The City of Shadows (51 page)

Authors: Michael Russell

Lester became the last Secretary General of the League of Nations. He sat out the Second World War in an empty Palace of Nations in Geneva, knowing that if Germany won he was on a Nazi death list; as the League of Nations fell apart he had prevented it becoming a tool of German domination in Europe. In 1946 he was the man who handed the vision of peace and cooperation that had been the League of Nations over to the newly formed United Nations. His retirement in Ireland was quiet and uneventful, first in Wicklow, then in Galway. He is one of the twentieth century's greatest Irishmen, but he is barely known in Ireland. Being too anti-Nazi once carried the taint of being too close to Britain.

Count Edward O'Rourke was appointed Bishop of Danzig in 1922. He was forced to resign in 1937 as a result of increasing conflict with the Nazi authorities, although he was under as much pressure from the Vatican itself, which did not want to antagonise Germany. His successor, Cardinal Carl Maria Splett, a native Danziger, became little more than a puppet of Nazi policy. Edward O'Rourke's ancestors had fled Ireland after the battle of the Boyne and had subsequently become Russian soldiers and aristocratic landowners. His family lost its estates after the Russian Revolution in 1917. He died in Rome in 1943, having fled Poland when the Germans invaded. Like SeÃ¡n Lester he was on a Nazi death list. As one of the Catholic Church's most prominent opponents of Nazism, Edward O'Rourke has also been largely forgotten.

In the streets of GdaÂ´nsk's old town now you see much of what was there in 1930s Danzig. So successful has the rebuilding been that it is hard to believe it was almost totally destroyed at the end of the war. Its reconstruction was an extraordinary achievement by a Polish nation that lay in ruins everywhere. Yet GdaÂ´nsk is a city of ghosts. The people who originally built it have disappeared from its history.

Acknowledgements

This is a work of fiction, but many books, over many years, have played a part in telling the story, too many now forgotten. But there are a few that should be mentioned: Herbert S. Levine's
Hitler's Free City
; Paul McNamara's
SeÃ¡n Lester, Poland and the Nazi Takeover of Danzig
; Gerry Mullins'
Dublin Nazi No.1: the Life of Adolf Mahr
. What I have right I have from them; what is wrong is my own. SeÃ¡n Lester's papers in the League of Nations archives have given a sense of who the man was and how he thought that has made me confident about speculation in ways I could not otherwise have been. I could not have written about Dublin's Clanbrassil Street without Ray Rivlin's
Shalom Ireland
, which is a precious document of record of Ireland's small Jewish community. A very different document, and one that makes for hard reading, is Denis Fahey's
The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World
; this book was published in 1935, and it is enough to say that it carried a bishop's imprimatur at the time. The story Tom listens to on the radio is Patricia Lynch's
The Turf-Cutter's Donkey
(1934). Directories of the period have been a special joy: in particular
Thom's Directory of Ireland
. Also invaluable was
The
Irish Times Archive
, where I could sometimes find that things I had made up had happened.
It is impossible to write about the Free City of Danzig without mentioning the website
www.danzig-online.pl
. It is an extraordinarily rich collection of documents and photographs for anyone interested in the Free City.

About the Author

After reading English at Oxford, Michael joined Yorkshire Television as a Script Editor on
Emmerdale Farm
, where he became Series Producer. He also spent several years in the Drama Department, first as Script Consultant then Producer, before leaving ITV to write full-time. He has been a regular contributor to
Midsomer Murders
and recently scripted the last ever episodes of
A
Touch of Frost
which topped the ratings. He lives in Ireland with his family.

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Michael Russell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Source ISBN: 9781847563460

EPub Edition Â© October 2012 ISBN: 9780007460083

Version 1

FIRST EDITION

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