‘The Chief didn’t think the time was right for an uprising, but he was like the girl who didn’t say yes and didn’t say no,’ Feliks said. ‘You wouldn’t believe it, but just before they were to decide whether to give Warsaw the go-ahead or not, he went off to Italy.’
In reply to Adam’s puzzled look, he said, ‘No one knows for sure why he did that. There are all sorts of rumours, as you can imagine. My feeling is that he got away from London so he wouldn’t have to take responsibility for the decision. Some of the representatives of the Polish government-in-exile warned against the Uprising. They said that without Russian cooperation and Allied support, it couldn’t possibly succeed, and were convinced that the insurgents couldn’t count on the Allies.’
Adam was frowning. ‘But wasn’t that why the government-in-exile sent you to Warsaw, to let the AK know exactly how things stood?’
Feliks gave a sarcastic laugh. ‘You would think so, but the obstacles they put in my path at every turn make me wonder. First they couldn’t find a plane to take me to Warsaw. And when I finally got to Warsaw, it was four days before they let me speak to Bór-Komorowski, the Commander-in-Chief of the AK.’
‘I suppose there were powerful elements in the AK who wanted to start the Uprising and didn’t want you near him in case you put him off the idea.’
After they parted, Adam was so furious that he couldn’t calm down. He walked the length of Regent Street to Oxford Circus, then along the Thames, and, before he knew it, he’d reached Greenwich. He was seething at the duplicity Feliks had described, and felt that unless he kept moving he’d explode. From what his friend had said, the Uprising wouldn’t stand a chance without Allied help. He clenched his fists. He had to do something.
Over the past few months, whenever Adam was on leave, he had come to London to see Judith, whose forthright manner and guileless nature he found more intriguing each time they met. But although he had intended to stay in London that night and have dinner with her, after his conversation with Feliks he decided to return to the base immediately to talk to his superior. Charles Watson-Smythe was staring out of the window of his small office, deep in thought, tapping his fountain pen on the desk. The knock on the door, which sounded more peremptory than Adam had intended, roused him from his reverie.
‘Ah, Czartoryski,’ he said with a marked lack of enthusiasm. ‘What is it?’
‘Sir, if I can have a minute of your time. I’m sure you’re aware that an uprising has broken out in Warsaw. How soon do you think we can drop supplies to Poland? I know the other men are also keen to get going.’
Watson-Smythe gave an irritated sigh. ‘Our mission is to bomb Germany, not send supplies to revolutionaries in Poland. As you know, we can’t spare the planes, the pilots or the fuel. Flying to Poland involves too great a distance and an unacceptable level of danger.’
Adam opened his mouth, closed it, and took a deep breath. He would have liked to comment about the unacceptable level of danger they faced each time they bombed Cologne, Berlin or the bridges in the Ruhr, but stifled the retort. Of all the RAF officers he’d come across, Watson-Smythe was the most arrogant. ‘Sir, with respect, the 1586 Special Duties Flight and the Polish Parachute Brigade were formed expressly to drop supplies to Poland, and they’re urgently needed right now.’
His commanding officer placed the fountain pen in the marble inkstand and gave him a hostile look. ‘I wish you’d leave the running of the air force to the RAF, Czartoryski,’ he snapped. With that, he picked up a dossier on his desk and began reading it as though Adam wasn’t there.
Resentful for being dismissed like a schoolboy, Adam strode back to the hut where the others were in the midst of a heated discussion.
‘We’re going to boycott dinner tonight, in protest,’ Tomasz said.
Adam found it difficult to control his irritation. ‘Do you think they’ll change their policy just because you go to bed without your dinner?’
Romek pounded his fist on the table. ‘We’ve got to do something to make these sons of bitches change their minds.’
‘The Russians encouraged us to rise up against the Germans, so they’re bound to come to the aid of the insurgents,’ Tomasz mused.
At this, pandemonium broke out. ‘You’re an idiot!’ Olek shouted. ‘Don’t you remember the leaflets they dropped in ’39 saying our Russian brothers were coming to help us against the Germans? The next thing they were invading and deporting us in our thousands to Siberia.’
Like Olek, Romek had also been deported. ‘Help from Stalin?’ He was tapping his temple derisively at Olek.
‘You need to get your head examined. The Russians are devious bastards. You can’t trust a word they say.’
Tomasz looked thoughtful. ‘We could write a letter to King George and Queen Elizabeth. Remember how they walked around the East End talking to ordinary Londoners during the Blitz? Let’s appeal to their sense of honour. After all, Polish airmen helped save Britain in 1940. Now it’s their chance to show their appreciation.’
The arguments continued and, listening to them, Adam felt old and cynical. These men saw the world in black and white, and believed in notions like justice and gratitude, while he knew that politicians had short memories, and debts were only repaid when it suited their agenda.
‘It will take ages to get a reply from Buckingham Palace,’ Tomasz was saying. ‘I still think we should boycott the mess tonight. As a gesture.’
The following afternoon, while the sun was still high in the summer sky, they were summoned for an urgent briefing.
‘A situation has arisen that has made it necessary to modify our plans,’ Watson-Smythe announced in a voice as dry as tissue paper. ‘This evening, instead of bombing Germany, you’ll be dropping supplies to Poland.’
A spontaneous cheer went up. With a curt nod, he stepped off the dais and the information officer took over. They all craned forward as he pinned photographs of Warsaw’s General Post Office to the board. ‘That’s where you’re to drop the containers,’ he told them. He explained that they would overfly the Russian zone but, despite repeated requests made to the Russian High Command, permission for British planes to land on their territory had been rejected. Recalling Feliks’s comments, Adam wondered what game Stalin was playing and why he’d refused permission for his allies to land so they could deliver supplies to another Allied nation.
As the briefing continued, they were warned to expect enemy fighters along the entire route. ‘If for some reason you can’t locate the General Post Office, don’t waste time and fuel but head straight for Krasinski Square, make the drop and get the hell out of there.’
Unlike their usual bombing missions, when they were given the exact route, this time they had to do their own navigating. The supplies they were carrying, which included PIAT anti-aircraft weapons, were so heavy that some of the equipment had to be removed to decrease the load. The officer concluded with the usual warning. ‘Fly as high as you possibly can over enemy territory. You won’t survive more than a minute below twelve thousand feet.’
Before they were dismissed, the officer read a message from the Prime Minister. Churchill stressed the grave importance of their mission because of the desperate situation in Warsaw where insurgents needed weapons and supplies. Adam wondered about his change of heart. Perhaps the Polish government-in-exile had been more persuasive than usual.
In the long summer twilight, Adam and his crew jumped into a truck, which bumped along the uneven ground to the airfield. It was still hot and they brushed away the sweat that ran down their foreheads and stung their eyes, but inside the Lanc the air around them palpitated with quiet determination. This time they were bringing not destruction to the enemy but aid to their countrymen. Weighed down by the heavy wooden boxes and metal containers stowed in the recess usually reserved for the bombs, the engine took longer than usual to rev up, but as Adam gripped the column and the plane rose into the cloudless sky, he breathed out. He always felt calmer when he heard the comforting
hum of the engines.
Stewart sat beside Adam, the map in his hands. As they flew, he gave exact coordinates and Adam steered their course. After flying over the Adriatic, avoiding the heavily fortified towns of Vis and Dubrovnik, they flew above the mountains of Yugoslavia, dropping altitude then rising steeply over the peaks of the Carpathians. As artillery fire flashed and sparked all around them, Adam saw another Lancaster turn into a fireball and spin from the sky. He raised his hand to his top pocket, and felt for the cigarette case, which always comforted him. They flew on unscathed.
It was a moonless night and in the darkness it was impossible to identify any topographical features as control points to aid their course. Adam turned to Stewart, unable to conceal his anxiety. ‘Where the fuck are we?’
For once, Stewart looked rattled. ‘How the hell am I supposed to know when it’s as black out there as inside a bear’s arse?’
Eventually he spotted a narrow ravine and suggested flying through it to avoid making a steep ascent later, but Adam shook his head.
‘If you can’t give me an accurate position, I’m not going to risk it. I’ll keep flying over the peaks till we get closer to Warsaw. At least we’re heading in the right direction.’
On their descent to Warsaw, they were flying into an area with the biggest concentration of German planes in the world. No one spoke. They were south of Kraków, flying dangerously low, when Stewart pointed to the left. Illuminated by bright reflectors, they could see an area enclosed by barbed wire, with watchtowers looming above low barrack huts. Stewart whistled between his teeth and noted the position of the towers. ‘Strewth, it looks like a prisoner-of-war camp — maybe a concentration camp. I reckon we should tell them about this place at the debriefing.’
Before long, they saw a red glow on the horizon. There was no need to consult the map. Warsaw lay about a hundred miles ahead and it was burning. When they were only a few miles from the capital, Adam opened the bomb recess, ready to make a quick drop and disappear into the darkness.
Stewart was peering down, trying to make out landmarks through the smoke. ‘I can see the main road but where’s that bloody post office?’ he hissed. The city centre was ablaze, and flames flickered through the smoke, leaping almost as high as the plane.
No one spoke and the sandwich Adam was chewing tasted like sand in his mouth. ‘We can’t make the drop here,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘The parachute lines will catch fire and the containers will be smashed to smithereens. It’s too dangerous to hover so low and we can’t waste fuel. We’d better head for the other drop-off point.’
Past columns of black smoke they spotted the Vistula River, a winding ribbon that gleamed faintly in the light of the flames. Adam lowered the flaps and undercarriage. They were flying slowly now and recoiled each time trails of lighted bullets flashed past. Their eyes blinded by flashes, they scanned the ground for the drop-off point.
Stewart waved his arm excitedly in the direction of a large red cross. As they approached, they saw that it was made up of people lying on the ground, holding hurricane lamps to guide them. The bomb recess was released and seconds later sparks flew on the road from the impact of the metal containers.
The plane shuddered, the engines roared, and they flew into the sky again. Everything had calmed down and they passed round the large thermos of black coffee. Stewart poured some for Adam and himself, but, before they could drink it, someone shouted ‘Fighter!’, and shells were exploding all around them.
A dazzling blast made them jump. Adam looked down. One of the Halifaxes had been shot down. ‘At least it was over quickly,’ he said.
But he didn’t have time to reflect on the fate of his colleagues because enemy planes were already pursuing them, and he corkscrewed and spiralled until he lost them.
They were flying above the peaks of the Tatra Mountains now, and beneath them, wrapped in darkness, lay mountain hamlets like Zakopane where he’d spent carefree holidays skiing on Mt Gubalowka and seducing the young women he met on the slopes.
The radio operator sent a Morse message that they’d made a successful drop, and they began to relax.
The rest of the flight passed without incident and with a sigh of relief they saw the familiar airfield below. Home at last. Adam released the undercarriage and checked his watch. It had seemed a lifetime but it was only ten and a half hours since they’d taken off. He cut the engines and they jumped onto the tarmac. It was unusually quiet. There was no personnel around, and they had to wait for half an hour before a truck arrived to take them back to base.
The operations room was deserted when Adam went inside to report on the mission. He glanced at the blackboard that listed the names of the ten planes and their crews that had flown out at the same time as his. Beside every single name, including his own, the officer in charge had chalked the symbol they all dreaded, a hatchet.
All the other crews that had set out for Warsaw the previous evening had perished, and as they were so late, Adam realised that the officer must have assumed that his plane had also been shot down.
He looked at the hatchet again and shivered. It was like looking at his own gravestone.
Forty-Three
As Elzunia changed the dressing on a young woman’s leg, she dreaded the moment when the patient would wake from her morphine-induced sleep. The beds in the ward had been pushed so close together that the nurses and doctors had to squeeze through a narrow space to get to the patients. More patients were being brought in all the time, civilians as well as insurgents, children as well as adults, many of them horribly burned by incendiary rockets or maimed by bombs.
As she straightened the sheet over her patient, Elzunia reflected on the turbulent progress of the Uprising, which had led to her being removed from the field and posted to this hospital. Only five days had passed since the Uprising had begun, intoxicating days of great hope. First came success that surpassed all of their dreams. Their surprise attacks had won control of the power station and the water board, and left much of the administration of the city in their hands. Red-and-white national flags fluttered everywhere, and the atmosphere was euphoric. It seemed as though the secret state had finally emerged from underground. All they needed now was for the Russian army to join the fight and for the Allies to send desperately needed supplies.
But the exhilaration of those first days soon evaporated into the sultry air. Instead of withdrawing, the Germans had brought in reinforcements. They were pounding the city with heavy artillery, setting fire to it with incendiary rockets, smashing it with bombs and killing civilians and insurgents indiscriminately. It was clear that they intended to raze Warsaw to the ground and bury all its inhabitants under the rubble. And no one could figure out why the Russian guns on the other side of the Vistula had fallen silent. Some said it was because of the ferocity of the German counterattack, while others saw it as a sinister communist agenda.
The young woman’s eyes fluttered open and rested on Elzunia. She struggled to sit up but fell back onto the pillow. ‘Why am I here?’ she asked.
‘Your house was bombed,’ Elzunia said. ‘Don’t you remember?’
The woman shook her head. She was as pale as the fair hair that hung loosely around her bloodless face.
Several patients were moaning or calling for a doctor while someone kept shouting, ‘Watch out!’ in a frightening voice. ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ the woman was saying. ‘I’m just taking up a bed you probably need for someone who’s really ill.’
Elzunia swallowed. ‘You’ll be here for a few days. Until your leg heals.’
‘My leg?’ The woman’s eyes widened. She looked down and closed her hand around Elzunia’s wrist. ‘What’s wrong with it? It’ll be all right, won’t it? I’m a physical education teacher.’
Elzunia sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand while she explained that a shard of glass had severed her right calf and part of the shinbone so that her leg had had to be amputated below the knee.
The wom
an stared as though unable to grasp Elzunia’s words. Then she let out a despairing cry and buried her face in her hands.
Elzunia was still thinking about her as she headed for the adjacent ward where a German soldier had been admitted. Her blood was boiling. No matter how often the matron explained that their job was to heal the sick, regardless of nationality, she couldn’t come to terms with having to nurse the enemy.
‘It’s outrageous,’ she fumed to Janka when they met in the corridor. ‘We’re healing them so they can go and kill more of us. And we’ve hardly got enough medicine for ourselves as it is.’
Janka nodded. ‘It’s insane. Why do we have to be so stupidly noble? Can you imagine them looking after us if we were wounded? But there’s one good thing about having their soldiers in here. At least they won’t attack a hospital that’s looking after their men.’
That morning they had draped a huge Red Cross banner on the roof, so the German bombers would see that this was a hospital, but Elzunia didn’t feel safe. She knew they didn’t respect hospitals, but having German soldiers there would probably protect them. As soon as she stepped into the next ward, her gaze was drawn to the man lying in the bed nearest the door. There was a blood-stained bandage on his head but the eyes that met hers were hard and cold. She stopped breathing. It was Wolfman, the SS officer from the Ghetto. Although their situations were now reversed, and he was in her power, her hands trembled so much that she had to leave the ward to compose herself.
He was staring at her with that terrifying expression when she returned with a basin of warm water, iodine and bandages. Unable to bring herself to look at his face, she removed the stained bandage and proceeded to clean the gash that looked as though someone had taken a cleaver to his skull. As she worked, she could feel his eyes boring into her.
‘Du bist die Jüdin von Ghetto, Fraülein, nicht wahr?’
She pretended not to hear.
Nocturne Page 33
