When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

by Peter Godwin

  The Poles hold their ground for four long days until, finally, they are relieved by the Canadians. By then, according to their battle report, nearly six hundred Poles are dead or missing, another one hundred fifty wounded. They have killed more than two thousand Germans and captured another five thousand. General Stan-islaw Maczek, the officer commanding the First Division, later wrote, “Of all the battlefields in Normandy, none has presented such a picture of hell, destruction, and death.”

  A memorial is later built there. It reads:

  Between the 18th, 19th, 20th and 22nd of August 1944, this vast panorama of the Oren countryside stretching away to the horizon, with its gaily colored pattern of crops and fields dotted with apple trees hemmed by hedgerows, was the scene of a battle of unprecedented importance, which was to determine the outcome of the Second World War. At this historic spot, the First Polish Armored Division closed the last escape road out of the “Falaise Gap” (Chambois — Montormel) to the German VIIth Army, thus playing a decisive role in its destruction and hastening the liberation of France.

  Over the next few days the German retreat turns into a rout, as soldiers flee down what becomes known as Todesgang, “Death Road.” Allied fighter planes relentlessly attack the withdrawing troops. Kazio recalls that road, strewn with the wreckage of charred vehicles and choked with carnage; corpses lined thick along the roadside — human and horse — both distended by gas, their innards busting out.

  The Poles advance north at a punishing pace, covering three hundred miles in nine days to liberate Abbeville. They cross into Belgium, and on September 6 they help to liberate the ancient city of Ghent. There, at last, they are allowed a few days’ rest.

  WHAT IS HAPPENING back in Poland, Kazio knows only vaguely. His elation at news of the Warsaw Uprising has turned to disbelief as he begins to hear reports that the Russians approaching the city from the east have stopped their advance on the banks of the Vistula, their guns silent, allowing the Nazis to crush the uprising and raze the city.

  Since the outbreak of the war, Kazio has received three letters from his father. They are carefully written to include virtually no personal details, in case they are intercepted. In the final two letters, his father asks him for any news of his mother and sister. Kazio’s letters to his father ask the same question. Their letters have crossed. In his last letter, Maurycy has enclosed a copy of a snapshot of himself as a keepsake. Kazio peers at it with a magnifying glass and thinks he can make out the letters ECUA across it. He assumes his father has acquired an Ecuadorian passport to enable him to get out of Poland, and Kazio carries the passport photo around with him in his tunic pocket as a talisman. When he discovers that there is an Ecuadorian consul in Ghent, he goes to see him, hoping he can find out his family’s whereabouts. But the man is only an honorary consul and can do nothing, and anyway, Kazio’s unit moves out of Ghent the next day.

  They make their way to the Dutch town of Breda, which they liberate without a single civilian casualty. But some stubborn German troops take up defensive positions on an island in the middle of the river Maas and refuse to budge. So the Poles dig trenches facing the island and trade mortar and rocket fire daily with the German holdouts.

  Kazio turns twenty-one years old in that dugout by the river Maas, celebrating with a large, round Gouda cheese shared with Cania and other friends from his unit. Later, when he falls ill from a cheese overdose, he is ordered to the hospital. He finds it full of Dutchmen all slowly going blind from bingeing on German rocket fuel.

  Just as his unit is about to advance north into Germany itself, Kazio is selected to attend Officer Training School. So he says good-bye to Cania and the others and sails from Ostend for Britain. On the ship, he gets drunk with a Polish sailor whom he last saw four years before, when they both volunteered at the Polish Army headquarters in London.

  KAZIO IS STILL IN the officers’ training course at the Crieff Hydro Hotel in Perthshire, when the Germans surrender and VE Day is declared in May. But Poles like Kazio remain in limbo.

  Back home, the Soviets have already selected and eliminated the flower of the Polish intelligentsia, in a calculated act of cultural genocide. Almost twenty-two thousand people were killed — many of them executed in an abattoir in the Russian city of Smolensk and buried in the forests of Katyžn. (The dead include an admiral, 2 generals, 103 colonels and half-colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains, 3,420 NCOs, 7 chaplains, 200 pilots, 3 landowners, a prince, 43 civil servants, 20 professors, 300 doctors, more than 100 writers and journalists, and hundreds of engineers, teachers, and lawyers.)

  When the Polish government-in-exile demands an international inquiry, Stalin uses this as a pretext to break off relations with it, and imposes a puppet communist regime on Warsaw. He then persuades the British to withdraw their diplomatic recognition from the Polish government-in-exile in London. The “Free Poles” have now become an official embarrassment, marooned by the tide of history. They have helped to defeat one occupier, Hitler, only to find him replaced by another, Stalin.

  In the summer of 1946, the huge victory parade takes place down the Mall in London. Two million onlookers cheer wildly as King George VI takes the salute from Allied soldiers of dozens of nations. In the skies overhead there is a massive flyby. But though they are the fourth biggest Allied army, no Polish forces march that day. The new Warsaw regime, at Stalin’s insistence, ignores the British invitation and stays away. And the Free Poles have not been invited. Anyway they have nothing to celebrate. While everyone else is jubilant, many of them watch the victory parade in tears.

  “The new Polish government said we were traitors, just a bunch of fascist thugs, and I realized I would never be able to go home to Poland,” says my father. “And Cania, who had stayed behind with our unit in Germany after I’d been sent back for officer training, realized the same thing. He couldn’t bear it. He walked out of his tent one evening and shot himself.”

  MAURYCY WRITES AGAIN at the end of the war to say that he has still heard nothing from Halina and Janina. Both father and son know by now in their hearts that there is little hope of finding them alive. “All he told me,” says Dad, “is what I told you. That they were picked up by a Nazi patrol and never seen again.” Maurycy was hidden by his barber, Mr. Majewski (who, despite his middle syllable, was a Gentile). He spent two years in hiding, finally emerging from the ruins toward the end of the war.

  “I knew then that everything I had known in Poland was gone, destroyed. And that I would never go back,” says my father.

  KAZIO ENROLLS at Medway Polytechnic to complete his preuniversity matriculation, and he starts calling himself George, the better to fit in. And there, in the common room one day, when they both reach for Punch magazine at the same time, he meets an ex-Wren who has also just been demobilized. Civilian clothes are rationed and hard to find, so she still wears her navy-issue bell-bottoms. Her name is Mary Helen Godwin Rose.

  Helen has straight Titian red hair, hazel eyes, creamy skin. She comes from four generations of Anglican churchmen. Her father, the Reverend C.P.G. Rose, was an author (of The Christian Case for Birth Control published, precociously, in 1924, and Antecedents of Christianity published in 1925) and a naval chaplain who served on the dreadnought HMS Colossus, in the Battle of Jutland during World War I, and proposed to her mother high up in the crow’s nest of HMS Invincible. Helen is their second daughter, ten years younger than Honor, and she grows up in a succession of naval bases in the south of England. Her mother, known as Baha, is a charming and strong-minded woman, an enthusiastic espouser of causes, a vegetarian and a suffragette, a despiser of corsets and of cosmetics, who throws out the family’s refined china and makes them eat from rough pottery bowls. She holds militantly progressive views on everything from birth control to macrobiotic diets, and it is generally acknowledged that her eccentricities cost her husband the chaplain-generalship of the fleet. So denied, he resigns his commission and accepts a living from Lord Darnley of Cobham Hall in Ken
t, one of the many civilians who had traveled great distances to hear him preach.

  Cobham is the site of the half-timbered Leather Bottle Inn, which Dickens used as a setting in The Pickwick Papers, and the home in retirement of Sir Herbert Baker, the imperial architect who had designed so many public buildings for Cecil Rhodes, founder of Rhodesia. The Reverend Christopher Rose and his family live in the ten-bedroom vicarage, where he names each room after a ship he served on. His liberal views soon provoke the ire of his superior, the bishop of Rochester. When he refuses to take down a notice on his church door welcoming visiting nonconformists to worship and receive communion there, the bishop takes him before the ecclesiastical court for breaking his oath of canonical obedience.

  But before he can be disciplined, Christopher Rose goes swimming in the Thames one morning after having nicked his chin shaving. He develops septicemia — it is just before Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin in a garret in St. Mary’s, Paddington — and dies a few days later at the age of fifty-one. Helen is not quite twelve. Her mother survives on the charity of others and by running a guesthouse in Cobham. Helen is sent to St. Margaret’s boarding school, on a bursary for the orphaned daughters of Anglican clergymen. Honor clashes often and violently with Baha, from which Helen learns the tactical advantages of passive resistance and evasion.

  In the school summer holidays of 1940, at home in Cobham, Helen remembers, she lies on the daisy-filled lawn watching the dogfights of the Battle of Britain far above in the clear skies over the rolling chalk ridges of the North Downs. Soon an antiaircraft battery is placed in their orchard and, night after night, the guns pound, filling the sky with fire and smoke. The gunners are aiming at German bombers lured by decoy city lights constructed in fields west of Cobham. In a single night the local batteries bring down fourteen bombers within three miles of their house.

  Helen returns to St. Margaret’s, Bushey, on the northern periphery of London, in early autumn, just in time for the beginning of the Blitz. At night when the air-raid sirens wail, the girls troop down into underground bomb shelters where they sleep so tightly squashed together that they must turn over in unison. They get exam points for every night they spend down there. Above them, London is pulverized. Over a million houses are destroyed, 43,000 people killed, another 139,000 injured by the time the bombing lets up that summer of 1941.

  As soon as she turns eighteen, Helen follows her dead father into the Royal Navy and becomes a Wren. She is stationed at Folkestone and spends many of her nights on the end of the dark, bomb-mangled, wind-whipped pier, where she uses an Aldis lamp to signal by Morse code to ships at sea. She remembers the Christmas eve after D-day, listening to the soldiers singing carols as their ship set sail from the adjacent harbor, and knowing that many would not return. And while she listened to the haunting sound of “Silent Night” floating over the water, military policemen dashed up and down the pier, chasing deserters who were desperate to avoid embarkation.

  At the end of the war, she decides she wants to become a doctor, a frustrated ambition of her dead father and still very much a pioneering profession for women. She enrolls at Medway Polytechnic to complete her premed courses. When she realizes that she’s behind in physics, George Goldfarb offers to help, and they become friends. Soon, she introduces him to her mother, who at first sees him as a charity case, a displaced Jew whose life has been devastated by the Holocaust, a deserving cause for her energetic altruism.

  Helen is accepted by St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, the oldest hospital in Britain, founded in 1123 by Henry I’s court jester, Rahere. It is the first year women have ever been allowed to train as doctors there. Many of the hospital’s ancient buildings are still bomb damaged, and the women’s segregated common room is an old air-raid shelter. In the chemistry lab she is teamed with an Egyptian student who deeply disapproves of women being trained as doctors and is appalled that he is having to work in such proximity to one. But eventually he is sharing the strong Turkish coffee he brews up in a beaker over their Bunsen burner.

  George goes on to study engineering at the University of London, and they continue to see each other. When he first asks her to marry him, she just laughs, knowing that it is socially impossible, that Baha — despite her progressive views in some areas — will never stand for it. He waits a bit and then asks again. And again. And on his fourth attempt, in early 1948, she narrows her eyes and looks up at him and says, “You know what? Damn them all. I will marry you.”

  Together they go to the Old Curiosity Shop next to the post office in Cobham. It has bay windows with mullion panes and sells Victorian bric-a-brac, postcards, and Dickens memorabilia, mostly to literary pilgrims who have come to see the Leather Bottle Inn. In a dusty velvet tray at the back of the shop, they find a Victorian ring, gold with a topaz set in the middle, flanked by a pearl on either side. Helen tries it on and it fits. It costs a modest £4 10s (about US$18), a large sum to them then, but George buys it.

  He places it on the finger of his new fiancée, and after admiring it, she takes it off and wears it secretly, on a long chain around her neck. One day when Helen is carrying Christen, Honor’s daughter, the little girl reaches in and fishes out the ring in front of Baha. She asks why Helen is hiding it, and Helen confesses that it’s an engagement ring.

  Baha is incensed. To George’s father in Poland, she writes furious diatribes accusing his son of being a gold digger and an opportunist, a Jewish cuckoo in the nest of her Christian charity.

  ONLY THREE OF MAURYCY’S letters survive, all written in 1948 and saved by Helen’s elder sister, Honor; the rest of his weekly letters are to his son, and George destroys them when he erases his old identity. For reasons of self-preservation, Maurycy Goldfarb has changed his own name, even before his son. His letterheads now bear the name Stefan Golaszewski, a name he has taken from a Warsaw tombstone. The letters beg Helen’s family to look kindly on George. Letters written in a formal, stilted English, full of courtly foible and florid phrasing, heartbreaking in their earnestness. A man who has lost his wife and young daughter to the Holocaust, a man who has lived hidden underground for two years, kept apart from his only son, a man writing to a hostile stranger in another land, saying: We are not the wandering itinerant Jews you think we are, we are not a family to be ashamed of and to be disdained, we are something, we are cultured and cosmopolitan and proud. Do not denigrate my son; he is worthy of your daughter. The letters of Maurycy Goldfarb, a man writing in a foreign language, under a dead man’s name, to a stranger, appealing for respect.

  To Honor and John, her husband, who are supporting Kazio and Helen in the teeth of Baha’s venomous onslaught, he writes:

  I thank you very cordially for your kind letter of the 16th inst. It gave me gladness and comfort all the more if I compare it with the letter received from Mrs. Rose which struck me like a thunderstorm from the clear sky so that I could not find the right words to reply. . . .

  I know it from my Kazio that they fell in love with one another, and is there anything more beautiful than such strong love in the juvenile age? I must admit that I appreciate my son’s calm and composure towards Mrs. Rose all the more because he had a very caressed childhood. It proves only how much he loves Helen. . . .

  My son wrote to me lately that he wants to defer his wedding till my arrival at London. Their wedding will be the only happy day in my life since 1939!

  And again, two months later, he presses his son’s case, a son he has not seen now for nearly ten years:

  We had in our family a great many intelligent people, but Kazio was the most distinguished of all. I may assure you that as soon as my Kazio has finished his studies he will be able to keep his own family, and Mrs. Rose will surely be proud of her son-in-law.

  And though life in war-shattered Warsaw is grim, he manages to send a little gift to my mother.

  My much beloved Helen,

  Some days ago I have sent you 3 pairs of nylon stockings and shall be very please to hear from you as soon
as possible that you have received them in good order, and that they have pleased you well. I got your 3 photographs and find them very nice and lovely. Your common photo with Kazio reminds me of Kazio in 1939 when he was hurrying from school home. He looks like in 1939! I may stress that you will be happy with Kazio all your life. When I shall be with you, you will be convinced that my words become true!

  My projected trip to England must be again delayed but I hope to get a passport in the course of the next weeks and then I shall come over to you.

  Many kisses my beloved daughter from affectionate yours,

  Stefan Golaszewski

  The stockings never arrive. And of course, as he already suspects, he never does get a passport. He is never able to leave. And George and Helen go ahead with their wedding, at St. Mary Abbots on Kensington High Street, without him. And without Baha, who boycotts it. George has relatives in Norfolk, Virginia, who own a clothes factory there and have been sending him care packages, but when they hear that he is to marry a Gentile, they cut him off.

  (Years later, when I am living in Notting Hill Gate, I walk down Kensington Church Street to St. Mary’s to look for their register entry. But of course I scan down the columns looking under the wrong name, Godwin, and never find them.)

  The young couple work hard to complete their degrees. Surviving solely on ex-service student grants, they have little money for diversions. As they come to the end of their courses, Stefan, né Maurycy, writes to his son telling him that he has decided to marry again. His second wife is a childhood friend. She has a son the same age as George, a son who — coincidentally — is also called Kazio, George’s old name. The two boys knew each other growing up, but were not friends. George is numb at the remarriage. In some ways he feels that his father is being disloyal to the dead Goldfarb women. And that he is being replaced by a namesake.