique Colbert, foil instructor at the L’Ecole d’Escrime Français, are you not?” he addressed her in French.

“I am.”

“I thought so.” He nodded at a guard, who yanked Victoria to her feet and took her to a squalid prison cell where she was bound to a chair under a hot ceiling lamp. Through walls marked with scrawls of fear and defiance and last endearments to loved ones—Never confess! I am afraid. Don’t talk. Keep the faith. Simone, I love you—she could hear moans of torture in the next room. How long would it be before they came for her, she wondered, her stomach clenching as she imagined herself stripped naked before her interrogators went to work on her. She and Labrador had been warned to expect it. Major Renault had told them that stripping a woman down to her birthday suit was a Gestapo torture technique, designed to humiliate and demoralize the victim and make her more vulnerable. Be prepared for that mortification if you’re caught, he’d said, but she and Labrador had agreed that they could not possibly gird themselves for that kind of violation. She would hold out as long as she could. Had the others also been arrested? How long would it be before they broke? It was Labrador they had to keep safe.

An hour passed. Thirst made swallowing difficult, and sweat broke out from the heat of the lamp in the airless room. Victoria’s bladder began to fill. Her limbs ached from their bound positions, and her hearing numbed from the steady pound of her heartbeat and the cries of the suffering. The breathing and mind exercises to steady the nerves taught in training proved useless. After a while, Victoria’s eyes closed and her head fell forward as she waited for the cell door to bang open.

Finally the day and moment arrived and two men walked in, one a colonel in the Sicherheitsdienst and the other the major who had interviewed her. Victoria’s mouth fell open. The Gestapo man pointed at Victoria. “Is that her?”

“Yes!” Colonel Derrick Albrecht snapped. “That is my bout partner at L’Ecole d’Escrime Français.”