Nocturne

by Diane Armstrong

  Part III

  Fifty-Four

  Elzunia sat on the hard wooden bunk, her arms around the shivering children. The chill rose in an icy mist from the cement floor and settled on their clothes. Through the grimy window, the grey sky hung low, and the air had the sharp smell of snow about to fall.

  ‘My tummy hurts. I’m hungry,’ Zbyszek wailed.

  ‘Me too,’ Gittel whimpered.

  Elzunia looked at them and her heart ached. In the month since they’d been deported to Germany, they’d become skin and bone and there were dark circles around their eyes. She tried to rub some warmth into their arms but every movement of her blistered, raw hands made her wince.

  Every day, as she scraped the rust off bits of broken machinery and breathed in the pungent smell of the synthetic oil that the factory produced, she was forced to listen to the insulting comments of the German foreman who gloated over the fate of his Polish workers and reminded them several times a day how lucky they were to be living in a civilised country among cultured people.

  ‘Your friends, the British, bombed our factories, so now you have to repair the damage,’ he had said, delighted at the divine retribution that had presented him with this workforce of slaves.

  Weak from hunger, Elzunia tried to ignore the pain in her hands, the exhaustion, and the misery of her existence, while Gittel and Zbyszek sat on the floor at her feet all day, careful not to draw attention to themselves.

  When the local Arbeitsamt office had assigned her to this factory, they ordered her to place the children in a crèche, but the idea of leaving them in a Nazi institution for foreign children was unthinkable. Elzunia had begged them to let the children to stay with her, insisting that they wouldn’t create any disturbance or interfere with her work.

  But although they had reluctantly agreed to let the children stay with her on probation, they refused to give them any food. The children didn’t contribute to the German war effort so they didn’t warrant being fed, the foreman explained, his piggy eyes sinking deeper into the folds of his plump face.

  Every morning, Elzunia cut her slice of black bread into three pieces, and every evening, as she shared her cabbage and turnip soup, she wondered how long the three of them could survive on this diet. But no matter what happened, she was determined they’d stay together. As she scrubbed machine parts with blackened fingers, she reproached herself for the thousandth time. If only she hadn’t been so impatient, they would now be in a camp for evacuees instead of being worked to death in a German factory.

  The long column of refugees leaving Warsaw that sad October day had proceeded at such a slow pace as it made its way over rubble and bomb craters that it scarcely moved. The journey ahead had seemed endless. Even before they’d left the city centre, the children had complained they were tired, and Elzunia could only carry them a few steps at a time.

  Looking around for another route to bypass the throng, she had turned into a side street that seemed deserted. She was congratulating herself for being so enterprising when her path was blocked by two SS men, who forced her at gunpoint on to a cattle truck bound for Germany with a group of other frightened Polish women.

  Elzunia could still hear the hollow clang of the carriage being bolted from the outside, and could still feel the jolt as the train moved off. A plump girl called Agnieszka was sobbing. ‘We’ll end up in one of those death camps and I’ll never see my mother again.’

  Gittel pulled Elzunia’s sleeve. ‘Why’s that lady crying?’

  Elzunia felt like crying herself but gritted her teeth.

  The train had lurched on for several hours but there was no way of knowing where they were because the tiny window covered by a metal grille was too high up. Banging on the sides and shouting for water, food and toilet stops had been futile. No bucket had been provided in the carriage, so they’d been forced to use one corner as a toilet. Elzunia had shared the last of her bread and water, but the children were thirsty again. ‘We’ll be getting off soon and then you can have a drink,’ she kept telling them.

  ‘It’s all because of the Jews,’ one of the women was saying. ‘They’ve always caused Poland’s problems.’ Some of the others chimed in with stories to illustrate Jewish vices. Elzunia was on the point of making a cutting remark but stopped herself in time. Revealing that she was Jewish would endanger not only herself but the children as well. She had known she’d have to conceal her identity from the Germans, but knowing that she couldn’t trust her companions made her feel bitter and alone.

  Finally the train lurched to a halt. As the guards unhasped the doors, Elzunia could see a group of officials and SS men standing on the platform, surveying them with distaste.

  ‘Mein Gott, what animals!’ a stout, uniformed woman exclaimed, screwing up her face as she peered into the carriage. She pulled her jacket more tightly around her as though to shrink into it. ‘Look how filthy they are! It’s disgusting.’

  The man beside her shrugged. ‘What can one expect from Slav Untermenschen?’

  Agnieszka nudged Elzunia. ‘I’d like to see how clean they’d be if they were locked up for days with nowhere to shit,’ she whispered.

  A wind as sharp as a butcher’s knife blew across the platform, and, while they shivered, the Arbeitsamt official, wrapped in his greatcoat, began to pontificate about their good fortune.

  ‘You are fortunate to have been brought here to work for the Vaterland,’ he announced. ‘If you work hard, you will be well treated. But if you steal, sabotage or try to escape, you will be severely punished.’

  The lorries that sped them towards their destination passed neat fields and farmhouses as immaculate as illustrations in picture books. Not a speck of paint was missing, not a paling hung crookedly from a fence, not a leaf littered a front path. Despite her anxiety, Elzunia was intrigued by this relentless perfection.

  She was still lost in thought about her arrival in Germany, while her fingers kept moving to avoid the foreman’s threats to report her to the Arbeitsamt, when Gittel’s high voice piped up from under the workbench.

  ‘I need to do wee-wee.’

  Elzunia bit her lip. She always made sure the children went to the toilet before she started work.

  ‘I need to go — badly.’ Gittel squeezed her legs together to emphasise the point.

  Agnieszka gave Elzunia a sympathetic glance but the others kept their eyes on their work. No one wanted to antagonise the foreman.

  ‘I’m sorry but I have to take her to the toilet,’ Elzunia told the foreman.

  He placed his beefy hands on his hips. ‘I told you this is not a kindergarten!’ he thundered. ‘You are not permitted to leave the factory and take time off work —’

  ‘It will only take a minute,’ she pleaded.

  ‘This is essential work. We can’t have disruptions.’ He waved a threatening finger at her. ‘Tomorrow they will go to the kindergarten to learn German discipline.’

  In desperation, Elzunia grabbed his arm. ‘I’ll stay back this evening and work longer to make up the time. Just don’t send them away.’

  He studied her for a moment. ‘When you finish here this evening, go and clean the kitchen,’ he snapped. ‘But if this happens again, they go.’

  The chef was a gruff German whose bulging stomach nudged his apron. From his lumpy red nose and face veined with broken capillaries, Elzunia guessed that he was fond of the drink and probably had a volatile temperament. Pointing to a wobbling pile of dishes stacked so high that she could hardly see over the top of them, he told her to wash and dry them, then scour the saucepans, wipe down the tables and scrub the floor.

  Exhausted after working in the factory for twelve hours, she didn’t think she’d have the strength to get it all done, but driven by the threat of Gittel and Zbyszek being sent away, she didn’t stop until she’d finished everything. Then she sank into a chair and fell asleep.

  Someone was shaking her arm and she opened her eyes to see the chef holding out a mug of strong coffee. She
breathed it in and felt light-headed. It was real coffee, not the chicory substitute the workers received.

  ‘For a Pole, you’re not a bad worker,’ the chef was saying. ‘The kitchen maid was taken to hospital today. You can take her place. Be here at five-thirty sharp to make breakfast.’

  Elzunia’s tiredness evaporated and she felt like pirouetting around the kitchen. No matter how hard she’d have to work for the chef, it would be better than slaving in the factory, and there was always the possibility of obtaining scraps of food for the children.

  The chef was a hard taskmaster. He insisted on everything being done to immaculate, gleaming perfection. Whenever he wasn’t satisfied, he roared so loudly that she jumped, and he often abused her for being a dirty, lazy Pole who didn’t know what work was. By the end of the first day, her hands and feet were so numb that she wished she was back in the factory and she suspected that the previous kitchen maid had collapsed from nervous exhaustion.

  But she discovered that when she did exactly what he wanted, he left her alone. And as long as the children sat quietly in the corner and kept out of his way, he didn’t object to them. After spending the day on her feet in the kitchen, she’d stagger back to the dormitory and fall onto her bunk, exhausted. One night, at the end of the first week in the kitchen, she sensed a strained atmosphere in the hut. Some of the women stopped talking when she came in, while others continued whispering as they glanced in her direction.

  ‘Here’s our privileged princess,’ said the woman with the sharp face.

  ‘Meaning what?’ Elzunia asked, but with a sarcastic laugh the woman turned away.

  Long after the whispers ceased, Elzunia tossed on her hard bunk, unable to sleep. A figure moved quietly towards her in the dark and she sat up, careful not to disturb the sleeping children.

  It was Agnieszka. ‘She said she’s going to tell the chef you’re Jewish,’ she whispered. ‘I told her it was a load of crap, and some of the others said we were all in the same boat so we shouldn’t rat on each other, but she’s had it in for you ever since you got that job in the kitchen. She said the kids looked Jewish and it would be easy to tell if the boy was.’

  Elzunia couldn’t close her eyes. She lay awake listening to the night. It was quiet, but this wasn’t the quietness of repose. It was the stillness of the antelope twitching in the undergrowth under the lion’s gaze. By the time the grudging winter light appeared in the sky, she knew what she had to do.

  Fifty-Five

  It was the kind of winter’s day that Adam regarded as typically English: grey and non-committal. Heavy and dull without rain, cold and damp without snow. Just a relentless chill that seeped into your body and made your bones ache. But inside the officers’ mess, the atmosphere was lively. Everyone knew that the war was almost over, and the right side had won. Only the details remained to be ironed out.

  Although after his conversations with Feliks, Adam was less sanguine about the outcome for Poland than his colleagues, he was relieved at the prospect of ending his flying career. Life for bomb crews resembled a deadly form of Russian roulette in which five out of six chambers were loaded.

  Each time he climbed into the Lanc, he knew he might not return, and, each time he returned, his joy at having survived was marred by reading the names of those who hadn’t, whose kits and belongings would stealthily be removed from their lockers as though they’d never existed. Only a few more missions to go and it would all be over and normal life would resume. What that life would consist of, he wasn’t certain. Until recently, only one thought was uppermost in his mind: Poland. But for the past few months he’d found his thoughts increasingly returning to Judith, and he wondered whether she would agree to go to his homeland with him.

  The other airmen were sprawled out in the deep leather armchairs or standing around the small bar, telling jokes and discussing what they’d do when the war ended. Tomasz couldn’t wait to return to Lwów, whose beauty he extolled at every opportunity.

  ‘You can keep your Guild Hall in Kraków and your Royal Palace in Warsaw. You haven’t seen anything if you haven’t seen the buildings and parks in Lwów. Our opera house is the most beautiful in Europe,’ he said, then added hastily because they were shouting him down, ‘next to Paris.’

  Stewart was coming towards Adam with two tankards of dark liquid. ‘You can’t leave England without trying this stuff,’ he said.

  Adam took a sip, shuddered and pushed it away. ‘It’s like mead that’s gone bad.’

  Stewart laughed. ‘They call it Guinness. Not my brew either, but I thought I’d give it a go.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’m going to London this afternoon to see Nancy. I’m trying to talk her into coming back with me to Australia. Best bloody country in the world, mate.’

  Adam couldn’t understand these Australians who regarded England as home but compared it unfavourably with their own country, a distant backwater that didn’t count in the conference rooms where major world decisions were made. Whenever he asked Judith what it was she loved so much about Australia, she would look at him helplessly and launch into a list that included skylarking on the beach, greeting strangers in the street, giving people a fair go, and not being snobbish. According to her, the garbage man in Australia thought he was as good a bloke as the prime minister. ‘You just feel good there,’ she would conclude with a shrug, frustrated by his bemused expression.

  In the background, the voice of the BBC announcer, who always sounded to Adam as though he were juggling marbles in his throat, was droning on. Suddenly, the word ‘Poland’ leapt out of the bulky wooden wireless and they stopped talking and turned up the volume.

  At a conference in Yalta, a place none of them had ever heard of, the fate of their nation had been decided by the leaders of Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. The eastern part of Poland, including Lwów, had been ceded to Russia, while the rest of the country was to be governed by a provisional government installed by the Soviet Union until elections could be held.

  The silence was broken by a harsh sob. It was Tomasz. ‘Looks like I won’t be going home after all,’ he said in an unsteady voice.

  Adam clenched his fists so tightly that it looked as though his knuckles would burst through the skin. Unable to sit still, he paced around the mess. From what Feliks had said, he had known that the Allies would cave in to Stalin to some extent, but he hadn’t expected such a devastating betrayal. The fifth partition of Poland had just been completed but this time the country had been dismembered not by her enemies but by her allies.

  He gave a bitter laugh. No satirist could have invented such a scenario. To appease Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt had made him an offering of the nation on behalf of which they had declared war in 1939. They had conquered one dictator only to strengthen another.

  ‘Those Judases have sold us out,’ Romek fumed, throwing his head back to toss down a whiskey. ‘Instead of three pieces of silver, they got a pat on the back from Comrade Stalin. Fucking hypocrites.’

  ‘What fools we were,’ Olek said. ‘We joined the RAF thinking that if we helped Britain win the war, we’d be helping Poland get its independence. Now our country’s fucked and so are we.’

  Some of the other men were shouting while others sat in glum silence, trying to absorb the news and the likely effect it would have on their lives.

  Stewart was shaking his head in disbelief. ‘To think of the three of them — sitting there like bloody emperors, deciding the fate of Poland!’

  Adam looked grim. ‘Not just Poland. They’ve sealed the fate of Europe for decades to come.’

  In the midst of the furore, the intercom crackled and they listed to the announcement. All leave had been cancelled and they were summoned to an operational briefing.

  ‘Damned if I’m going to fly any more missions and risk my neck for the bastards who betrayed us,’ Romek shouted.

  ‘Me neither,’ Tomasz said. ‘They can go to hell, where they belong. Churchill and Eden were telling us ho
w they’d never abandon us, but in the end they sucked up to Stalin and sold us out.’

  Adam rose heavily to his feet. There was a tortured look on his face but his voice was expressionless. ‘No matter how we feel, we have to see this through to the end. If we don’t behave with honour, they’ll say Poles are cowards and deserters.’

  In a mutinous mood, cursing under their breath, they filed slowly into the operations room for the briefing. The operations officer tapped on the map of Germany with his pointer.

  ‘Your target tonight will be Dresden.’

  There was a sharp intake of breath. This city was often described as the Florence of the north, but they were told that those baroque churches and palaces concealed state-of-the-art factories producing radar and listening devices, which had to be obliterated.

  ‘Dresden is a major centre of communications for Germany’s defence,’ the officer explained. ‘The German army is still capable of reinforcing its eastern front with up to forty-two divisions from other fronts. We have to destroy their communications to hinder the movement of half-a-million German troops from the west, so that we can help the advance of the Red Army.’

  Ignoring the muttering, the officer continued. ‘It’s not generally known that Dresden is an industrial centre of military importance. There are over a hundred factories and industrial plants on its outskirts that build radar and electronic parts, fuses for anti-aircraft shells, gas masks, engines for their Junkers, and cockpit parts for the Messerschmitts. Our aim is to hit the Jerries where it hurts and, by Jove, we’ll show the Russians what Bomber Command is capable of!’

  As his plane lifted off three hours after the first wave of Lancasters had flown away, Adam thought about the other major cities they had bombed. Cologne, Berlin and Hamburg had also had their cultural and ecclesiastical showpieces and civilian populations. As always, he felt calmer as soon as he was airborne. The comforting drone of the engines had stilled the jangling of his nerves, which on this occasion had been more insistent than usual.