by Clare Mulley
Christine finally left on 13 November, accompanied by Father Laski.77 They chose a more easterly route than the one she had taken with Wladimir, over the high Czarnahora, now in the Ukraine, and she carried Ukrainian identity papers made out in a false name, along with $500. By the time she reached the Warsaw asylum, five days later, she found that, amid growing fears that Hungary was about to join the Axis, the Polish underground had decided not to risk the old escape route. As a result the airmen had been taken into the Russian-occupied zone of Poland, and through Kiev into Russia itself. Soon after two of them reappeared in Warsaw, with the news that the Russians had handed the others over to the Germans. Christine was now asked to bring these last two pilots out, but they were too exhausted to travel. Instead she handed them over to the Musketeers with $200 to pay for a doctor and sanctuary for three weeks, before they could be taken over the border. It was Father Laski who finally got them to Budapest, where he made contact with Kate O’Malley. Sir Owen was having an after-lunch nap when his daughter told him she had two RAF pilots who needed to be taken south over the border. ‘Body-smuggling was generally taken to be below the dignity of a British diplomat, and contrary to HMG’s regulations to boot’, Wladimir noted when he heard of the incident, but Sir Owen nevertheless agreed to help them.78 Having hastily provided the pilots with passports and visas under the rather conspicuous names of Hardy and Willis, Sir Owen took them to Belgrade listed as members of his staff.79
Christine had not been able to wait for them because she had been asked to take a large consignment of urgent information to Budapest. The bulkiest item was an Anglo-Russian dictionary with a special code, call signs and wavelengths hidden inside its pages. Going against the usual security precautions, she was also given a detailed description of the number and locations of radio stations in Poland, and instructions for how to establish regular direct radio communications between Warsaw and London at specified times, using the information in the dictionary. Witkowski must have been short of couriers to entrust both of these documents to the same person, but that was not all Christine was carrying. She had the formulae for two new gases being produced by the Germans, and a second report which, in her own words, provided ‘further up to date information on ammunition factories in Germany and Poland, detailed plans of aerodromes, aircraft factories, the number of planes which existed in Poland, details of torpedoes, U-boats and a new torpedo invention’.80 The extraordinary detail of the intelligence had been provided by sixteen engineers placed among the Polish workers forcibly sent to Germany to work in munitions factories and at railway stations. Like almost all the information Christine brought out, these reports had been photographed onto 35mm film, the rolls of which she carried inside her gloves.
Christine had also made the time to undertake some personal missions while she was in Poland. Andrzej had written a letter for his mother, Maria, which Christine delivered to her at Zamosc, in the south-east of the country. She also wrote to her Skarbek cousins, giving them the first definite, if circumspect, information they had had about their father since the fall of France.81 Despite the risks, Christine also visited her own mother again, who told her that her brother had been arrested by the Gestapo. Once again, she tried, vainly, to persuade Stefania to leave Poland, or at least Warsaw and her work as a teacher in a clandestine school. Strive as she might, she could not persuade her mother of the very real danger she faced. Stefania was convinced that her social status as a Skarbek would protect her – in a society that had never really accepted her, and which was now disintegrating. The ghetto, bordered on one side by the empty building of the former Goldfeder bank, now enclosed in less than one and a half square miles over 400,000 people, nearly a third of Warsaw’s population, mainly Jews. Were Stefania to be discovered living outside the ghetto she could be shot instantly. She could also be shot just for giving classes. When the Gestapo discovered that secret lessons were taking place in another Warsaw flat, ‘they seized all of them’, an underground officer wrote, ‘and hanged them straight away from a balcony in Leszno Street’.82
Determined to protect her mother, Christine spoke to Witkowski about her, and also sought out her father’s old friend Stanisław Rudziejewski, the young war hero whose odorous feet had so offended the fine ladies at the Warsaw opera twenty years before. Stanisław had been sent to a camp in Latvia in 1939, from which he had been rescued by his wife Irena, just before his unit was transferred to the Russian forests near Katyn. A forester by trade, both he and Irena had now joined the Polish resistance, and Christine asked them if they would hide Stefania in their isolated forest house until she could get her out.83 After some discussion they agreed, but Stefania was obdurate. Still blindly clinging to the belief that as an aristocrat she would be safe, she refused to abandon Warsaw, her Goldfeder relatives locked inside the ghetto, and her pupils. Christine could win the confidence and financial support of the British, she could secure the devotion of Polish officers working both in and outside the official resistance, she could even talk a Gestapo officer into carrying a ‘black-market package’ for her, but she could not persuade her Jewish mother to leave Nazi-occupied Poland. To Christine’s profound distress, Stefania disappeared a year later, having been arrested by the Gestapo and confined in Warsaw’s infamous Pawiak prison.
It was a bitter irony that Pawiak had been built in the 1830s to the design of Fryderyck Skarbek, prison reformer, godfather of Chopin – and Christine’s ancestor. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland, Pawiak was turned into a Gestapo jail, its name becoming ‘a spectre’ throughout Warsaw, according to one Polish underground army officer.84 Roughly 100,000 men and 200,000 women passed through the prison during the course of the war, mostly members of the resistance, political prisoners and civilians taken as hostages in street round-ups. Of these, 37,000 would die there.
The prison’s records provide a stark picture of what Pawiak was like when Stefania arrived there on 31 January 1942: the last known trace of her. Fifty-six people, including five family groups, had arrived at the prison the day before, and only ten left, including a child ‘transported to the city morgue’.85 Stefania was one of four new arrivals, and as a Jew she would have received harsher treatment than the resistance suspects, hostages, POW fugitives and smugglers that comprised most of the rest of the inmates, but conditions were very poor for all of them. Pawiak’s cells were dirty, cold, dark, crammed with people and riddled with vermin. Windows – where the cells had any at all – were generally covered, further limiting access to light and air. Prisoners slept on planks or straw mattresses, and buckets served as the only toilets. There was no soap or water. Meals supplied only a few hundred calories a day, so most prisoners were starving. Routine maltreatment ranged from beatings to forced walks across glowing cinders. Disobedience led to solitary confinement, or immediate execution.86 For most inmates, Pawiak was a stop preceding deportation to the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, Stutthof, Majdanek, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald or Gross-Rosen, but there is no evidence that Stefania was sent to a camp. Thousands of Pawiak prisoners, mainly members of the Polish intelligentsia, were executed by the Nazis, and it is likely that Stefania was among these, possibly killed by machine gun in the Palmiry forests just outside the city, or otherwise dying of disease or starvation in the prison itself. She was in her mid-sixties.
Christine had left Budapest by the time her mother was arrested at the start of 1942, but at least two independent accounts, both seemingly informed by Christine herself, tell a different story.87 According to Wladimir, just after Christine arrived in Warsaw, in November 1940, a cousin told her that Stefania had been arrested either because she had failed to register as a Jew and move into the ghetto, or because she refused to identify Christine in the false papers taken from her daughter in Slovakia earlier in the year. Burning with guilt, Christine evolved a plan to buy her mother’s freedom, provide her with Aryan papers, and smuggle her out of Warsaw to somewhere she could be hidden until the end of the war. A Goldfeder
cousin, a pianist at a café in the ghetto patronized by crooked Wehrmacht officers, put her in touch with a Gestapo officer called Grüber, who was known as ‘the uncrowned king of the black market’, and ‘a mighty skirt-chaser’.88 The next evening Christine danced with Grüber in the café, and later, over drinks, he agreed to look through her mother’s files. The next day he left Christine a note saying that he regretted he could not help, as her mother had already been transferred to Auschwitz.* In another account, the Gestapo officer demanded $300 and a night with Christine for her mother’s life, and only told her she was too late after both payments had been taken.89
By late 1940 Christine was used to telling stories to cover her tracks. She changed the route of her first train journey into occupied Poland, and Wladimir’s ability to work out her identity from her regularly repeated tale of the bodies in the snow had shown her how important it was to vary any story, however painful or seemingly innocuous. Later Christine’s war stories would grow more and more contradictory. From time to time she indulged ‘in the most outrageous fantasies when talking to people whom she was not disposed to take seriously’, one of her close British friends and colleagues later admitted, thinking of her tales presenting herself ‘as a gun-toting female who would happily toss hand-grenades whenever the occasion demanded’.90 But people’s stories usually have some vestige of truth, and it is possible that Christine did try to rescue someone from Pawiak or the Warsaw ghetto. Women were using sex for this purpose in Warsaw in 1940. Or perhaps the story stemmed from Christine’s eternal regret that although she would have done even this to save her mother, she never had the chance.
Christine arrived back in Budapest on 25 November 1940, physically and emotionally exhausted. She spent Christmas with Andrzej, working on plans to return to Warsaw but too ill to do much more. She had flu, and a hacking cough, and Andrzej was concerned about her. He was also increasingly worried about the situation in Hungary, whose military police, press and policies were all now dominated by the Nazis. By the end of November the Gestapo had even established an independent presence in Budapest. Andrzej wanted to leave the city, but Christine was waiting for a final delivery from a Polish courier. Towards the end of January 1941 Andrzej realized they were under almost constant surveillance. Above all he was concerned that they should not be arrested together, as this would leave no one to warn other members of the network, and because if their cover stories were not entirely watertight they might be made to contradict one another. At 3 a.m. on 23 January, knowing that the military police typically called in the early hours, Andrzej left Christine in the flat on a practice escape run. It was cold and miserable but the streets were deserted. The next night they went out for dinner with Kate O’Malley and some other friends. They were woken by banging on their door at four o’clock in the morning. They looked at each other. Christine grabbed a dressing gown. Andrzej put on his leg. Neither of them had any illusions, but to Andrzej’s amazement he noticed that Christine seemed almost cheered by their impending arrest. After weeks of illness and nervous anticipation ‘she was smiling to me…’ he reported, ‘as merry as if she was going to a cocktail party!’91
6: TRAVELS IN AN OPEL
‘Christine suddenly stood up on the bed, holding the edge of the sheet with her teeth’, runs one account of the arrival of the Hungarian police. ‘“I’ll make you some tea,” she told them, “but turn round first, all of you…”’1 Whether or not the bed-linen was raised, Christine certainly managed to put the police off their guard. A moment later the whistling of the kettle could not entirely disguise the sound of the toilet flushing away incriminating pages of her diary. ‘Why did you pull the chain?’ one of the policemen demanded furiously in Andrzej’s version of the story, provoking Christine to smile, and reply ‘in her normal voice, “Isn’t it usual to flush the loo after use?”’2 When Andrzej tried the same trick he was given an unblinking escort, and was reduced to using some smart sleight of hand to stow his coded notebook in the pocket of his jacket. The police searched the flat for an hour but found nothing incriminating. Even so, Christine and Andrzej were driven to a fortified house in Horthy Miklos Street to be interrogated.
Andrzej was ushered into a large upstairs room, where a Gestapo officer ordered him to remove his clothes. His overcoat was immediately searched down to the inside of its seams and left on a peg. Having stripped to his underpants, he managed to slip his notebook from under his folded jacket into a pocket of the coat, where it hung, untouched, throughout the questioning. His leg and his person having been thoroughly checked for microfilm, he was ‘brutally interrogated’ for nineteen hours without break but stuck doggedly to his usual cover story.3
At midday on the second day the interrogators finished their shift and were replaced. Andrzej was exhausted and losing his grip. Hoping to break him, the Gestapo showed him the bloodied mess of a man they were working on in the next room. Then the interrogation began again. The Gestapo officers wanted to know why he and Christine had spent so much time at the British Legation, to which Andrzej replied that he did not think that the German Minister would have welcomed them. His sarcastic response only provoked them into beating him. However, he clung to the growing conviction that the Gestapo needed to prove that he and Christine had been working directly against the Reich, for the British or for someone else, before they could be extradited to Germany. That evening Andrzej was confined in Budapest’s notorious Hadik prison. The situation seemed hopeless. The next day, back in the interrogation suite, he was amazed to see Christine ushered in, looking ‘as pale as paper’. ‘The doctor says I am not well’, she told him pointedly.4
Christine had faced a similar ordeal to Andrzej and, like him, she stuck to their story. At times it was almost too well rehearsed: she even made the same joke about the German Ambassador not being likely to welcome them, although, she added drily, Andrzej’s frequent presence at the British Legation might have something to do with the Minister’s attractive daughter. Most importantly though, she later reported to Section D, ‘I again denied having any dealings with the British’, adding with typical aplomb, ‘other than a flirtation’, possibly referring to Sir Owen.5 Christine’s interrogators wanted to know how, and how often, she had managed to visit Poland, and showed her a copy of her ‘Zofia Andrzejewska’ identity papers with her photograph attached. ‘One can’t deny that the likeness is striking’, one admirer later pictured Christine responding after a steady inspection of the papers. ‘However, it seems to me that the girl on that picture is much prettier.’6
Christine had been ill before she was arrested, and despite her courage Andrzej could not imagine how she would hold up under twenty-four hours’ interrogation. But, not for the first time, Christine made a virtue of her apparent weakness, hamming up her hacking cough until her eyes were streaming. With what the British later called ‘great presence of mind’, she then bit her tongue so hard, and so repeatedly, that it soon appeared as though she was coughing up blood.*7 It was a searingly painful but brilliant tactic that brought immediate results. The Germans were, rightly, terrified of tuberculosis, which spreads rapidly through the airborne droplets expelled by coughing, sneezing or even speaking. A prison doctor was quickly called in to diagnose Christine’s condition. As casually as possible in the circumstances, Christine mentioned that she had been enlisting the help of her aunt, who was related to Admiral Horthy, Hungary’s regent, to find a lung specialist when she had been arrested. Christine did indeed have a tenuous connection to the Horthy family through a distant aunt, and while it is doubtful that by 1941 the Gestapo had any concerns about this, it might have given the Hungarian doctor another incentive to help her. Although it is unlikely that he was taken in by her coughing, the doctor arranged for Christine to have a chest X-ray. She could not have hoped for a better result. Dark shadows were clearly visible across her lungs: the impact of the garage fumes from her job at Fiat fifteen years earlier. The doctor conspiratorially ‘confirmed’ tuberculosis and urged her immedia
te release on humanitarian grounds.†
Christine’s sangfroid paid off. After a brief consultation she and Andrzej, who was considered likely to be contagious, were released – under certain conditions. Followed by two plain-clothes policemen, they were told to go to their regular rendezvous, the Café Hangli, before returning to their flat, which they were then not to leave without permission. They were not to take any form of transport except a tram, and were to report to the police every three hours by phone. Fortunately word of their arrest had got round, and in any case one look at Christine and Andrzej’s swollen faces would have served as a clear signal. No one greeted them at the café. After coffee, and their first meal in two days, they walked slowly back through the icy streets to their flat. It was only when they realized they were still being followed and their phone had been tapped that they finally started packing.
Andrzej’s pride and joy was his sandy-brown, two-door Opel Olympia, nicknamed ‘Paul Opiel’, which he had kept topped up with petrol but hidden in a dirty greenhouse in the gated courtyard behind his and Christine’s flat. This was the same car that he had driven out of Poland the year before, and in which he had escaped the Hungarian internment camp. The SS had raced Opels in 1938, and the following year the convertible became a favourite of high-ranking SS officers.8 It is entirely possible that Andrzej’s beloved car had once belonged to a discerning Wehrmacht officer, as his sister later proudly referred to it as his ‘spoils of the war with Germany’.9 But because Andrzej had never used the Opel on his border excursions, or driven it much round Budapest, it was not known to the Hungarian police. When, blithely ignoring the team watching the flat, a friend arrived with a bottle of slivovitz to welcome them home, the three of them came up with a plan. That evening, as the police followed Andrzej’s Chevrolet out of the city, Andrzej revved up ‘Paul Opiel’, filling the cold greenhouse with clouds of fumes, and drove off in the opposite direction. The Opel had a four-cylinder engine capable of at least 60 miles an hour and made short work of the roads around their flat. Soon they were parked outside the old, yellow-plastered houses round the corner from the British Legation. A quick call to Kate O’Malley and they were through the snow-covered porte-cochère, which led from the street to the Legation’s large inner courtyard.
