Marrying Stefania in late December 1899, Jerzy Skarbek used his wife's dowry (her father was a banker) to pay his debts and continue his lavish lifestyle.
Notable relations included Fryderyk Skarbek, prison reformer, and Włodzimierz Krzyżanowski, United States Union general.
Skarbek was distantly related to the Hungarian regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, as a cousin from the Lwów side of the family had married a relative of Horthy.
Krystyna took after her father and his liking for riding horses, which she sat astride rather than side-saddle as was usual for women.
She also became an expert skier during visits to Zakopane in the Tatra mountains of southern Poland.
At the family stables, she met Andrzej Kowerski, whose father had brought him over to play with ten-year-old Krystyna while he and her father discussed agricultural matters.
1908
Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek, (, ; 1 May 1908 – 15 June 1952), also known as Christine Granville, was a Polish agent of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War.
She became celebrated for her daring exploits in intelligence and irregular-warfare missions in Nazi-occupied Poland and France.
Krystyna Skarbek was born in 1908 in Warsaw, the second child of Count Jerzy Skarbek, a Roman Catholic, and Stefania (née Goldfeder), the daughter of a wealthy assimilated Jewish family.
1920
The 1920s left the family in straitened financial circumstances, and they had to give up their country estate and move to Warsaw.
1930
In 1930, when she was 22, Count Jerzy died.
The Goldfeder financial empire had almost completely collapsed, and there was barely enough money to support the widowed Countess Stefania.
Krystyna, not wishing to be a burden to her mother, worked at a Fiat car dealership, but soon became ill from automobile fumes and had to give up the job.
At first she was thought, on the basis of shadows on her chest x-rays, to be suffering from tuberculosis, which had killed her father.
She received compensation from her employer's insurance company and took her physicians' advice to lead as much of an open-air life as she could.
She began spending a great deal of time hiking and skiing the Tatra Mountains.
In 1930, she was a runner up in the Miss Poland beauty contest.
On 21 April 1930, she married a young businessman, Gustaw Gettlich, at the Spiritual Seminary Church in Warsaw.
They proved incompatible, and the marriage soon ended without rancour.
A subsequent love affair came to naught when the young man's mother refused to consider the penniless divorcée as a potential daughter-in-law.
One day, she lost control on a Zakopane ski slope and was saved by Jerzy Giżycki, who stepped into her path and stopped her descent.
Giżycki came from a wealthy family in Kamieniec Podolski (formerly Poland, at the time the Soviet Union).
At fourteen, he had quarrelled with his father, run away from home, and worked in the United States as a cowboy and gold prospector.
He eventually became an author and travelled the world in search of material for his books and articles.
He knew Africa well and hoped one day to return there.
1938
The two were married on 2 November 1938 at the Evangelical Reformed Church in Warsaw.
1939
Soon after, he accepted a diplomatic posting to Ethiopia, where he served as Poland's consul general until September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland.
She later said of Giżycki: "He was my Svengali for so many years that he would never believe that I could ever leave him for good."
Upon the outbreak of World War II, the couple sailed for London, arriving 6 October 1939, where Skarbek sought to offer her services in the struggle against the common enemy.
1940
She became a British agent months before the SOE was founded in July 1940.
She was the first female agent of the British to serve in the field and the longest-serving of all Britain's wartime women agents.
Her resourcefulness and success have been credited with influencing the organisation's decision to recruit more women as agents in Nazi-occupied countries.
1941
In 1941 she began using the alias Christine Granville, a name she legally adopted upon naturalisation as a British subject in December 1946.
Skarbek's most famous exploit was securing the release of SOE agents Francis Cammaerts and Xan Fielding from a German prison hours before they were to be executed.
She did so by meeting (at great personal risk) with the Gestapo commander in Digne-les-Bains, France, telling him she was a British agent, and persuading him with threats, lies, and a two million franc bribe to release the SOE agents.
The event is fictionalised in the last episode of the British television show Wish Me Luck.
Skarbek is often characterised in terms such as Britain's "most glamorous spy" or "Churchill's favourite spy".
1952
She was stabbed to death in 1952 in London by an obsessed and spurned suitor who was subsequently hanged.
2012
Journalist Alistair Horne, who described himself in 2012 as one of the few people still alive who had known Skarbek, called her the "bravest of the brave."
Spymaster Vera Atkins of the SOE described Skarbek as "very brave, very attractive, but a loner and a law unto herself."
