by Clare Mulley
Christine had not killed herself, but she had injured her leg. Nonetheless, with Wladimir’s help she managed to keep going. Amazingly he still had his compass, and Christine had some loose tea-leaves and sugar in her rucksack, which somehow sustained them. After another close encounter with a mountain patrol who fired a few shots at them the following day, they reached a rocky outcrop near the top of the mountains where they could rest a while. Here they sat, watching the mist clear. ‘Do you know’, Christine said, getting to her feet, ‘that I’ve only just this moment understood what Saint-Exupéry meant when he told me that on his solitary flights, high above the clouds, he felt like opening the canopy of his plane to lean out and shake hands with God.’*37
Two days later Christine limped over the Hungarian border, and the next evening they were back in Budapest with Andrzej. Wladimir would always maintain that Christine had saved both their lives when she brought out her ‘diamonds’, but Christine was, as usual, more circumspect in her own report. ‘Having found 145,000 zloty on me, and 75 dollars and 15,000 kronen on a boy accompanying me’, she wrote rather modestly, ‘they apparently preferred that to the 10,000 marks reward’ they would have received for two agents, ‘and we were able to escape’.38
Despite having narrowly avoided being shot as spies, Wladimir and Christine felt they had failed. The only valuable intelligence they brought back was that the route they had taken should temporarily be closed, and that the medal of Our Lady was no longer a safe identity tag for the ZWZ. They had lost the money they had been entrusted with, along with Christine’s travel documents bearing her photograph. It was later reported that her image was posted in every railway station in Poland, with £1,000 reward on her head – ‘dead or alive’.39 Nevertheless, Christine announced that she was determined to return to Poland permanently, and support the underground resistance in situ. It seemed like a death-wish. On average, the women engaged in liaison and courier work inside Poland could expect to survive, at most, a few months, and most of them were anonymous, at least at the beginning.40 Knowing, however, that danger was not likely to put her off, Andrzej and Wladimir discouraged Christine by arguing that her languages, and her good relations with the British, gave her greater potential to work with Polish intelligence elsewhere in Europe. Meanwhile Wladimir’s Polish bosses were furious that he had been caught and compromised. He was instructed to rejoin the Polish Army in Poland or the Middle East, and a few days later he moved to Belgrade. Once there he accepted a posting with the Polish army to Latrun, in Palestine. He would go on to fight with exceptional courage in North Africa.
By the time Wladimir left Hungary, France was being evacuated. Jerzy Giżycki had already arrived in London, from where he hoped to move to Canada ‘to prepare there some sort of a home to which Christine could come when she gets out of her … predicament’.41 His appeals for information about his wife now went unanswered, partly because Hubert Harrison had failed to return to Budapest after his most recent trip to London, preferring instead to resume his old job at the Daily Express.* Jerzy’s last letter in Christine’s British file states with moving brevity, ‘Am going away on official mission. Do not know when shall be back. If should not be back – kindly take care of my wife.’42 He had abandoned his Canadian plans and departed instead for West Africa, where he had taken a posting with Polish intelligence.43
Eastern Europe, like the rest of the world, was badly shaken by the fall of France that June. The Polish community in Budapest might no longer feel as humiliated by their country’s earlier defeat, but they also saw that the whole tide of the war had shifted in Germany’s favour. And Hungary’s puppet government, which had recently introduced its own version of Germany’s Nuremberg laws, preventing Jews from working in the civil service or marrying outside their own communities, now knew that sooner or later they would have to give way to German pressure to abandon their neutral status altogether. Recognizing this, the Polish intelligence team left Budapest for Belgrade. As a result the British now needed their agents in Hungary more than ever, both to provide a link to Poland, but also to help evacuate British and Polish POWs, particularly pilots, who were now desperately needed to fight in the Battle of Britain. That summer two fighter squadrons of 145 Polish pilots, escapees from Poland, France, or Hungarian internment, shot down 201 enemy aircraft. This was the highest number of kills by any Allied squadrons in the battle, and a decisive contribution to the victory. Thirty Polish pilots lost their lives, but the Battle of Britain marked Hitler’s first major defeat and a strategic turning point in the war.
Christine and Andrzej were ordered to Belgrade on 30 June, but their work in Budapest had entered a key phase.44 They had developed their courier networks to smuggle money, arms and explosives into Poland, and intelligence out, using well-connected contacts including a Jesuit priest, ‘a little, worn man’ with broken boots, called Father Laski, and Prince Marcin Lubomirski.45 Andrzej, his assistant, Antoni Filipkiewicz, and others, were also driving vast numbers of Czechoslovakian and Polish officers, many of them pilots, across the ‘green frontier’ from Hungary to Yugoslavia, often in groups of twenty or thirty men, barely hidden in Andrzej’s enormous Chevrolet, as well as the lorries and farm trucks that had previously brought in supplies of vegetables, flour and explosives.
By now Andrzej had unrivalled knowledge of the frontier, and had organized a number of courier posts on the borders. That summer he and Christine extended the routes that would later become famous as part of the secret ‘underground railroad’ that took escapees out through the Balkans and Turkey, and so to Greece or on to Palestine and Egypt to join the Allied war effort. Christine would make the clandestine arrangements on the Polish and Slovakian side, and Andrzej and his team would drive the men out of Hungary to the south.46 Andrzej was too security-conscious to keep a record of his movements, but his passport contains over twenty visas, mainly between Hungary and Serbia, and many for multiple entry. The British later estimated that he was responsible for the transfer of 5,000 internees over the course of 1940, with Christine crossing the Polish border six times and the Slovakian border eight times in support of this work.47 Clearly they worked extremely effectively together, making a huge contribution to the war effort both in terms of providing men to fight the Nazi advance and by undermining the Germans’ sense of security in the territories they occupied.
Andrzej’s summer journeys along the dusty roads lined with budding mulberry bushes and the poppies whose black seeds would later flavour the country bread were in many ways idyllic, but he was under increasing surveillance. On one occasion he was captured by a border patrol on the Slovak frontier while awaiting the arrival of some British escapees from Poland. Although ‘severely handled’ by the police, he managed to get away, and immediately returned to the frontier to finish the job.48 Not long afterwards he was sent to collect men from the Polish–Russian border. Ever resourceful, he obtained a Hungarian Ministry pass and official car to drive into the frontier zone, in exchange for smuggling out the young relatives of a Hungarian colonel.* With this permit, and Christine’s press pass, the pair of them could now also carry the microfilm received from her Polish contacts further across Hungary, usually hidden, with cartoonish audacity, either inside her gloves or behind a secret panel in his wooden leg.
Their adventures were soon the stuff of legend. Alone, on the run from a border patrol, Christine met a sympathetic forester who, with great presence of mind, took her in and hid her, pretending she was his daughter, sick in bed.49 Weeks later, as she hiked to the crest of the mountain range serving as the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia, a Luftwaffe pilot reportedly spotted her dark figure beneath him, ‘trapped like an ant on a tablecloth’.50 For hours she was forced to play hide and seek, shielding herself behind a large rock to escape the stream of machine-gun fire that streaked towards her.51 Once she talked her way out of arrest by telling some suspicious frontier guards she was on a picnic, even getting them to help push-start her stalled car.52 In another
story she and Andrzej were driving three Czech pilots across the border when some police opened fire. Although they sped away, two of the Czechs were killed, one shot in the head, the other in the spine, leaving ‘the interior of the car … spattered with blood, its back riddled with bullets’.53
Sometimes their activities seemed to take on a darkly comic dimension. During another dramatic car chase Christine is said to have optimistically tried to shield Andrzej’s head from a volley of bullets with her bag. Later he joked that her knickers would have served as a better talisman.54 And in Budapest they once had to shelter the well-known socialite turned secret agent, Prince Eddie Lobkowitz, then working for the French underground. Bored at their safe house, the prince simply pulled down his hat and went off to drink coffee in the best cafés, where he watched the waitresses through a hole in his newspaper, burnt for the purpose with his cigarette. They laughed afterwards, but were glad to pass him on swiftly.55 As the German position strengthened, Budapest grew ever more dangerous, and neither Christine nor Andrzej had diplomatic immunity. She was ‘a person of quite remarkable courage and intelligence’, the British reported that August.56
Christine was also busy enlisting the help of the British Minister in Hungary, Sir Owen O’Malley. Sir Owen had arrived in Budapest from London less than a year earlier, his imagination fired even on the drive over as he watched ‘the brave way the silver snipe on the bonnet of my Humber car flashed on the great plain of Central Europe’.57 Patriotic, romantic but essentially conventional, at Harrow O’Malley had played Antonio, the merchant of Venice, opposite Rupert Brooke’s Portia, and he would later live in a house rented from the Byron family. But Sir Owen was also an opportunist. When war broke out he had sent as many British subjects home as possible, and then launched a daily information service, using trusted staff and his attractive eighteen-year-old daughter Kate to take shifts sitting on a cork-topped stool in the Legation bathroom to monitor the powerful radio receiver.58 He also encouraged members of his staff to rent flats overlooking the West-Bahnhof rail tracks so they could report on the long munition trains full of tanks, tracked vehicles and guns passing through the city, the shapes clearly recognizable under their waterproof covers. Despite this, he was punctilious in keeping to the Foreign Office line of maintaining cordial relations with so-called neutral countries. He was, therefore, initially reluctant to support the work of Section D in Hungary.
Christine’s friend the British journalist and intelligence officer Basil Davidson described Sir Owen as ‘an Anglo-Irish gentleman of impeccable diplomacy whose views … were that the war was probably lost and that, this being so, nothing should be done to make bad into worse, above all nothing irregular, and in his own Legation’.59 When Sir Owen discovered that Section D had been secretly using the Legation’s cellars to store sacks full of high explosives until they could be used to blow up enemy shipping on the Danube, he sent for Davidson. He had ‘pale blue eyes, and pale spectacles rimmed in gold’, Davidson remembered. ‘All these he turned away from me.’60 Sir Owen was livid, and had ditched the explosives in the Danube lest the Legation’s diplomatic neutrality be compromised. Davidson was persona non grata, and lucky not to be in the Danube himself. ‘We were totally amateurish’, he admitted later, ‘very amateurish and very ignorant.’61
But Sir Owen did not avert his eyes from the ‘young, beautiful and gifted’ woman, as he described Christine, who cornered him at one of the Legation’s regular Monday evening cocktail parties; his daughter Kate was just as taken with Andrzej.*62 Sir Owen’s news bulletin was his pride and joy, and it did not take Christine long to smooth over the strained relationship between the Minister and Basil Davidson, giving both men the chance to share ‘watered-down news of a pro-Allied colour’ to the Hungarian press and radio.63 Christine was of ‘considerable assistance to the British Minister’, Section D reported, although it might be argued that the boot was on the other foot.64 Sir Owen was not entirely uncritical of Christine, describing her as ‘extremely obstinate, individualistic, attractive and moody’, but he was completely won over by her ‘unexampled courage’, reporting that ‘she was ready to risk her life at any moment for what she believed in’.65
As a result, both Sir Owen and Kate O’Malley were soon helping, ‘as unobtrusively as possible’, with the ‘exfiltration’ of Polish soldiers and pilots, and British POWs interned in Hungary and Poland.66 Sir Owen applied to the British Foreign Office in London for funding, and was ‘staggered’ when he was told that he had an unlimited budget.67 His daughter Kate, meanwhile, was able to meet Christine and Andrzej in the Budapest bars, cafés and cheap boarding-houses to which her high-society parents could never go, slipping in and out of buildings in her fashionable little Budapest shoes ‘with the familiarity and ease of a little mouse’, her mother later wrote, before confessing she had been ‘rather aghast’ when she learned how closely her daughter had been involved in the underground.68
Like her increasingly besotted father, Kate worshipped Christine, even noting the ‘grace and ease’ with which she moved. ‘There was something almost animal in it,’ Kate commented. ‘Something antelope-ish.’69 Sharing great risks almost daily, but also gossip and light-hearted intimacy, she and Christine were soon as close as sisters. However, Christine was not entirely happy about Kate’s equally fervent admiration for Andrzej. That summer Christine and Andrzej had finally moved into a flat together, but now it was Kate and Andrzej who wandered round the flower market, Andrzej teaching Kate songs about the frontier, along which ‘the corn is so green, oh so green, that a man may pass through it unseen, all unseen’.70 Meanwhile Christine was left lecturing one of her few other female friends in the city on how ‘you have to love a man so much you don’t mind … helping with his gammy leg, or giving him an enema’.71 (Andrzej was still driving huge numbers of men out of the country, and as security tightened he was often forced to walk long distances to make contact with his smugglers, causing terrible problems with his leg, which had received no medical attention since the start of the war.) But if some of the romantic spark had gone, Christine’s relationship with Andrzej was still deeper and more intimate than any she would enjoy with any other man.
At the end of September 1940, as the situation in Hungary worsened and Wehrmacht officers started lingering ever more territorially over their coffee in Budapest’s railway stations, Christine and Andrzej began to amass information on troop and freight movements through the country. At the request of the British they organized surveillance of all the main rail, road and river traffic, particularly noting the build-up of the frontier guards on the borders with Romania and Germany. Christine was later credited with sabotaging communications on the main Danube river route, as well as providing vital information on oil transports to Germany from Romania’s Ploieşti oilfields.72 Both she and Andrzej also distributed British arms and explosives to exiled Poles in Hungary and in Poland itself, and on at least one occasion that autumn made good use of the weapons themselves.*
Incensed at seeing Romanian petrol being shipped via Hungary into Austria, Andrzej and a friend limpet-mined some of the barges on the Danube one night, swimming out into the icy river with the heavy magnetized mines while Christine, who could not swim, waited impatiently, with Andrzej’s leg, in their fastest available car. The barges later blew up spectacularly too far from port to be salvaged.† By now even Sir Owen had overcome his dislike for SOE sabotage work. Deeply impressed, he would later claim that Christine ‘had a positive nostalgie [sic] for danger … [and] could do anything with dynamite, except eat it’.‡73
But such proceedings could not go unnoticed. Polish intelligence were filing reports on their activities, but Andrzej was also under more hostile and almost constant German surveillance. Soon the Nazis began to pressure the Hungarians to arrest him. Fortunately Andrzej had developed excellent relations with some influential Hungarian officials, and when he was arrested for a third time the police released him with the strong advice that he leave the coun
try. Not long afterwards several other members of his network were arrested and interrogated. Realizing that they had been infiltrated, Andrzej discovered that one of his newer recruits had been seen talking with a member of the German Embassy. He started to feed the man false information and, when he was sure, felt no compunction about calling on a group of Hungarian thieves sympathetic to the Poles to look after his ‘inquisitive friend’.74 Having got the informant paralytically drunk on slivovitz while they knocked back water, the thieves left him on the nearest public bench. He was found stiff and dead the next morning after a night when temperatures reached minus 20, his body giving off the distinct smell of bitter almonds from the plum kernels in the slivovitz.
At the start of October 1940 a Musketeer courier arrived from Poland with news that sixteen British pilots and airmen were hiding, as they spoke no Polish, in a Warsaw ‘asylum for the deaf and dumb’.75 Christine at once asked the British for the money and backing she would need to go to Poland and lead the men out. Fears for the men’s safety grew as rumours circulated that Hitler was planning to implement ‘mercy killings’ of the disabled, but Christine was urged to wait until the November snows, which would reduce the effectiveness of the frontier patrols and enable her to ski across more easily. ‘I waited for five weeks’, Christine later reported, before deciding that if the British would not help, ‘I would do it myself.’76
