The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (14 page)

But Sir Owen did not avert his eyes from the ‘young, beautiful and gifted’ woman, as he described Christine, who cornered him at one of the Legation’s regular Monday evening cocktail parties; his daughter Kate was just as taken with Andrzej.
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Sir Owen’s news bulletin was his pride and joy, and it did not take Christine long to smooth over the strained relationship between the Minister and Basil Davidson, giving both men the chance to share ‘watered-down news of a pro-Allied colour’ to the Hungarian press and radio.
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Christine was of ‘considerable assistance to the British Minister’, Section D reported, although it might be argued that the boot was on the other foot.
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Sir Owen was not entirely uncritical of Christine, describing her as ‘extremely obstinate, individualistic, attractive and moody’, but he was completely won over by her ‘unexampled courage’, reporting that ‘she was ready to risk her life at any moment for what she believed in’.
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As a result, both Sir Owen and Kate O’Malley were soon helping, ‘as unobtrusively as possible’, with the ‘exfiltration’ of Polish soldiers and pilots, and British POWs interned in Hungary and Poland.
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Sir Owen applied to the British Foreign Office in London for funding, and was ‘staggered’ when he was told that he had an unlimited budget.
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His daughter Kate, meanwhile, was able to meet Christine and Andrzej in the Budapest bars, cafés and cheap boarding-houses to which her high-society parents could never go, slipping in and out of buildings in her fashionable little Budapest shoes ‘with the familiarity and ease of a little mouse’, her mother later wrote, before confessing she had been ‘rather aghast’ when she learned how closely her daughter had been involved in the underground.
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Like her increasingly besotted father, Kate worshipped Christine, even noting the ‘grace and ease’ with which she moved. ‘There was something almost animal in it,’ Kate commented. ‘Something antelope-ish.’
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Sharing great risks almost daily, but also gossip and light-hearted intimacy, she and Christine were soon as close as sisters. However, Christine was not entirely happy about Kate’s equally fervent admiration for Andrzej. That summer Christine and Andrzej had finally moved into a flat together, but now it was Kate and Andrzej who wandered round the flower market, Andrzej teaching Kate songs about the frontier, along which ‘the corn is so green, oh so green, that a man may pass through it unseen, all unseen’.
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Meanwhile Christine was left lecturing one of her few other female friends in the city on how ‘you have to love a man so much you don’t mind … helping with his gammy leg, or giving him an enema’.
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(Andrzej was still driving huge numbers of men out of the country, and as security tightened he was often forced to walk long distances to make contact with his smugglers, causing terrible problems with his leg, which had received no medical attention since the start of the war.) But if some of the romantic spark had gone, Christine’s relationship with Andrzej was still deeper and more intimate than any she would enjoy with any other man.

At the end of September 1940, as the situation in Hungary worsened and Wehrmacht officers started lingering ever more territorially over their coffee in Budapest’s railway stations, Christine and Andrzej began to amass information on troop and freight movements through the country. At the request of the British they organized surveillance of all the main rail, road and river traffic, particularly noting the build-up of the frontier guards on the borders with Romania and Germany. Christine was later credited with sabotaging communications on the main Danube river route, as well as providing vital information on oil transports to Germany from Romania’s Ploie
ş
ti oilfields.
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Both she and Andrzej also distributed British arms and explosives to exiled Poles in Hungary and in Poland itself, and on at least one occasion that autumn made good use of the weapons themselves.
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Incensed at seeing Romanian petrol being shipped via Hungary into Austria, Andrzej and a friend limpet-mined some of the barges on the Danube one night, swimming out into the icy river with the heavy magnetized mines while Christine, who could not swim, waited impatiently, with Andrzej’s leg, in their fastest available car. The barges later blew up spectacularly too far from port to be salvaged.
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By now even Sir Owen had overcome his dislike for SOE sabotage work. Deeply impressed, he would later claim that Christine ‘had a positive nostalgie [
sic
] for danger … [and] could do anything with dynamite, except eat it’.
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But such proceedings could not go unnoticed. Polish intelligence were filing reports on their activities, but Andrzej was also under more hostile and almost constant German surveillance. Soon the Nazis began to pressure the Hungarians to arrest him. Fortunately Andrzej had developed excellent relations with some influential Hungarian officials, and when he was arrested for a third time the police released him with the strong advice that he leave the country. Not long afterwards several other members of his network were arrested and interrogated. Realizing that they had been infiltrated, Andrzej discovered that one of his newer recruits had been seen talking with a member of the German Embassy. He started to feed the man false information and, when he was sure, felt no compunction about calling on a group of Hungarian thieves sympathetic to the Poles to look after his ‘inquisitive friend’.
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Having got the informant paralytically drunk on slivovitz while they knocked back water, the thieves left him on the nearest public bench. He was found stiff and dead the next morning after a night when temperatures reached minus 20, his body giving off the distinct smell of bitter almonds from the plum kernels in the slivovitz.

At the start of October 1940 a Musketeer courier arrived from Poland with news that sixteen British pilots and airmen were hiding, as they spoke no Polish, in a Warsaw ‘asylum for the deaf and dumb’.
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Christine at once asked the British for the money and backing she would need to go to Poland and lead the men out. Fears for the men’s safety grew as rumours circulated that Hitler was planning to implement ‘mercy killings’ of the disabled, but Christine was urged to wait until the November snows, which would reduce the effectiveness of the frontier patrols and enable her to ski across more easily. ‘I waited for five weeks’, Christine later reported, before deciding that if the British would not help, ‘I would do it myself.’
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Christine finally left on 13 November, accompanied by Father Laski.
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They chose a more easterly route than the one she had taken with Wladimir, over the high Czarnahora, now in the Ukraine, and she carried Ukrainian identity papers made out in a false name, along with $500. By the time she reached the Warsaw asylum, five days later, she found that, amid growing fears that Hungary was about to join the Axis, the Polish underground had decided not to risk the old escape route. As a result the airmen had been taken into the Russian-occupied zone of Poland, and through Kiev into Russia itself. Soon after two of them reappeared in Warsaw, with the news that the Russians had handed the others over to the Germans. Christine was now asked to bring these last two pilots out, but they were too exhausted to travel. Instead she handed them over to the Musketeers with $200 to pay for a doctor and sanctuary for three weeks, before they could be taken over the border. It was Father Laski who finally got them to Budapest, where he made contact with Kate O’Malley. Sir Owen was having an after-lunch nap when his daughter told him she had two RAF pilots who needed to be taken south over the border. ‘Body-smuggling was generally taken to be below the dignity of a British diplomat, and contrary to HMG’s regulations to boot’, Wladimir noted when he heard of the incident, but Sir Owen nevertheless agreed to help them.
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Having hastily provided the pilots with passports and visas under the rather conspicuous names of Hardy and Willis, Sir Owen took them to Belgrade listed as members of his staff.
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Christine had not been able to wait for them because she had been asked to take a large consignment of urgent information to Budapest. The bulkiest item was an Anglo-Russian dictionary with a special code, call signs and wavelengths hidden inside its pages. Going against the usual security precautions, she was also given a detailed description of the number and locations of radio stations in Poland, and instructions for how to establish regular direct radio communications between Warsaw and London at specified times, using the information in the dictionary. Witkowski must have been short of couriers to entrust both of these documents to the same person, but that was not all Christine was carrying. She had the formulae for two new gases being produced by the Germans, and a second report which, in her own words, provided ‘further up to date information on ammunition factories in Germany and Poland, detailed plans of aerodromes, aircraft factories, the number of planes which existed in Poland, details of torpedoes, U-boats and a new torpedo invention’.
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The extraordinary detail of the intelligence had been provided by sixteen engineers placed among the Polish workers forcibly sent to Germany to work in munitions factories and at railway stations. Like almost all the information Christine brought out, these reports had been photographed onto 35mm film, the rolls of which she carried inside her gloves.

Christine had also made the time to undertake some personal missions while she was in Poland. Andrzej had written a letter for his mother, Maria, which Christine delivered to her at Zamosc, in the south-east of the country. She also wrote to her Skarbek cousins, giving them the first definite, if circumspect, information they had had about their father since the fall of France.
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Despite the risks, Christine also visited her own mother again, who told her that her brother had been arrested by the Gestapo. Once again, she tried, vainly, to persuade Stefania to leave Poland, or at least Warsaw and her work as a teacher in a clandestine school. Strive as she might, she could not persuade her mother of the very real danger she faced. Stefania was convinced that her social status as a Skarbek would protect her – in a society that had never really accepted her, and which was now disintegrating. The ghetto, bordered on one side by the empty building of the former Goldfeder bank, now enclosed in less than one and a half square miles over 400,000 people, nearly a third of Warsaw’s population, mainly Jews. Were Stefania to be discovered living outside the ghetto she could be shot instantly. She could also be shot just for giving classes. When the Gestapo discovered that secret lessons were taking place in another Warsaw flat, ‘they seized all of them’, an underground officer wrote, ‘and hanged them straight away from a balcony in Leszno Street’.
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Determined to protect her mother, Christine spoke to Witkowski about her, and also sought out her father’s old friend Stanisław Rudziejewski, the young war hero whose odorous feet had so offended the fine ladies at the Warsaw opera twenty years before. Stanisław had been sent to a camp in Latvia in 1939, from which he had been rescued by his wife Irena, just before his unit was transferred to the Russian forests near Katyn. A forester by trade, both he and Irena had now joined the Polish resistance, and Christine asked them if they would hide Stefania in their isolated forest house until she could get her out.
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After some discussion they agreed, but Stefania was obdurate. Still blindly clinging to the belief that as an aristocrat she would be safe, she refused to abandon Warsaw, her Goldfeder relatives locked inside the ghetto, and her pupils. Christine could win the confidence and financial support of the British, she could secure the devotion of Polish officers working both in and outside the official resistance, she could even talk a Gestapo officer into carrying a ‘black-market package’ for her, but she could not persuade her Jewish mother to leave Nazi-occupied Poland. To Christine’s profound distress, Stefania disappeared a year later, having been arrested by the Gestapo and confined in Warsaw’s infamous Pawiak prison.

It was a bitter irony that Pawiak had been built in the 1830s to the design of Fryderyck Skarbek, prison reformer, godfather of Chopin – and Christine’s ancestor. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland, Pawiak was turned into a Gestapo jail, its name becoming ‘a spectre’ throughout Warsaw, according to one Polish underground army officer.
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Roughly 100,000 men and 200,000 women passed through the prison during the course of the war, mostly members of the resistance, political prisoners and civilians taken as hostages in street round-ups. Of these, 37,000 would die there.

The prison’s records provide a stark picture of what Pawiak was like when Stefania arrived there on 31 January 1942: the last known trace of her. Fifty-six people, including five family groups, had arrived at the prison the day before, and only ten left, including a child ‘transported to the city morgue’.
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Stefania was one of four new arrivals, and as a Jew she would have received harsher treatment than the resistance suspects, hostages, POW fugitives and smugglers that comprised most of the rest of the inmates, but conditions were very poor for all of them. Pawiak’s cells were dirty, cold, dark, crammed with people and riddled with vermin. Windows – where the cells had any at all – were generally covered, further limiting access to light and air. Prisoners slept on planks or straw mattresses, and buckets served as the only toilets. There was no soap or water. Meals supplied only a few hundred calories a day, so most prisoners were starving. Routine maltreatment ranged from beatings to forced walks across glowing cinders. Disobedience led to solitary confinement, or immediate execution.
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For most inmates, Pawiak was a stop preceding deportation to the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, Stutthof, Majdanek, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald or Gross-Rosen, but there is no evidence that Stefania was sent to a camp. Thousands of Pawiak prisoners, mainly members of the Polish intelligentsia, were executed by the Nazis, and it is likely that Stefania was among these, possibly killed by machine gun in the Palmiry forests just outside the city, or otherwise dying of disease or starvation in the prison itself. She was in her mid-sixties.