‘Szabó’
Exhibition
A permanent
exhibition within Ho8 dedicated to the life of Violette Szabó GC. The exhibition tells the harrowing story of a young mother’s
courage as a secret agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) who was
eventually caught and executed at Ravensbrück concentration camp aged
only 23.
The exhibition was formally opened by her daughter (and Jersey resident), Tania Szabó in March 2003 in the presence of the Lieutenant Governor of Jersey, Air Chief Marshall Sir John Cheshire KBE CB and Lady Cheshire.
Produced by UK exhibition designers Event Communications Limited, (also the creators of Captive Island, the main award-winning exhibition within Ho8), Szabó attempts to introduce a degree of perspective to the Occupation story and goes further by suggesting that Jerseymen, with their knowledge of France and its language, would have been strong candidates for service with the SOE’s French Section.
Built within one of the old surgical wards of Ho8, the exhibition concentrates on the beauty and femininity of an ordinary girl from Brixton who was transformed into a courageous secret agent.
The focal point of the exhibition centres on a dress similar in style to one Violette Szabó bought in Paris during her first successful mission and which she may have been wearing under her jumpsuit when she parachuted into France two months later. The dress is used to help convey the process of this transformation.
A tremendous amount of research has gone into this new exhibition with the help of the Imperial War Museum, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), archived photographs from a number of sources including Violette Szabo’s daughter Tania and from conversations with two of the men who parachuted into France with her on her second, fateful, mission in June 1944.