Noor Inayat Khan was born January 1, 1924, the eldest of four children to parents living in Moscow, Russia. Her father was descended from a line of noble Indian Muslims and her mother was an American born and raised in Albuquerque. Her father was a devout Sufi teacher and her brother became the head of the Sufi Order International. Just before the outbreak of the First World War, the family moved to London and then onto a suburb just outside of Paris. When she was just 13, her father passed away and Noor took responsibility for her three younger siblings. She studied at the Sorbonne and the Paris Conservatory before beginning a career as a writer. She published a number of books, stories, and poems including the Twenty Jataka Tales, a children’s book inspired by the Buddhist tradition. The family fled to England together when the Nazis invaded France and both her brother and Noor joined in the cause to defeat Nazi tyranny. In 1940 she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Force and trained as a wireless operator before being recruited to join the Special Operations Executive. She was sent to special training as a wireless operator in occupied territory, becoming the first woman to do so in this capacity. Noor flew to Paris to work as an Assistant Section Officer and when the network she worked with was being rounded up by Germans, she requested to stay. In 1943, after being betrayed by fellow agents who were suspected of working as double agents, she was arrested and emprisoned. She managed to escape once with a fellow agent but they were quickly recaptured and sent into solitary confinement after refusing to sign a declaration vowing to make no more escape attempts. On September 12, 1944, she and four other SOP agents were transferred to Dachau concentration camp and executed the next morning. According to reports, her last words were Liberté.