by Clare Mulley
Christine had first met Andrzej in the stables at Trzepnica when they were children, and had encountered him again in Zakopane when he bought a pair of Jerzy’s old skis. A bachelor and a ladies’ man, Andrzej was tall and well built, with dark blonde hair and intense blue eyes, always smiling and utterly charming. He loved good food, drink, talking late into the night, dancing and – of course – flirting. His round face with its perfect complexion conveyed a certain innocence that Andrzej had long found it convenient to exploit. Always active, he lived life to the full, spending his time riding or skiing while his mother believed he was at a monastic retreat, and as a student in Kraków he claimed to have survived for three years only ‘on vodka and raw meat’.33 It was a lifestyle not without consequence. When he had last met Christine he had just survived an avalanche, intact, against all the odds, but not long afterwards he lost one leg below the knee when a friend accidentally shot him through the foot on a hunting trip. His prosthetic leg, made in Britain from wood with metal clamps, was heavy, but he refused to let it slow him down. No longer able to ride, he simply transferred his passion for horses into a lifelong love of fast cars.*
When the Nazis invaded, Andrzej joined the ‘Black Brigade’, Poland’s only motorized unit. Repeatedly leading near-suicidal attacks on the advancing Wehrmacht, in the aftermath of one skirmish Andrzej was found alive but near bursting with rage, pinned by one leg beneath a bombed-out tank. ‘I don’t want a doctor, you blithering idiot,’ he had shouted at the officer who found him, ‘I want a blacksmith.’34 Other than a crushed prosthesis he was uninjured. Andrzej had reached the rank of Lieutenant, and was awarded the Virtuti Militari, Poland’s highest award for valour, before his unit was captured. While Christine was courting the British Secret Services in London, Andrzej somehow managed to steal an Opel, the car of choice for discerning Wehrmacht officers, and lead his brigade’s escape. They re-formed, attacked again, and were finally forced to cross into Hungary, where they were interned under the terms of the Geneva Convention in a huge barbed-wire enclosure, already filled with lorries, cars and men.
Under international law, internment was meant to be for the duration of the war, but as one Polish Home Army officer later wrote, ‘the authors of the Convention did not … take into consideration the Polish temperament, reluctant to submit to the deprivation of freedom, nor the prevailing pro-Polish sentiment among their [Hungarian] jailors.’35 Two days later Andrzej drove out of the camp in the same Opel, took off his uniform, hid his car, and became a pedestrian civilian in Budapest.36 Over 35,000 Polish men and officers would ‘escape’ from internment camps in Hungary, but few stayed long in the capital. At that time men of military age who were not in uniform needed a doctor’s certificate to prove they were unfit for service, but if questioned Andrzej would just pull up his trouser leg, rap on his rather worn-looking wooden leg, and ask how he could possibly be an officer.
Christine had not been in Budapest long when she was invited to an evening at the Café Floris, a press and intelligence hangout. Andrzej was holding court in the smoky back room, recounting his war stories to a lively crowd of friends. ‘The door opened and a girl walked in’, he remembered. ‘I stopped and stared at her. She was slim, sunburnt, with brown hair and eyes. A kind of crackling vitality seemed to emanate from her.’37 After they had been introduced, Christine had to remind Andrzej to resume his story. ‘It is not often one has a chance to talk with someone who fought with the Black Brigade’, she fawned, not mentioning that she had only arrived from London a few days before.38 The stories were good that night, and after a while Andrzej was pleased to see that Christine’s dark eyes were ‘shining with tears’.39 Later they talked together alone, and when she explained a little about her situation, Andrzej asked why the British had abandoned the Poles, despite their guarantees. Declaring that it was complicated, Christine suggested they discuss it privately the next evening. ‘I’m inviting you out to dinner’, she laughed, looking up at him.40
It was rare enough for a woman to ask a man out in 1940 Budapest, let alone a beautiful and patriotic Pole clearly intent on risking her neck for her country, and equally clearly unsure of the best way to do so. Brave and vulnerable, full of charm and determination, Christine, apart from the fact that she was married, was pretty much Andrzej’s perfect woman. Nevertheless, he was forced to miss their date the following evening.
After he had left the internment camp, it had taken Andrzej just a few days to organize the escape of the rest of his unit. His plan had been to travel with them through the Middle East to France, where they could rejoin the Polish army. However, the Black Brigade’s commanding officer, General Maczek, ordered Andrzej to stay in Budapest and organize the ‘exfiltration’ of as many Polish men and officers as possible. It was not long before Andrzej was known as the Scarlet Pimpernel of Poland.*
Andrzej was soon running a hugely efficient escape route with the help of various Polish contacts on both sides of the border. A distant cousin obtained or prepared all the vital paperwork that would be needed by their escapees.† Andrzej and his friends Prince Marcin Lubomirski and the wife of the head of the Cavalry Officers’ School at Grudziądz made contacts inside the internment camps, and arranged the routes across the mountains, through Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and southwards to Yugoslavia. The four of them also drove the vehicles that took the men hundreds of miles across the borders. It was exhausting work. Andrzej’s big ‘escape car’, an old Chevrolet, was unheated, and he often had to dig it out of the snow in temperatures of minus 20, or put blankets under the wheels to get them to grip. More than once he had to enlist the help of local villagers with horses to drag the car out of a snowdrift. Even on a good day, with little farm traffic and no snow, it took at least four hours to reach Belgrade from Budapest; in winter the round trip could easily take a whole day, or night.
At first Andrzej and his cousin ran the operation from the Metropole Hotel, where there would often be at least ten men sleeping on the floor of their room. One night, after returning from a border crossing, Andrzej found the Hungarian police waiting at the hotel to arrest him. Although the Hungarians were sympathetic to the Poles and turned a blind eye to resistance activities where possible, they had no choice but to imprison anyone caught releasing officers from the internment camps. When questioned about his movements, Andrzej unlatched his leg and laid it on a table. Point taken, he was released, but his wooden alibi was beginning to wear a little thin and it was clear that he and the team needed a more secure address. Öröm Utca – Street of Joy – was perfect. Quiet during the day, at night it was in the heart of Budapest’s red-light district where the nocturnal comings and goings of one more mud-spattered car would not be much noticed. From here Andrzej organized the safe transit of hundreds of escaping internees, refugees and army stragglers.
On the day he was due to have dinner with Christine, Andrzej was needed to drive a group of men across the border at no notice. A friend rang her with his apologies and when Andrzej got back the next day, cold and frozen, she rang him. They arranged to meet beside the Danube, near the graceful Lánc-Hid, or Chain-Bridge.41 It was windy and cold, and Christine was wrapped up in her duffle-coat with the hood pulled up over her hair against the drifting snow. In the silvery-blue dusk Andrzej watched her making her way along the cobbled embankment beside the river, ‘walking as she did when she was in a good mood … in a dancing way, full of grace’.42 When Christine swung her ‘pretty legs’ into the car beside him, neither of them knew it was the start of a long relationship, but Andrzej already felt ‘a great spark’ between them.43
That night they ate at the Café Hangli, famous as a romantic refuge for artists and writers and in the middle of a park on the banks of the Danube, not far from Christine’s flat.* Too cold to eat outside under the trees, they sat by the heavily draped windows where Andrzej drank local wine and held forth about the war, politics and the perfidy of the British. Christine poured water into her wine glass and listened. Andrzej seemed
to embody the Polish spirit of resistance as she saw it: dashing and courageous, but ill-informed. Towns and villages across Poland were already plastered with Nazi posters showing a mother holding her dead child in her arms, in front of a burning town. Printed below were the words, ‘England, this is your work!’ Believing such propaganda, Christine argued, was the first step towards accepting occupation.† She then broke all the rules and told Andrzej her mission. He was horrified, but deeply impressed.
After dinner, Christine and Andrzej went back to her tiny flat and only parted company the next morning. ‘Everything was magical and wonderful and funny’, Andrzej remembered.44 The flowery yellow chintz of the curtains, the coffee Christine had made which they promptly left to go cold, the wonderful directness that he found so disarming, even the sofa that was hardly big enough for one. Given the nature of their work, they decided to keep their affair secret, so when the maid arrived with Christine’s breakfast tray Andrzej had to hide in the cupboard. It was a comedy romance but all the more poignant for that.
If Christine’s once Catholic conscience ever pricked her, she managed to effectively bury any guilt she might have felt about cuckolding her husband. Although Jerzy was still in France trying to find a way to serve his country, she and Andrzej faced arrest every day and, if handed over to the Gestapo, possible execution. More than ever before, Christine realized that life was precious, and she did not intend to waste whatever she might have left. Over the next few weeks, when Andrzej wasn’t working, the two of them scarcely spent a day without seeing each other. If it was biting cold they would hunker down in her flat, emerging only to go to a café, or walk round the glass-roofed central market, filled with winter produce. Later, as spring started to arrive, the first of the season’s flowers stood soaking in leaky buckets in the gallery above. But if the winter sun was bright they would walk through the Old Town’s narrow streets and courtyards, listening to the song of the golden orioles in the trees on the slope below the Fisherman’s Bastion, or looking up at the balconies with their signs for cheap rooms, dressmakers or furriers. If they had petrol, they would cross one of the seven bridges that spanned the river and drive up the Hármash-atár-hegy, the big scrubby hill on the Buda side. At the top they would stop at an inn and look down over the city. Here they could watch as the lights came out along the banks of the Danube before Andrzej ordered coffee and an ice-cold glass of barack, the Hungarian apricot brandy. Later, huddled together in her rooms against the cold, she would call him her ‘kot’, her cat, and he in turn would call her his ‘kotek’, ‘kitten’. Both were strays, but both were also fiercely patriotic, and their passion for each other seemed to reflect their love of their country, a secret source of strength and pride.
By late February 1940, to her growing frustration, Christine had still not managed to cross into Poland. The problem came from the least expected quarter. A British report delicately summed up the situation: ‘the Poles have been a bit sticky’.45 The Polish underground was beginning to organize itself, but there were a number of key groups each with different political connections vying for authority, and intelligence bases not only in Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest and Belgrade, but also in Athens, Istanbul, Cairo and Stockholm. The main resistance group, which was affiliated to the fledgling Polish government-in-exile, had legitimate concerns that Christine, as an amateur, and ‘in the pay of the English’ as she wrote bitterly, would be a liability.46 If Christine had believed that by putting her life on the line for her country she would finally be accepted and valued by her compatriots, she was wrong. Instead she found herself in a familiar limbo, halfway between Polish patriot and alien other, only this time the ‘other’ was British agent. As the frictions intensified between the different intelligence communities, the clandestine Polish network in Budapest warned her that ‘any movement in Poland which is not our movement is an enemy one’.47 Although Christine tried to play down the tensions in her reports to Section D, for a while their support for her crossing cooled.
Christine was far from idle, however. Sometimes she joined Andrzej on his raids, but mostly she pursued her own plans to disseminate anti-German propaganda throughout Poland. In January 1940 Section D had sent Basil Davidson, a young journalist with the Economist and the London Evening Standard, to Budapest by train through Yugoslavia, with a large supply of explosives in a blue plastic bag. His job was to set up a legal news agency, providing stories from the Ministry of Information to the local papers, and also to run a clandestine printing press. Unfortunately, as he later admitted bluntly, ‘I hadn’t the foggiest idea of how to do that.’48 Seizing the moment, Christine not only stored the explosives at her flat, but now also began to develop plans for a radio ‘Freedom Station’ to broadcast Allied news and propaganda into Poland from Hungary. ‘I find myself becoming a bit of a fan of “Madam Marchand” and would like to see her get her own way’, one Section D report enthused, before rather more pragmatically concluding that, should things go wrong, such an initiative might still ‘add some, admittedly undeserved, credit to our own activities’.49
In February Peter Wilkinson, previously of the British Military Mission to Poland, arrived in Budapest with a consignment of revolvers, which according to Davidson were too heavy and bulky to be of much use, and in any case required ammunition that was impossible to obtain locally. Davidson proposed to drop the guns in the Danube. Wilkinson then turned his attention to the prospects for propaganda work, and was keen to use Christine, but even his presence could not override Polish objections to her radio scheme. This first encounter between Wilkinson and Christine set the tone for their future relationship: short, curt and professionally disappointing. He was one of the few men she failed to impress. Wilkinson was a shrewd judge of character, and although he recognized Christine’s potential as an agent he found her charm disconcerting and rather disapproved of what he considered her personal amorality. With little achieved, and ‘the cold Central European wind and flaky snow coming down’, Budapest was ‘absolutely miserable’, Wilkinson summed up before he left.50
In mid-March, another unexpected development put further pressure on Christine: ‘her attractiveness appeared to be causing some difficulty in Budapest’, Section D reported.51 The problems started when the Polish journalist and intelligence agent Józef Radziminski, still infatuated, threatened to shoot himself at her flat – ‘in his genital organs’, Wilkinson reported with some disgust – after Christine had rejected his continued advances.52 Losing his nerve at the last moment, he merely winged himself in the foot, but according to Wilkinson ‘this failure made him even more ardent’.53 Once able to walk again, Radziminski threw himself from the Elizabeth Bridge onto what turned out to be the still half-frozen Danube. As a result, instead of drowning as intended he merely broke his remaining good leg. ‘He only succeeded in wounding himself, and was not arrested’, British intelligence briskly rounded off their report, before sending Radziminski a telegram pointing out that this incident was a serious breach of security.54 Christine’s summary of Radziminski is perhaps even more damning: ‘he proved unsatisfactory and was dismissed’ was all the space she gave him.*55 Such public displays might have enlivened the day-to-day experience of the freezing British intelligence population of Budapest, but they also drew unwanted attention to the activities of the city’s many ‘foreign correspondents’. This, combined with growing Polish hostility to the British agents in Hungary, was enough for Section D to finally encourage Christine to press on with her virtually suicidal mission into occupied Poland.56
‘Well! Your Poles haven’t done much!’ Thus, General Ironside, then Chief of the General Staff, castigated Adrian Carton de Wiart when he finally arrived back in London after the Nazis had established their occupation of Warsaw. Having witnessed the determined and courageous response of both the Polish military and civilians during the September campaign, Carton de Wiart felt the remark was premature. Not least since the Poles had never officially surrendered. Knowing this, he replied quietly, ‘L
et us see what others will do, sir.’
4: POLISH RESISTANCE
‘The wind swept like a sword across forest, plain and mountain’, a close friend and fellow British agent wrote, perhaps a little melodramatically, of the conditions that awaited Christine on her first journey to carry British propaganda into occupied Poland, at the end of February 1940. ‘Birds in the trees were frozen to the branches upon which they had slept … and there was blood on the snow to mark the passage of starving wolf-packs.’1 In fact Christine would encounter neither frozen birds nor starving wolves, but something much more disturbing – her first direct experience of the human cost of war.
In Budapest, Christine had introduced Andrzej to journalists, diplomats and, after Radziminski had been dismissed, the British secret service. Andrzej spoke no English but was ‘the only person I could trust’, Christine told her Section D bosses when they asked whom she would recommend to replace their lovesick agent.2 In turn Andrzej vouched for Christine to Janek Marusarz, a star of the Polish Olympic skiing team before the war, and now a mountain courier for the exiled Polish Military Attaché.* Christine already knew Jan slightly from her own skiing days. Now she asked him to take her with him on his next journey into Slovakia, over the 2,000-metre-high Tatra Mountains, across the well-guarded Polish border, and down into Zakopane in occupied Poland. At first Jan thought she was joking. Then he thought she was insane. Not only was there a war on, it was the worst winter in living memory, with temperatures reaching minus 30 in the mountains and snow lying over four metres deep, often burying the few peasants’ huts. There were no ski-pistes, or any other kind of road, and the ski down into Poland would follow several days’ hike up the mountains on the other side of the border, carrying illicit documents, supplies, including a small primus stove, and skis. The journey was practically impossible even for him, Jan argued, and he seriously doubted it was something that Christine could survive. Andrzej backed him up, telling Christine to at least postpone her plans until the spring, but ‘such were her powers of persuasion’, he later reported, that within a few hours Jan had agreed to take her on his next trip, when his progress would be anyway slowed by a VIP that he had to escort across the border.3
