I told Julian about Irena, and he promised to make enquiries about her through the Red Cross for me. I do so hope that she and the girls are alive and well. Now that Erich is safe with me, all I can think of is seeing her and Wilhelm’s daughters again.
‘I had no idea the estate was so vast.’ Laura leaned back in her saddle and looked across the lake to the woods on the other side.
Brunon offered her a roll of mints. ‘Before the war it was ten times the size it is now. It bordered the town at one point. Grandfather told me that the von Datskis collected rents on forty-five farms.’
‘It’s more beautiful than I ever imagined. I can understand why my grandmother wanted me to see it from horseback. It would have taken us hours to walk to this point.’ Laura took out her camera and snapped the vista of woods that encroached right to the water’s edge. ‘I also know why she wanted to come back, and why she never talked about her life here.’
‘It’s a pity she wasn’t well enough to go for a drive with my grandfather,’ Brunon said. ‘He was disappointed.’
‘As was my grandmother when the doctor ordered her to bed. However, if past experience is anything to go by, she will force herself to be well tomorrow. Grunwaldsee is so beautiful,’ she mused. ‘If it had been my home and I had lost it, I don’t think I’d ever recover. It also explains where my grandmother lives now. She bought a lakefront piece of land in America and built on it, although everyone said the sensible thing to have done was buy an existing house.’
‘She built a house on a lake, like Grunwaldsee?’
‘Not at all like Grunwaldsee.’ Laura patted her horse’s neck. ‘Her house is wooden, modern, and very American.’
‘Your grandmother is a wise woman. I doubt that Grunwaldsee could be recreated.’
Laura pulled her horse’s bridle to the right, dug in her heels and followed him along the bank. ‘Are we close to the summerhouse?’
‘It’s about a kilometre away. This lane was widened in the seventies. But the summerhouse is much older. More than two hundred years old, according to my grandfather.’
‘My grandmother said it hadn’t changed from the last time she had seen it, although it had obviously been recently renovated.’ Shading her eyes against the glare of the sun, she looked out over the lake. ‘That’s a beautiful yacht.’
‘Nothing with an engine has ever been allowed here, not even in Communist days. Oil pollution has killed the fish and fouled the water in half the lakes around here, but not this one.’
‘And in the future?’
Brunon laughed. ‘My grandfather sent the West Germans with their motor boats packing, and now that the Russian who has bought the estate is of the same mind it’s probably as safe as any lake in Poland. Come on, let’s see how good a rider you are when it comes to cantering through woods. I hope you know how to duck.’
Laura rode after Brunon through the trees. The warmth of the sun brought the realization that it had to be close to lunchtime. Suddenly hungry, she recalled the sandwiches and bottles of water Brunon had slung on his saddle at his grandmother’s insistence.
‘Is it time to eat?’ she called.
‘Yes, and if we walk the horses down this way, we’ll come to the summerhouse. There’s a bench in the garden that overlooks the lake.’ He slowed his horse and, as they rode side by side, they talked of politics and everything and nothing. Laura was suddenly struck by how relaxed she felt in this young man’s company. He looked about the same age as her brother Luke but was far more mature, and she wondered if it was a result of spending so much time with his elderly grandparents.
She was laughing at a comparison Brunon had made between pop music and Wagner when the lane veered sharply to the left. A car blocked her path and she found herself gazing at a tall, thin, dark-haired man with disconcertingly blue eyes. Her horse reared, she shouted at it and fought to regain control, but the stranger proved quicker than her. Dropping the fishing rod in his hands, he reached out and caught the bridle.
‘Polish horses don’t like to be screamed at in English.’ Like Brunon, his English was American-accented.
‘I don’t know any Polish.’ She clung on to the horse with her knees.
‘As you’re in the country, perhaps it’s time you learned,’ he rebuked.
‘I’ll try to make a point of it,’ she retorted.
‘How long have you been here?’ he asked, still holding on to the bridle.
‘Three days.’
‘In that case I’ll forgive you. Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend, Brunon?’
Brunon’s face had turned red, and Laura wondered if the man was a friend of the new owner. For all of Brunon’s assertions that ‘the owner wouldn’t mind’ he was clearly embarrassed at being caught riding his horses on his land. ‘This is Laura von—’
‘Templeton,’ Laura supplied.
‘Von Templeton?’ The man smiled. ‘Now that is an unusual name.’
‘My grandmother was a
von
. My name is plain Templeton.’
‘Michael Sitko.’ He translated his name into name into English and offered her his hand. ‘My friends call me Mischa. Are we going to be friends, Laura?’
‘I doubt I’ll be in Poland long enough to make friends.’ He looked at Brunon. ‘You’re exercising the horses?’
‘And showing Laura around Grunwaldsee,’ Brunon conceded.
Mischa looked at Laura. ‘Apart from enjoying a ride with Brunon on a nice day, is there any particular reason why you’d want to see Grunwaldsee?’
‘My grandmother grew up here.’
He grew serious. ‘The lady with a “von” in her name.’
‘She’s a von Datski,’ Brunon divulged proudly before Laura could stop him. After her grandmother’s reluctance to reveal her family name to the woman in the hotel, Laura sensed that Charlotte would have preferred to keep her identity from anyone who lived near Grunwaldsee. ‘She came here yesterday with Laura. My grandfather knew her at once.’
‘And now you and your grandmother are staying with the Niklas family?’ Mischa said.
‘No, at a hotel in Allenstein; I mean, Olsztyn.’
‘Which one?’
‘It’s on the other side of the lake.’
‘I know it. The service is good and the food’s not bad, either. Excuse me; I have to retrieve my fishing tackle and make a telephone call.’ He opened his car and loaded his fishing rod into it.
‘I’m sorry, it’s my fault you dropped it,’ Laura apologized.
‘There’s no damage done.’ Mischa reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone.
‘Are you staying tonight?’ Brunon asked.
‘Indefinitely,’ Mischa answered. ‘I’ll be moving more furniture into the main house this week.’
‘Then join us for supper tonight? You know my grandmother always makes enough to feed an army.’
‘Thank you, I will.’ Mischa sat in his car and closed the door.
‘Mischa works for the new owner of Grunwaldsee?’ Laura asked Brunon as they rode on.
‘He
is
the new owner of Grunwaldsee.’
‘Him! But he’s so young – he only looks about thirty.’
‘Perhaps he is. I’ve never thought about his age.’ Brunon stopped his horse next to a jetty and dismounted. ‘You thought that an old Russian would have bought the estate? It’s the young ones who have the money.’
‘And run the Mafia.’
‘I don’t think Mischa would like being called Mafia.’ He led his horse down to the water’s edge so it could drink.
‘What does he do?’
‘Something that’s made him enough money to buy this place. It’s not wise to ask a Russian how he makes his living, particularly if he lives well.’
‘And he’s moving out of the summerhouse into the main house, so he obviously intends to live there.’ Laura followed suit and dismounted.
‘Some people are saying that he intends to turn the main house into a hotel, but he’s never discussed his plans with me or my grandfather.’
‘It would be sacrilege to turn that house into a hotel.’
‘Few people are rich enough to pay for the upkeep of a house the size of Grunwaldsee without an income.’
Laura recalled what her grandmother had said about the cost of renovating Bergensee. Perhaps it was just as well that the new owner didn’t share her romantic notions. If Grunwaldsee were to survive into the next century with its roof and walls intact, it needed a master with his feet firmly on the ground.
FRIDAY, 26 OCTOBER 1945
The best news: Julian has found Irena. She is in a displaced person’s camp near Berlin. He has promised to take Erich and me to see her on his next leave. In the meantime I have her address and I will write to her.
WEDNESDAY, 31 OCTOBER 1945
Irena arrived yesterday afternoon. Julian didn’t say a word to me, but sent her travel orders, a train ticket and the telephone number of his office with a note asking her to contact him and tell his office what train she was arriving on. He met her at the station and brought her straight here.
I was cleaning the stairs when she arrived. I opened the door, but didn’t recognise her. She is thin, pale and looks years older, but as soon as she spoke, Erich ran to her and hugged her.
I made us a meal of corned beef that Julian had given me and stewed apples and boiled potatoes. After we had eaten it, we sat up half the night talking. Greta looked in briefly but she was as cold to Irena as she had been to me.
I know that Greta used Wilhelm’s name to get her position as an interpreter because Julian sympathized with me about Wilhelm’s death. When I asked him how he knew my brother had been hung by the Nazis he said that Greta had told everyone how her brother had died. Anti-Nazis are given preference over Nazis as employees by the Allies. It disgusted me that Greta could bring herself to use Wilhelm’s name after writing the letter of denouncement she sent to him before he was hanged.
Like Erich, Irena has been seriously ill. In her case it was a bad case of typhus. She read me a part of the last letter Wilhelm wrote to her. One of the guards in Ploetzensee prison forwarded it to her in the displaced persons’ camp after the war.
In it, Wilhelm begged her forgiveness, but maintained that killing Hitler and saving Germany was more important than their lives, or even the lives of their children. He finished by saying that he hoped she would understand.
After she had read it to me, she told me that she didn’t understand why Wilhelm had risked their lives and happiness, and never would.
She said that Wilhelm had told her about the treatment the Wehrmacht, SS and Einsatzgruppen – the killing squads – had meted out to the Jews, Russians and Poles in Eastern Europe. Even the women and children. He’d also talked to her about the camps he’d seen in Poland.
She said that all she had thought about in Ravensbruck was what Wilhelm had done, and she found it hard to accept that he had supported Colonel von Stauffenberg knowing that if the coup failed, she and the girls would be incarcerated in a similar place.
I argued that Wilhelm had been an honourable man. He knew that he was risking his own life but he couldn’t possibly have foreseen what Hitler would do to his family or the families of the other conspirators. As innocents, he had every right to expect that she and the girls would be left alone, but even as I spoke I knew that Irena had stopped listening to me.
She told me that her baby, a boy, had been born in a prison cell without help from a doctor, or nurse. Less than twenty four hours later she had been taken from the prison and force marched through a hailstorm to Ravensbruck concentration camp. She had been given only a thin sheet to wrap around the child. As a result he had died of pneumonia two days after they arrived.
After liberation she had looked everywhere she could think of for Marianna and Karoline but as their names had been changed she had been warned that it would be impossible to find them. It was then she finally broke down and cried.
I had made a bed for her on the floor and I joined her there. I held her tight all through the night and cried with her. Before morning I promised that no matter, what I wouldn’t rest until we had found the girls and they were returned to her.
Charlotte stared at the bottle of pills that the doctor had left next to her bed, but made no effort to touch them. For sixty years she had been haunted by thoughts of her mother’s final resting place. Time and again she had imagined the bodies of her mother, her baby and Minna shovelled hastily into a communal pit with scores of others, without dignity or ceremony. She had pictured the pit being filled in by uncaring strangers who had walked away from it without leaving a stone or memorial to mark the spot.
She had promised herself that one day she would visit and pay her respects. Why not now, when she was so close? She no longer felt as weak as she had when Laura had called the doctor, and there was no way she’d be able to sleep while she felt this restless. She swung her legs to the floor, left the bed and walked into the bathroom.
Twenty minutes later, bathed, dressed in a plain black suit, her hair caught in a lace net at the nape of her neck, Charlotte left her room. She caught sight of herself in the security monitor as she walked across the foyer, and was surprised by the old woman she had become. Reading the diary had peeled back the years, until she had even begun to think of herself as that other, younger Charlotte.
Young but shattered; tormented by grief at the loss of a lover, a longed-for baby, loving parents and brothers. She had thought she had grown accustomed to living without them and all the might-have-beens, but the combination of seeing Grunwaldsee and re-reading the diary entries she had made during and after the war had rekindled the pain until it had become as intense and crushing as it had been in 1945.
She had so many more things to do before she could leave – and not just Poland. She smiled wryly when she thought of David Andrews’ warning that she would sleep more. Even her body appeared to recognize that time was too short and too valuable to waste in sleep.
She went into the flower shop in the hotel foyer and looked around. The holders were resplendent with long-stemmed, hot-house roses and orchids, the staples of ostentatious bouquets. She wanted something simpler.
She finally settled for three simple posies of white daisies. She paid for them, went to reception and asked the girl at the desk to order her a taxi. As they drove past the lane that led to Grunwaldsee she couldn’t resist timing the journey. The miles that had taken hours to cover by horse and cart and on foot in January 1945 took only minutes by car nearly sixty-one years later.
She searched the horizon for landmarks, but the trees and bushes had grown, changing every perspective. She couldn’t even be sure the road was the same one and, just as she’d feared, no memorials had been erected to commemorate the dead she had seen lying in the snow in 1945. Sitting on the edge of her seat, she asked the driver to slow down.
‘If you want the shrine, madame, it’s around the next corner.’ He reduced his speed and pulled up alongside a clearing that might, or might not, have been the one where she had left her mother, her daughter and Minna. Where it met the road a shrine had been erected. Built of white wood and natural stone it was no different from a hundred others she had seen between Warsaw and Olsztyn. Asking the man to wait, she picked up the flowers, left the car and walked towards it.
The sun was shining, the air warm and clear. She looked up at the sky. If this was the site of the rape and massacre, there was nothing left of that butchery to taint the atmosphere.
A garishly-painted plaster Madonna gazed with downcast eyes at the offerings of flowers and candles that littered the foot of the glass case, protecting her from the elements. Charlotte hesitated, then, still clutching her flowers, entered the woods. The bushes were in full leaf, the trees taller. Had it really happened here?
‘I helped build the shrine.’ Marius suddenly appeared and walked towards her. ‘When Laura told me you were ill, I decided to leave some flowers at the hotel desk for you. As I drove out of the lane I saw you in the taxi and followed you here.’ He handed her a bunch of irises. ‘These are from the bulbs your mother planted in the small garden behind the house.’
‘Thank you.’
‘There was so much we left unsaid yesterday.’
‘It wasn’t the right time.’ She tried to smile. ‘A homecoming, even one after all these years, should be happy.’
‘And there were too many people around.’ He leaned against a tree. ‘I was a boy when you left and so in awe of you, and now …’
‘We’re equals,’ she said, when she saw him searching for the right words. ‘Time and old age does that, Marius.’
‘They buried some of the bodies over there.’ He indicated a spot on the edge of the clearing, ‘but not all of them. Russian soldiers moved into Grunwaldsee a few hours after you left. They had orders to detain every Russian soldier who’d been held prisoner by the Germans. The first ones they brought to the estate had been held in the camp outside town. They had to bring them in by cart because most were too weak to walk. They locked them in the church. The next day they brought back the Russians who’d worked for us … My mother saw them being marched down the lane. She bribed the guards with your mother’s silver candlesticks and they allowed her to talk to them. The lieutenant, Leon, told her what had happened to your mother – and you. The next morning we harnessed one of the carts and drove out here.’ He hesitated. ‘The captain was too grief-stricken to talk … but he was alive.’
‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘Later I understood he hadn’t died in that forest. But I didn’t … I couldn’t bear to know …’ She looked at him. ‘You and Martha took a terrible risk.’
‘Not really,’ he said. ‘The Russians were everywhere but, as my mother predicted, they didn’t look twice at a middle-aged Polish woman and a young boy, and the few German soldiers left in the area were too busy trying to reach the American lines in the west to bother about civilians. We took your mother and Minna back to Grunwaldsee and interred them in the vault. My mother hoped that the family wouldn’t mind the maid lying next to the mistress, but the ground was too hard to dig a grave. All the pastors and priests had fled, but we recited what we could remember of the Lutheran funeral service over them. My mother only had her Catholic prayer book.’
‘Thank you sounds inadequate.’ Tears pricked the back of Charlotte’s eyes. ‘I’ve had nightmares about their final resting place for years. I’d imagined them tumbled into a mass grave in spring with so many others.’
‘There was a baby,’ he said awkwardly. ‘A little girl. My mother was sure she was yours.’
Lost for words, Charlotte nodded.
‘As we found her lying on your mother we put them into the same coffin. It wasn’t a proper one; I made it out of wood scavenged from the stables and, unlike my father, I was never much of a carpenter. If you send the taxi away, I’ll take you to them.’
*……*……*
Laura and Brunon had eaten the sandwiches Jadwiga had made them, remounted and ridden halfway around the lake when Mischa caught up with them. He was on a Datski grey, a stallion with a fair amount of spirit, judging by the toss of its head and the short rein Mischa was careful to keep it on. Laura was glad Brunon hadn’t saddled it for her.
‘Is your grandmother Greta or Charlotte von Datski?’ Mischa asked in English. Like Brunon, the Russian had a direct way of talking that made no allowances for social niceties.
Laura found it disconcerting and was tempted to answer, ‘And, hello again to you, Mischa,’ but she was curious about his question and said, ‘You’ve studied the family?’
‘There were a few old papers in the attics.’ She remembered what Marius had said the day before about every scrap of paper being burned, and decided that either the old man or Mischa was lying. Of the two she preferred to think it was Mischa.
‘Really?’ she said sceptically, before relenting. ‘My grandmother is Charlotte von Datski.’
‘The one who ran the estate during the war after her father died, and stayed right up until the invasion.’
‘So I believe.’ Laura looked to Brunon who nodded agreement, and once again she realized just how little she knew about her grandmother’s past.
‘Marius told me she was still trying to persuade his mother to leave when the Russians were practically on the doorstep.’
‘She argued with her for so long, my grandfather said his mother thought she would never get away,’ Brunon added.
‘Marius has talked to you about her?’ Laura asked Mischa, surprised to discover that he seemed to know as much about the history of Grunwaldsee as Brunon.
‘It was impossible to stop him. He admired and respected your grandmother. Probably more than any woman he’s met before or since, including his wife.’ Mischa grinned. ‘She was quite a lady when she was young.’
‘She still is.’ It felt odd to be sitting on a horse in the middle of the Polish countryside discussing her grandmother with a man she’d only just met.
‘So, what do you think of Poland?’ He reined in his horse and pushed it between hers and Brunon’s.
‘I haven’t seen much of it, but it’s not what I expected. All these woods and lakes, and this glorious weather. It’s idyllic.’
‘You thought a country that had been Communist for so long would be dark and cold and full of decaying tower blocks?’ he teased.
‘Drabber perhaps,’ she agreed diplomatically.
‘Ah, you were expecting to see Slavic misery, embodied in a people with long faces with a penchant for spouting tragic poetry as they stroll beneath the shadows of a chemical works.’
Brunon laughed, and the image was close enough to the truth for Laura to join him.
‘Forgive me,’ she apologized, ‘but my grandmother told me very little about Grunwaldsee.’
Mischa breathed in deeply and looked around. ‘Like Marius and Brunon who belong here, I love this place.’
‘My grandfather belongs in the lodge,’ Brunon interrupted in a tone that caused Laura to wonder if the Niklas family were worried that the new owner might evict them.
‘And the main house. Your grandfather and great-grandparents moved in during the winter of nineteen forty-three,’ Mischa revealed. ‘They stayed until the Russians invaded.’
‘He never told me that. How did you know?’ Brunon asked suspiciously.
‘Marius mentioned it when I asked him if he minded Russians buying Grunwaldsee. He said we weren’t the first Russians to live here. That Soviet prisoners of war had worked on the estate during the war and the lodge was needed to house their guards.’
‘Prisoner labour, here?’ Laura was astonished.
‘Your grandmother never told you about that, either?’ Mischa was clearly taken aback.
‘No. You seem to know a great deal about what went on here during the war.’ Laura resented his knowledge of her family history. If anyone should be making revelations she felt it should be Charlotte, not a Russian neither she nor her grandmother knew.
‘I’ve spent a lot of time talking to Marius. He said some grand – and on occasion, wild – parties went on here when he was a child. Particularly with the twins. You did know that your grandmother had twin brothers?’
‘I knew she had two brothers called Paul and Wilhelm, and that they were both killed in the war.’
‘Yes,’ Mischa breathed, more to himself than Laura or Brunon and as if she had not spoken, ‘this place is just about perfect.’
‘Then it’s just as well you had the money to buy it,’ Laura fished.
‘I didn’t.’
‘You borrowed it?’
‘I didn’t steal it.’ He winked at her. ‘You Westerners need to broaden your minds. Not all Russians are Mafia, Laura von Templeton.’ He dug his heels into his horse’s flanks and rode back towards the summerhouse.
Marius turned the wheel of the car and drove down the lane, past Grunwaldsee, towards the small church that overlooked the lake. ‘When we didn’t find your body, my mother and I hoped you’d escaped. In nineteen forty-seven we heard that Greta had survived from someone who had seen her in West Germany after the war. But nothing about you, until we saw your illustrations in a book in the sixties. Mama insisted there couldn’t be two Charlotte Datskis but I wasn’t so sure.’
‘Greta always was a survivor.’ Charlotte caught a glimpse of the expression on Marius’s face, and they laughed. Marius’s family hadn’t liked Greta either.
‘Is she still alive?’ Marius stopped his small car in front of Grunwaldsee church and switched off the ignition.
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Do you see her?’
‘As little as possible.’ Charlotte gathered the flowers from her lap as he walked around to open the passenger door.
‘We tried to take care of the crypt in the church the way you would have if you’d been able to stay,’ he consoled awkwardly.
She gripped his hand briefly and stepped outside. She hadn’t known what to expect. She had caught a glimpse of the old Jewish cemetery as she had driven around the town, and seen an uneven lawn where tombstones and monuments had once stood. Buildings had been erected on the Lutheran graveyard where Irena’s grandparents had been buried. But when she looked at Grunwaldsee church, like the main house and summerhouse, it stood marvellously, miraculously unchanged.
Marius stepped back respectfully as she walked inside. It was cool and dark, and smelled musty and dusty, just as she remembered. The family vault was sunk into the wall on the right in front of the altar. She kneeled before it and ran her hands over the inscriptions on the plaques.
Memorials to the first von Datski who had lived at Grunwaldsee and all his heirs, up to her great-grandparents and her grandparents. Beneath them were her father’s plaque and the one she had ordered when they had received the news about Paul:
Paul von Datski
19 August 1918 – 1 July 1942
Her eyes filled with tears when she saw cruder carving below the fine Gothic lettering:
Wilhelm von Datski
19 August 1918 – 19 October 1944
‘In death they were not divided,’ she murmured. ‘Thank you, Marius.’
A plaque with similar carving had been set alongside Wilhelm’s inscribed with her mother and Minna’s names.
‘You were allowed to erect those in the church during the Communist era?’ she asked Marius.
‘The large churches were closed and barricades were erected around them, but no one cared what happened in the small country churches. The stonemason didn’t even charge us for adding Wilhelm’s name to the plaque. But then, you probably know that Wilhelm, like Claus von Stauffenberg, was regarded as an East German and Soviet hero after the war.’