Tell Me Who I Am

by Julia Navarro

  Major Jürgens seemed to be paying close attention to the meal, and made out that he wasn’t paying them any attention, but Amelia could sense how he was scrutinizing her, and could see the glitter of anger in his eyes whenever he looked at Max.

  They went back to Warsaw two days later and moved into the Hotel Europejski, where Captain Hans Henke, Max’s efficient adjutant, had reserved for Amelia a room adjoining Max’s.

  “I am so pleased to have you here... But I’m scared that you will be bored and want to go back to Berlin,” Max said.

  “I only want to be with you; and it is always an adventure to get to know a city. I will meet people, don’t you worry about me.”

  “But you must be careful, the city isn’t safe. The Gestapo and the SS are everywhere.”

  “It can’t be worse than Berlin.”

  “Trust no one here apart from Captain Henke.”

  “I know, I know...”

  What Max could not imagine is that he couldn’t even trust the woman with whom he was madly in love. Amelia had already started to photograph the documents he carried in his briefcase.

  She took photographs of everything, trusting that the Admiralty would know how to select the most interesting documents.

  Amelia only photographed the documents when Max was asleep, or in the shower. She shuddered to think of the terrible damage she would do him if he ever found out about it. Max was in love with her as he had never loved any woman before. Amelia was in love with him too, but not with such intensity, she told herself that she had given the best of her love to Pierre.

  A few days after their arrival in Warsaw, Max had already established a work routine and Amelia was free to search for the address that Jan and Dorothy had given her on Major Murray’s orders.

  It was a building in the heart of Warsaw. A three-story house, one of whose corners abutted the Market Square. Amelia went up to the third floor and rang the bell and then waited impatiently.

  A young woman answered the door and looked her up and down, and then asked:

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Polish,” Amelia apologized in German.

  “You only speak German?” the young woman said.

  “And English and French and Spanish...”

  “We will speak in German. What do you want?”

  “After the storm, the sea is calm,” Amelia said.

  “Come in, please,” the young woman said, and introduced herself as Grazyna.

  The house was large and bright. The square and one of the side streets could be seen from its windows. It was a middle-class house, furnished with furniture and paintings of good quality.

  Grazyna asked her to sit down.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Amelia Garayoa, and I think we have some friends in common...”

  “Yes, it seems that way. What do you want?”

  “They said that I could come here and leave some photos...”

  “They said that you would come, but not when. What do you have?”

  “I have been able to photograph some documents, they could be important.”

  “Give them to me, I’ll make sure they get where they need to go.”

  “How do you get your material to London?”

  “I can’t tell you. We are running grave risks here, and if you get arrested then it’s best if you don’t know.”

  “Is the Resistance well-organized?”

  “The Resistance?” Grazyna gave a bitter laugh. “You can’t imagine what the Germans did when they invaded. They came with endless lists of people, of anyone who might be likely to put up the slightest resistance. The Einsatzgruppen have murdered thousands of people: doctors, artists, lawyers, civil servants... Yes, they killed anyone who could have tried to stand up to them, even if only in words rather than in deeds.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “No one did anything to stop them,” Grazyna said sadly.

  “Great Britain declared war on Germany because of Poland,” Amelia protested.

  “Too late. They were engaging with Hitler, and they refused to see what was happening, and the Poles were the first victims. If only Churchill is able to do something! At least he was never keen on appeasement. How could they have been so blind?”

  While Grazyna spoke, Amelia looked at her. She calculated that she couldn’t be more than twenty-five years old, although the lines around her mouth made her appear older. She was of medium height, with light brown hair and dark blue eyes, fleshy, not beautiful, but attractive. Amelia thought that Grazyna would pass unnoticed almost anywhere.

  “Do you live alone?” she dared to ask.

  “Yes, but my parents live near here. And what about you? What is your cover?”

  “I am the lover of a Wehrmacht medical officer.”

  Grazyna gritted her teeth in order to avoid screwing up her face into a disgusted grimace.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Spain.”

  “You’ve come a long way... Why aren’t you in your own country?”

  “My father was shot after our Civil War; my mother died, and... well, let’s just say that life has pushed me here. Oh yes, and even if you don’t believe me, the officer I live with is a good person, not a Nazi.

  “Right. He’s only obeying orders, I suppose.”

  “Exactly. He was in the army before Hitler came along.”

  “But he doesn’t know that you’re a spy.”

  “No, he doesn’t.

  “And why are you doing this?”

  “I hope that when Hitler is defeated it will help free my country from Franco.”

  Grazyna’s guffaw irritated Amelia. She was sure that sooner or later Franco would be removed from power; she grasped hold of this dream because it gave her the strength to carry on living.

  “It’s not funny,” she said dryly.

  “I’m surprised that you’re so naïve, but of course, I don’t want to offend you. Give me the material.”

  Amelia took out a handkerchief in which the film was wrapped and gave it to Grazyna.

  “I think that this house is still safe, but we shouldn’t take any chances. There’s a flowerpot in the window; if it is on the right-hand side then that means that you can come up without any problems, but if it’s on the Left then either I’m not here or I am in danger, and then, whatever happens, you must not come up. Do you understand?”

  “Of course.”

  “What do you think about Jews?”

  The question confused Amelia and she didn’t say anything, which Grazyna took the wrong way.

  “So, you’re one of those people whose principles soften when it comes to the Jews.”

  “What are you saying! My best friend was Jewish, my father’s business partner was Jewish... It’s just that I don’t know what to say when you ask me what I think of them: Should I think anything in particular? That’s the problem with people who think that you should think ‘something’ about the Jews.”

  “Don’t get annoyed, it was only a question. My fiancé is Jewish. He’s in the ghetto.”

  “I’m sorry, I know that they’ve been confined to certain streets and aren’t allowed to move around freely.”

  “The conditions in the ghetto are getting worse every day.”

  “Can you see your fiancé?”

  “You can’t enter the ghetto or leave it without permission, but we can get past the guards, even though it isn’t always possible.”

  “If there’s anything I can do...”

  “Maybe there is, given that you’ve got a Nazi for a lover...”

  “Max is a soldier, a medical officer in the Wehrmacht, and I’ve already told you that he’s not a Nazi.”

  “You’ll have to tell him that we’ve met.”

  “Alright, I’ll tell him that I bumped into you in the street, and that I was lost and you kindly showed me the way back to the hotel, and then I asked you to have a cup of tea with me to say thank you and then we g
ot talking and became friends. Is that alright?”

  “It’s believable, I suppose. What hotel are you staying at?”

  “The Europejski.”

  “We’re more or less the same age, and you don’t know anyone, so your lover will be glad to know that you’ve got someone to chat with while he’s out killing Poles.”

  “I’m asking you please to stop talking about Max like this. You don’t know him, so you shouldn’t judge him. I can understand that for you all Germans are your enemies, but he is not.”

  “I suppose you have to believe that so as not to feel so bad while you do your work,” Grazyna said.

  “No, it’s not that. I’ve known him for a while and I assure you that he’s not a Nazi.”

  Grazyna shrugged. She wasn’t going to make any more concessions about the Germans. She hated them too much to make any distinctions between them. Some of her best friends had been disappeared by the Einsatzgruppen, two of her uncles had been hanged, and her fiancé was in the ghetto. No, the Spaniard couldn’t ask her to see beyond the pain and the hatred.

  “I’ll take you back to your hotel, so that you can tell your lover a believable story.”

  They left the house in silence. Amelia was wondering if she would ever form a connection with Grazyna. And Grazyna did not know what to think of Amelia. From what she had just said, it was clear that she was a British agent with a mission, and she needed this Wehrmacht officer in order to fulfill the mission, but even so, Grazyna didn’t trust anyone who had amicable relations with the enemy.

  Grazyna explained that she was a nurse and that she worked at the Saint Stanislaw hospital. Whenever she could she stole medicine to take to the ghetto.

  It wasn’t easy, but there was a nun who helped her, Sister Maria.

  “She’s an extraordinary woman, and extremely brave in spite of her age.”

  “How old is she?” Amelia asked.

  “I think that she’s past sixty; she’s a bit fat and moans a lot, but she doesn’t mind risking her life. She has access to the box where the keys to the dispensary are kept, and she helps me steal the medicine.”

  “A light-fingered nun... ,” Amelia said, smiling.

  “A nun who helps save lives,” Grazyna said, angrily.

  “Of course! Don’t misunderstand me. I think that what sister Maria is doing is admirable, but I would be willing to wager that she never thought it was something she’d end up doing.”

  “And you, did you think you’d end up being the lover of a Nazi?”

  “I am not the lover of a Nazi.”

  They didn’t say anything else until they got back to the hotel. Amelia invited her in to have a cup of tea. Grazyna was right, it was important to give the illusion of truth to the lie that Amelia was going to tell Max.

  Max did not get back to the hotel until late afternoon. He was tired and irritated, but his mood changed when he saw Amelia. She told him that she had met a young Polish nurse and that they had got on very well, and he encouraged her to cultivate the friendship.

  “This way you won’t be so alone; I know that I was selfish to bring you here, but I didn’t want to leave you behind, not for anything in the world.”

  That night, and the nights that followed, Amelia took photographs of the documents in Max’s briefcase. Every time she did so she felt extremely scared, and she wondered if he would forgive her if he ever caught her.

  On the afternoon of the twentieth, Amelia went back to Grazyna’s house. She had not seen her since their first meeting. She saw the flowerpot on the right-hand side of the window and went up without hesitating up to the third floor.

  She rang the bell and Grazyna opened the door almost immediately.

  “Oh, it’s you!” she said, without hiding her surprise.

  “Yes, I saw the flowerpot on the right and I came up... ,” Amelia apologized.

  “Come in, I’ll introduce you to some friends.”

  There were two men and another young woman in the salon. They looked at her curiously.

  “This is Piotr and Tomasz, and this is my cousin Ewa, the best pastry chef in Warsaw. You have to visit my uncle and aunt’s cake shop one day, I promise you it’ll be worth your while.”

  Piotr appeared to be closer to forty than to thirty; he was tall and strongly built, with dirty-blond hair and chestnut eyes that were almost green, and strong calloused hands; the exact opposite of Tomasz, who was some way shy of thirty, thin, of medium height, with hair so blond it was almost white, and intense blue eyes. Ewa was the youngest of the group. Amelia thought that she was probably around twenty: tall and slender with light brown hair and dark blue eyes like Grazyna.

  “Have you got any more information?” Grazyna asked.

  Amelia tensed up and didn’t answer. She didn’t know who Grazyna’s guests were and was surprised that her contact could be so indiscreet.

  “Oh, come on, don’t worry! These are friends, I wouldn’t have invited you in otherwise. Didn’t you ask me about the Resistance? Well, here are three of them. We’re planning a trip to the ghetto.”

  “And how are you going to do it?” Amelia asked with curiosity.

  “Countess Lublin’s house is in a street next to the wall around the ghetto. There’s a service entrance round the back of the house; near to it there’s a drain that Piotr found; it leads through to the other side of the wall. The drains are usually watched, but we are usually able to avoid the watchmen, isn’t that right, Piotr?”

  The man nodded. Grazyna was talking in German, a language which, Amelia noted with relief, her friends also seemed to understand.

  “Piotr is the countess’s chauffeur. She’s a strange woman, she seems to be a friend to the Nazis, but Piotr thinks that this is only a façade,” Grazyna explained.

  “I met her in Krakow at a dinner given by the governor general, Hans Frank.”

  “That pig!” Grazyna spat.

  “You cannot imagine how they are suffering in the ghetto,” Ewa interrupted, “especially the children. We need medicine urgently, lots of them have typhoid fever.”

  “When are you going in?” Amelia asked.

  “We hope to be able to do so in a few days,” Ewa replied.

  “Well, have you brought material or not?” Grazyna asked impatiently.

  “Yes, here you are. I think it could be something important, they are sending large numbers of troops to the front.”

  Grazyna looked across at Tomasz and he nodded, as if answering a question that she had posed without saying anything.

  “I’ll send it at once, this evening,” Grazyna promised.

  “Yes, do it. Max is leaving tomorrow, he has said he’ll be away for a few days, he’s going north to where the major troop movements are. There are a lot of divisions in Poland...”

  “Well, you’ll get away from that man for a few days, at least,” Grazyna said.

  “Do you think I could come with you into the ghetto?”

  “No!” they all replied, almost simultaneously.

  “Well... I was just asking... I’d like to help...”

  “You do your job and we’ll do ours. Can you imagine what would happen if we were arrested? You don’t want to run any more risks than necessary,” Grazyna scolded her.

  On June 22 Operation Barbarossa was put into action: The Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union. Great Britain was not taken by surprise by this development. British intelligence had gathered information on German troop movements via its agents. Amelia Garayoa’s contribution helped confirm information that was already known in London. They had already managed to break the Enigma code, which the German army and navy used to encrypt their communications. This was good news for Churchill. He was certain that Hitler, even though he appeared invincible, would not be capable of fighting on two fronts at the same time.

  Stalin, though he had received numerous warnings of what Hitler was planning, had never given them any credit. He had even had the bearers of such information shot.

  The purges
in the Red Army had been so harsh that Stalin’s best generals had been shot. The German attack was brutal: 153 divisions, 6000,000 vehicles, 3,580 tanks, 2,740 airplanes, divided into three strike forces.

  The chief of Soviet General Staff, Marshal Georgi Zhukov, called Stalin, who was at his dacha at Kuntsevo, twenty kilometers outside Moscow, to tell him that German troops had crossed the Soviet border with Poland. Stalin was stunned, and couldn’t believe what Zhukov was saying. He had trusted Hitler to such an extent that he had left the Polish border very poorly defended.

  Amelia began to visit Grazyna regularly. She had nothing better to do, given that Max was with the German troops, and was not in Warsaw. She managed little by little to lessen the antipathy that Grazyna appeared to feel for her.

  Amelia went to look for her in the hospital one afternoon and met Sister Maria, who was in the infirmary looking over some papers.

  “So you’re the Spanish woman... Grazyna told me about you. Come on, I’ll take you to find her, but I don’t think she’ll be long because her shift finishes at five o’clock.”

  Grazyna was in a room filled with women; she was taking the temperature of one old woman who appeared to be close to death. Amelia was surprised by the tenderness with which she treated the old woman. When she saw Amelia and sister Maria, she came toward them.

  “Amelia, what are you doing here? What has happened?” Grazyna asked.

  “Nothing, sorry if I frightened you, I was just passing and I came in to see you...”

  “You gave me a fright! Now, meet my guardian angel,” she said, smiling at Sister Maria.

  “Don’t try to flatter me, you know that it has no effect on me.”

  “She’s my friend,” Grazyna said to the room at large, raising her voice and calming the patients, who had been worried to hear the visitor talking in German.

  While Grazyna was getting changed, Sister Maria invited Amelia to have a cup of tea with her in the infirmary. The two women got on immediately. The nun could see the worry in Amelia’s eyes.