Half-Dutch, half-Chinese, Catherina “Toto” Koopman was born in Java and educated in Holland and England. By the 1920s she was in Paris making a living as a showroom model for Chanel and Marcel Rochas. Of those early days she said: “It really was another world. One dressed not to please men but to astound other women.”

As well as modelling, she tried her hand at acting, and had a bit part in Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Don Juan (1934). After filming she stayed on in England where she had begun a short-lived romance with Max Aitken, son of Lord Beaverbrook, who did everything he could to break it up.

Her war years are still mysterious: she is believed to have worked as a go-between for British intelligence in Italy. Her cosmopolitan looks, multilingualism and contacts in Venetian society would have made her a prized asset. Eventually she was betrayed and, on direct orders from Berlin, sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. For two years, working in the camp’s kitchens, she displayed great bravery by smuggling out food to the starving inmates and intervened on behalf of prisoners selected for death.