Helene Moszkiewiez

Who is Helene Moszkiewiez?

Helene Moszkiewiez worked within the Belgian Resistance during World War II, and maintained three identities, Jewish, Belgian and German, working for two years as a clerk in Gestapo headquarters in Brussels.

The Germans took control of Belgium when she was 19. Two years earlier she had met a young Belgian soldier in a Brussels library. When she met him again, and he was operating with a different name while wearing a German uniform, she accepted his offer to work within the Belgian Resistance to undermine the Nazism Nazis.

Moszkiewiez moved to Canada after the war and wrote her memoirs, Inside the Gestapo: A Jewish Woman's Secret War. Her story recalls false identity papers, helping POWs escape, working within the Gestapo, hearing screams of SS victims, stealing information to rescue Jews scheduled for transport and killing a Gestapo officer. The story was made into a 1991 TV film, A Woman at War, with Martha Plimpton in the lead role.