She moved the desk chair in silence, putting it in front of the door. That way he’d bump into it and make some noise if he tried to leave, waking her up. She was pretty sure Julian would try to run away from the Roman Catholic Sisters at the orphanage once he got there, and he might think of running away now to avoid going there at all.
Take him to England, Leopold’s voice whispered in Kristina’s head. It’s the right thing to do.
She went back to bed, leaving the shutters open so the light would wake her.
*
Just before dawn, Kristina shook Julian awake and held a finger to her lips.
“Shh. Come on,” Kristina said. “I want to leave early so I don’t have to make excuses to a lot of people on the way out. I left a note. I don’t think anyone will come after us – I’m not really doing anything wrong.”
“What’s going on?” Julian asked.
“I’m taking you to England,” Kristina replied.
Julian didn’t make a sound. No exclamation of thanks, no gasp of relief, no cry of hope. He sat up in bed, his face pale and drawn, and he re‑knotted his school tie. He hadn’t even taken off his blazer when he’d got into bed last night.
Kristina wondered if Julian didn’t believe her – if his world had become so uncertain that there was no room in it any more for thanks or relief, or even hope.
“Come on, Julian, don’t worry about your tie!” Kristina told him.
“It makes people take me seriously,” Julian said. “People are nicer to tidy boys. And they’re less suspicious of them.”
Kristina’s RWD‑8 was standing outside one of the hangars of the airbase, wheels wedged, full of fuel, its engine freshly serviced. Her plane would never be in better shape for a flight across the English Channel.
She told the guards on duty that she was heading to her new flight unit at Tours and taking Julian as her translator. It wasn’t entirely untrue.
It took them two more days of flying to cross France. Kristina stopped at French Air Force bases on both nights, in Bergerac and Nantes. On the third day, instead of continuing to Tours, Kristina flew to Cherbourg. The radio operator at Nantes had given her a proper aviation chart of northern France, including the English Channel and a sliver of the southern coast of England. The very last leg of the journey was from Cherbourg to Swanage in England.
The flight over the English Channel only took an hour, and the sky was quiet. But Kristina flew with her heart in her mouth the whole way. If something went wrong with the plane, there would be nowhere to land. For the first forty kilometres, she couldn’t even see the coast of England ahead of her.
When she’d been flying over fields and forest and mountains, Kristina hadn’t been able to see any boundaries of countries. But now that she was flying over the sea, she understood why Julian’s father had felt his child would be safe in England. The sea was a defence all of its own.
Kristina’s small, unarmed RWD‑8 arrived safely over the cliffs of the south coast of England, and nobody tried to turn it away.
*
Julian hung up the telephone in the red‑painted English telephone kiosk outside the railway station in Bournemouth. He stood for a moment by himself, then carefully rubbed his eyes with his chapped knuckles and opened the heavy kiosk door made of glass and iron. Julian stepped out to where Kristina was waiting for him.
“My aunt said I can’t possibly stay with them in London,” he announced carefully. “My aunt and uncle have just evacuated all their own children in case Hitler starts dropping bombs there. She was sobbing on the phone. But she said to come to London on the train anyway – and she and my uncle will arrange for me to be evacuated too.”
Julian looked up at Kristina with a resigned, sad little half smile.
“So I guess that’s what I’ll do,” he said. “Better than a refugee camp, anyway. Like you said.”
“Will you go to the same place as your cousins?” Kristina asked.
“I don’t think so. They’re evacuating all the children in London, and it sounds like they just send you anywhere. To anybody in the country who says they’ll take children in. My cousins didn’t even get to stay together. My aunt was sobbing about that too.”
“It’s your war work,” Kristina told Julian. “It doesn’t matter how old you are – this is the work you have to do, and you’re a soldier. You did exactly what your father ordered. And now you have to continue with the consequences.”
“You will too,” said Julian.
Kristina nodded, wondering what the future held. She would have to fly herself back to France. It seemed crazy to have come all this way to just turn around again, but for now, France was where her work was, and her people.
“So you’ll get the next train to London?” Kristina asked Julian. He’d already bought a ticket.
“Yes. I have to change trains a couple of times, but I’ll be there before it gets dark. My aunt will meet me,” Julian said. “I’ll get to see their house even if I don’t get to stay there.”
He gazed at Kristina with his calm, sharp green eyes. “I’ll be all right,” he said.
“Give me your aunt’s address,” Kristina said.
Julian got out his notebook and pen. He tore out a piece of paper, scribbled on it and gave it to Kristina.
Then he said shyly, “I have something else for you.”
Julian held open his chapped fingers with his palm upwards.
On his hand lay a tarnished silver Polish Air Force pilot’s badge: a white eagle almost exactly like the one Kristina had given to Leopold.
“It was my dad’s,” Julian said. “From the last war. But yours is gone, so you’d better have this one.”
Kristina lifted the eagle from Julian’s open hand.
With solemn pride, she hooked the pin onto her Air Force tunic, just above her heart.
“Thank you,” Kristina said. She kissed Julian on the cheeks three times, just as she and Leopold would have done.
They heard the whistle of the train approaching. Julian crossed past the barrier. Kristina watched him go – a determined, neat and fierce figure, moving like a cat. His head was up and alert as he checked for the correct platform number.
Kristina had only known Julian for a week. Yet she felt like she was losing her best friend.
Julian turned and waved. And then he used Leopold’s words without knowing he was doing it.
“Stay safe!” he called to her.
Kristina’s heart swelled with love.
She’d fight for them both now.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I was inspired to write White Eagles by the Polish pilot Anna Leska and her experiences in the Second World War. Anna qualified as a glider pilot when she was eighteen years old and then learned to fly balloons and powered aircraft. The Polish Air Force selected Anna to fly liaison missions for them when Nazi forces invaded Poland in September 1939. The airfield where she was working was taken over by the Nazis, so she took one of the planes stationed there and escaped in it.
Anna Leska rejoined the Polish Air Force in France. In May 1940, the Nazis also invaded France, and Anna made her way to Britain. In 1941, she joined Britain’s Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) and was able to do war work by relocating aircraft for the Royal Air Force.
Anna Leska was one of three Polish women who flew with the ATA during the war, along with Jadwiga Pilsudska and Barbara Wojtulanis. Anna became a flight leader in charge of an international group of female pilots from Britain, America, Argentina and Chile. I would have loved to end White Eagles with Kristina joining the ATA as Anna did, but it didn’t fit in the tight timing of the story. Yet I like to think that after the end of the story, as the war progresses, Kristina will end up like Anna Leska – awarded medals by both Britain and Poland for her service in the air during the Second World War.
Anna Leska was one of thousands of Poles who fought against Nazi forces in France and then fled to Britain when France was also invaded. But most Polish soldiers and pilots
didn’t get to fly all the way across Europe in one week the way Kristina does in White Eagles. Many of them made their way to Britain very slowly after the Nazi invasion of Poland. For some people, it took a whole year to get there. They travelled on foot and by boat and by train, sometimes going the long way around via the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. People even ended up passing across northern Africa as they tried to avoid being caught by the Nazis in Europe.
The Poles who had fled their country thought of Britain as “the Island of Last Hope”. Polish pilots flew in the Battle of Britain with the Royal Air Force and even had their own squadron of Hurricane fighter aircraft. By the end of the Second World War, about two hundred thousand Poles had fought for their country while in exile in Britain. Over 19,000 of them served in the Polish Air Force or in Britain’s Royal Air Force.
Kristina’s journey is fictional and happens very fast, but I based the violent defeat of her Air Force unit and her desperate escape on facts. Kristina’s experience is typical of the horror that many, many people had to deal with as the Nazis invaded Poland. The brutal treatment that Kristina’s and Julian’s families suffer at the hands of the enemy invaders is also created from true accounts. Hitler wanted to wipe out both the Polish nation and its culture – if he’d had his way, the entire Polish population would have been destroyed.
One of the horrifying operations Hitler used was called Intelligenzaktion, in which the Nazis secretly murdered about one hundred thousand educated and professional Poles. They targeted people like teachers, doctors, social workers and lawyers – anyone with more than a secondary‑school education who might be likely to lead a resistance movement against the Nazis. The Intelligenzaktion executions took place a little later than the time at which White Eagles is set, and the Birky Language School is fictional. But real teachers were murdered as part of the Intelligenzaktion programme.
There was no happy ending for Poland after the Second World War. About six million Polish citizens, half of them Jewish, were killed during the war – about 20 per cent of its population. After the war, the Soviet Union took over the administration of Poland. The Soviet Union’s influence was so strong that the British government barred Polish forces from participating in the London Victory Celebrations of 1946 because Britain didn’t want to offend the Soviet Union. It didn’t matter that every other Allied nation was represented at the celebrations. It wasn’t until 1989 that Poland once again became an independent nation, fifty years after the Nazi invasion.
I have written many books that are set in the past, but I feel strongly that there is a direct link between then and now. Those people were just like us. When I’m writing, I try to include details that we can relate to in a personal way – like the chocolate coins that Julian shares with Kristina, and the man walking his dog in a Budapest park on a Sunday afternoon. There were refugee camps in Eastern Europe eighty years ago and there are refugee camps in Eastern Europe right now. We are connected to our past not just by our remembrance but also by our shared experiences.
It is important to remember how Britain welcomed citizens in exile from all over Europe during the Second World War, and how the Allied nations and the citizens of the Nazi‑occupied European countries fought together gallantly to defeat Hitler’s forces. These events are separated by time, but not by space. We walk on the same ground and fly across the same skies as those who fought in the Second World War.
Kristina and Julian both notice that you can’t see national boundaries when you’re flying over them. They also meet many different kinds of people in their journey across Europe – good and bad, kind and unkind, generous and selfish. Some people have strengths and flaws at the same time, like the flight commander who tries to take care of Julian by sending him to an orphanage where he probably won’t be very happy.
Being flawed makes us human. Trying to overcome those flaws makes us heroic.
White Eagles is a snapshot of a past time and places that still have many connections to us in the present day. I hope you will find special connections here of your own.
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