Authors: Jason Hewitt
‘They are sisters,’ whispered Nurse Joubert.
‘Yes,’ said Haynes. He scanned through the notes. ‘Both brought here from Buchenwald by all accounts. Must have got separated.’
‘They’ll be all right though?’ asked Owen.
‘Let’s hope so,’ said Haynes. ‘They’re together now. And that’s the main thing.’
The two sisters lay quite still in their beds, their teary eyes staring up at the ceiling and the line of naked light bulbs that hung like translucent heads. It was hard to tell their age, but
Owen thought they must have been much younger than they looked, with the beauty of their youth shaven from their heads and sculpted from their faces.
‘You said she might be of interest to someone?’ Owen said.
Had Haynes meant Janek? He’d been half expecting to see a Krzysztof Krakowski.
‘Ah, speak of the devil,’ said Haynes.
Martha bustled through the door, Irena behind her. She looked terrified as she entered the ward and Martha briskly led her through the beds.
‘Are you all right?’ said Owen, but Irena didn’t reply.
Martha brought her to the bed where they had already gathered, the two sisters staring blankly up at them all, their hands still clasped across the narrow divide.
Irena’s hand fumbled for his and he held it. It was as if she already knew what to expect. She glanced out of the corner of her eyes at the line of beds on either side and the
disease-ridden faces.
‘I’m very pleased to see you together again,’ Martha said to the two sisters. The newest of the arrivals was staring wide-eyed at Irena and suddenly looked scared. She murmured
something in Polish.
‘I don’t think this will take long, do you?’ Martha said, turning to Irena.
Irena’s grip on his hand tightened. She stood quite solid, but Owen could hear her breath coming heavy through her nostrils. She was trying to hold herself together. Every reunion in times
like this, he thought, must come as a shock.
‘I’m afraid she’s very sick,’ Martha told her. ‘But her sister has been good enough to give us all the details. I believe you know each other.’ She looked at
Irena. ‘Is that right?’
Irena nodded.
‘Perhaps you’d like to confirm her name then. We just need confirmation that what her sister has said is true.’
Irena stared at the sick woman, their eyes locked on each other.
‘Can you tell us what her name is?’ said Martha.
Irena nodded, her gaze slipping to the floor, and took a breath. ‘Her name,’ Irena said hesitantly, ‘is Irena Borkowski.’
There was so little time. For twelve-hour shifts Connie fitted sparking plugs while he was out in Hertfordshire. It was a hell of a journey to meet her, even when he managed a
few hours’ leave. They would meet outside the Connaught, him falling in line as she passed, and only when they reached Grosvenor Square or the Brown Hart Gardens on Duke Street did they dare
to speak. Mostly, though, they lived those hours in Shepherd Market; they walked its passages, ate pancakes in the café or made love in The Swallow hotel.
Every time he saw her with Max he burned; and with every snatched kiss, in the shadowy corners of his parents’ house, he felt a tiny bit of him break off and go to hell.
It had to stop.
We need to stop this
.
I know
, she said.
But they didn’t.
Irena – or the girl he had thought of as Irena – stood at the small window of Martha’s office staring out at the empty sky, her gaze somewhere over the
barrack rooftops, and her bony hand resting lightly on the sill. She had said that she would not talk to Martha, only Owen, and yet they had been there for fifteen minutes now and she had not said
a word.
He sat looking at her, waiting. Her eyes kept filling but she would not cry.
When the real Irena Borkowski had given Martha her details, and then the information had been confirmed, Martha had realized the deception.
Owen felt angry, cheated by this girl yet again.
All these lies
, he had told her.
I don’t know who you are
.
It made no sense. The strangeness he had woken to all those days before never seemed to clear, it just tangled tighter around him. He was so tired of it. Take him to a field now and he would lie
there and shut his eyes. He would let the grass grow over him and slowly pull him under the earth.
Eventually she spoke, not turning to look at him but keeping her eyes locked on the sky outside, wisps of cloud seeming to judder within the pane of glass as below them another truck thundered
through the dirt.
‘When this is all over,’ she said, ‘for years after this, everyone will say how awful we were. That is what they will remember. That is what they will say. But I am ruined too.
I am as ruined as they are. I have no home. I have no family either. I have lost all of that too. But I do not have the – how do you say? – the luxury of being the victim, of being the
ones that everyone now will give to, or feel sorry for, or pity, or love. I see this now. I see it here. In this place. In all this. And all I have is the shame of my people. That is all I am left
with.’ She turned and looked at him. ‘Do you understand? Right now, it is better to be anything but German.’
‘You shaved your head so you could be like them.’
‘I did what I had to do. People will feed you then,’ she said. ‘They will give you clothes, water. It’s true.’
‘So this Irena Borkowski – the real one – who is she?’
‘She was a domestic servant,’ she said. ‘A cook. Krzysztof Krakowski – he was my mother’s gardener. They had both been brought by my father from Poland to work for
my family in Hoyerswerda. When the war started we were only allowed to keep them because my father was well respected in the Wehrmacht. They made concessions for him. He fought in Russia, you know.
And then when that didn’t work any more and my father had disappeared, my mother would pay the SS off, so that we could keep them and keep them safe.’
‘And this Krzysztof chap, he raped you?’
She nodded. ‘I have not lied about everything. And what he did, it was not revenge for anything, if that is what you think. Before the war we were friendly. He was young, I was young, but
feelings like that soon became impossible. My mother was suspicious. The war was getting bigger. The Jewish Poles in Germany were being taken and my mother couldn’t keep paying the SS off. It
was only time before something would happen, I suppose: a different SS officer, one that could not be bribed; or we would run out of money; or someone would do something stupid. He wanted me to
help him and I would not. I could not help him like he wanted me to. He kept saying that he wanted me to marry him, that I could protect him, but how could I? Everyone knew that sort of thing was
not allowed, but he never saw sense. We fought about it. Then one night he got drunk, very drunk and angry with me about it and . . . well . . .’
‘That’s when it happened?’
‘That’s when it happened.’
‘And after?’
‘I don’t know whether my mother heard or if it was only by chance, but the next day he was taken. Irena too. I knew – or thought – I would not see them again. I stole her
identity papers just before the van came.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. I saw them on the table, that was all, and I was angry with them – with them both. I was seventeen. Still a child. I didn’t know what I was
thinking.’
‘So you took them. And then?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘for a while. Then my mother was taken as well. She had been listening to your British broadcasts. She thought our news people were not telling the truth
about what was happening on the eastern front. She was worried about my father so she would listen to your BBC, hoping to get something of the truth. Then a neighbour told the SS. She’d had
the volume up too loud or perhaps someone had told them about the bribes. I don’t know. Anyway, they came and they took her, just like they took all the rest. And that was that.’
‘And you?’
‘I was pregnant. They left me alone in the house to fend for myself. Then when it was clear that the war would be over soon and Germany was ruined, there was talk of Russians advancing,
that everyone was going to be raped and murdered, so I left too. Germans were being taken from the road and beaten to death. It was like hell.’
‘And is that when you took Irena’s name?’
She nodded. ‘I told you. My mother was a language teacher. We spent some years in Poland. Before the war my father was a site manager at a German shoe factory near Posen. My mother taught
German to the Poles in the offices, and Polish to the Germans living there, like us. It was useful. She was useful. It was her that got my father the job in the first place. She knew Herr
Blumenthal. Anyway, I realized I could pass for a Jew if I had to. I still had Irena’s papers. She was older than me but she has a young face. With my head shaved no one would know any
different.’
‘You didn’t think someone might question it?’
‘You have seen it,’ she said. ‘The chaos. You understand. I thought I would never see her again. I was certain she was dead.’
‘And what’s your name?’ said Owen. ‘Your real name.’
‘Anneliese,’ she said. ‘It is Anneliese Dreher.’
‘Does Janek know?’
She shook her head.
He stood up and came out from behind the desk. There wasn’t anything left to say. The girl turned back from the window. She was starting to sob now.
‘Please. You have to help me.’ Her hand was on his face. She was trying to stroke him, trying to kiss him. ‘I’ll do anything. You have to help me.’
He pushed her off. ‘No. Come on, stop that.’
She backed away against the wall, shaking her head vehemently. ‘Please,’ she begged. ‘You don’t understand. You don’t know what they will do.’
On a Sunday in early June 1943 – the last date he can fix in his mind with any certainty – she had driven him out to Wonersh in Max’s Austin. It had been an
audacious act that perhaps he would never forgive himself for but with only a few hours’ leave left before he was transferred to Warboys – now his training was completed – they
had done it anyway. The country lanes had been quiet and they had folded the roof down, Connie in her sunglasses and that familiar scarf rolled and knotted around her head.
They strolled out through the fields of rape, their arms held up as if together they were wading into the sea, and in the field beyond they sat in the grass smoking a couple of Woodbines as a
heron flew by on lolloping wings, low and languid over the stream. For a while they watched a bumblebee busying itself among the cotton grass. She was playing with a grey scrap of material
she’d found snagged like wool on a fence, turning it around and around in her hand and holding it to her cheek with her fingertips as if she were positioning a patch that she was going to pin
to her face.
I’ve never understood how they manage to get off the ground
, she said.
For such a bulbous body they have such frightfully fragile wings
.
That was why bees and birds were so much stronger than us, he told her, and that was how da Vinci had come up with the idea for his ornithopter, and that if mankind were ever to find a way off
the ground, it would need to employ the use of mechanics. And thank God for that. Otherwise, without the war, he wouldn’t have had a job. Da Vinci’s ornithopter was, he said, the
closest thing to strapping yourself within the ribcage of a bird.
Here was a girl who appreciated this, who had an inquisitiveness that was rare, he thought, in these days where planes were just expected to fly and no one questioned what it took to get 70,000
lbs of metal off the ground and moving. It wasn’t just power, he told her. It was a three-way love affair between aerodynamics, mechanics and art.
Sydney Camm had said it himself: Aircraft design is an art and not a science.
These are the things he remembered from that one afternoon in June, or perhaps many afternoons gathered before: the weight of her arm looped through his; the touch of her lips as she’d
stretched to kiss him; how when he’d laid out on the grass, the side of his face pressed to it, she had danced and swung herself around, and all he could see was her feet and the swishing
hemline of her skirt wafting by his face. Was that when he had sketched her, that very first time? Was that when she had said to him:
Aren’t you going to give me a face?
Long after they’d finished in fields and cafes and rented hotel bedrooms, their conversations would linger in his mind and bring with them secret smiles.
How do you feel
, she quizzed him once as they sat in bed,
about me having a slight schoolgirl fancy on the late Amelia Earhart?
I don’t much mind
, he joked,
as long as she’s still dead
.
And this
, he announced on another day, holding his sketch to the hotel window so the sun bleached through,
is the mechanics of a bee. Reconfigured – as you can see – in
the style of the late da Vinci
.
They had laughed those days – in those few and fragile piecemeal hours when they could cocoon themselves away from the world, when there was him and her and no one else, and they could
pretend that everything about them existed only in that room.
Then, on that June day at Wonersh, as he’d helped her across the stream, she’d slipped and, grabbing his jacket, had pulled a button clean away. It dropped with a splash and had
tumbled through the current some way before they had scooped it out with his cap.
Oh no
, she said,
it’s your RAF jacket. If we don’t sew that back on, my God you’ll be in trouble
.
While he’d dozed in the grass, his cap drying on his knee, she sat with his jacket heaped in her lap and sewed the button back on.
Only you and I will ever know
, she said, and
then she leant over him and he felt the warmth of her kiss.
They didn’t know what to do with her. It had gone up through the ranks almost as far as the lieutenant colonel. She’d have to go, Hamilton speculated. They
couldn’t house a German as if she was a Polish Jew. It was a displacement camp for victims of the Nazi regime, not a bloody hotel.