The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (9 page)

‘Well! Your Poles haven’t done much!’ Thus, General Ironside, then Chief of the General Staff, castigated Adrian Carton de Wiart when he finally arrived back in London after the Nazis had established their occupation of Warsaw. Having witnessed the determined and courageous response of both the Polish military and civilians during the September campaign, Carton de Wiart felt the remark was premature. Not least since the Poles had never officially surrendered. Knowing this, he replied quietly, ‘Let us see what others will do, sir.’

4: POLISH RESISTANCE

‘The wind swept like a sword across forest, plain and mountain’, a close friend and fellow British agent wrote, perhaps a little melodramatically, of the conditions that awaited Christine on her first journey to carry British propaganda into occupied Poland, at the end of February 1940. ‘Birds in the trees were frozen to the branches upon which they had slept … and there was blood on the snow to mark the passage of starving wolf-packs.’
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In fact Christine would encounter neither frozen birds nor starving wolves, but something much more disturbing – her first direct experience of the human cost of war.

In Budapest, Christine had introduced Andrzej to journalists, diplomats and, after Radziminski had been dismissed, the British secret service. Andrzej spoke no English but was ‘the only person I could trust’, Christine told her Section D bosses when they asked whom she would recommend to replace their lovesick agent.
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In turn Andrzej vouched for Christine to Janek Marusarz, a star of the Polish Olympic skiing team before the war, and now a mountain courier for the exiled Polish Military Attaché.
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Christine already knew Jan slightly from her own skiing days. Now she asked him to take her with him on his next journey into Slovakia, over the 2,000-metre-high Tatra Mountains, across the well-guarded Polish border, and down into Zakopane in occupied Poland. At first Jan thought she was joking. Then he thought she was insane. Not only was there a war on, it was the worst winter in living memory, with temperatures reaching minus 30 in the mountains and snow lying over four metres deep, often burying the few peasants’ huts. There were no ski-pistes, or any other kind of road, and the ski down into Poland would follow several days’ hike up the mountains on the other side of the border, carrying illicit documents, supplies, including a small primus stove, and skis. The journey was practically impossible even for him, Jan argued, and he seriously doubted it was something that Christine could survive. Andrzej backed him up, telling Christine to at least postpone her plans until the spring, but ‘such were her powers of persuasion’, he later reported, that within a few hours Jan had agreed to take her on his next trip, when his progress would be anyway slowed by a VIP that he had to escort across the border.
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A week later Andrzej drove Jan, his ‘VIP’ – known only as ‘Richard’ – and Christine, who was travelling under the name ‘Zofia Andrzejewska’ in honour of her lover, to Budapest’s Keleti station to catch a train to the Polish border. After a night in a safe house, the three travellers caught an early connection into Czechoslovakia, jumping out with their heavy wooden skis and poles just before the train reached the first station. Two days of climbing followed, with Christine at first stumbling along in Jan’s tracks, alternately wearing and carrying her skis. Soon she learnt to welcome the deadening monotony of regular movement, a rhythm that set the pace mechanically. Her companions looked somehow diminished, she noticed, huddled into themselves and climbing with minimal energy as if fearing that any more effort might expel the warm film of air from around their skin. It was so cold that Christine’s panting breaths hurt her throat and lungs and her fingers were frozen. Ice quickly formed on her clothes, the tendrils of hair that escaped her woollen cap, her eyebrows, eyelashes and even on the almost imperceptible down that grew above her top lip. That night they slept in their clothes, huddled together in a small wooden shelter, and rose early to keep climbing the next day.

Towards the end of the second afternoon they reached Cicha Dolina, the steep valley that, for centuries, traders, hunters and thieves had crossed to reach Zakopane. That evening a blizzard blew up. Jan led them to a hut where Christine and Richard collapsed at once, exhausted, onto a bed of pine branches, only temporarily surfacing to drink the hot sweet lemon tea that Jan made. A few hours later Christine was woken by the sound not of the gale itself, but of desperate human cries caught on the wind. She shook the men awake, but when they opened the door the gale filled the hut with freezing snow, and it was impossible to see anything or tell where the calls were coming from. Christine could not even hear the sound of her own voice as she shouted out into the dark, screaming that there was shelter, and Jan had to physically stop her from running out into the storm in which she would be lost in a moment. Richard helped to hold her back, terrified that she might alert Wehrmacht patrols to their hiding place.

The blizzard had blown over by morning, and it was so clear and bright that Christine felt that ‘the sharp contours of the High Tatras might at any minute leave a white scratch on the blue enamel of the sky’.
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They left early to make the most of the day, even though the near-perfect visibility made them vulnerable to border patrols. Halfway up the final ascent they found two rucksacks lying in the snow. Christine went through them but did not find any papers. A short distance further on they came across the bodies of a fair-haired girl and a young man. They lay in the lee of a mountain pine, huddled together, and clasping each other’s hands as if hoping this gesture of love might somehow protect them from the freezing blizzard. ‘Here are your Germans’, Christine said acidly. She covered the faces of the dead with pine branches and drew a cross in the snow above their heads. It was scant ceremony but all she could do.
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Christine was deeply shaken, and she, Jan and Richard finished their climb in silence. Later they heard that thirty people had died in the mountains that night, trying to cross out of Poland.
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German patrols would find so many bodies emerging from the thawing snow that spring that they would double their border guards the next winter.
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And yet, despite heavy losses, Polish couriers, including Christine, continued to carry secret messages sewn into the seams of their clothes, or parcels of explosives, money, radio transmitter parts or even microfilm across the mountains in both directions, throughout the war.

The sheer ski down to Zakopane provided Christine with some sense of release. Jan’s parents welcomed her like a daughter and, after eating, she slept for more than a day. In the morning she sent a postcard to Andrzej, which let him know she had survived the crossing. Then she set to work. As the only sizeable centre in the mountains, Zakopane was full of Wehrmacht officers who, when not patrolling the passes, had entirely taken over the Hotel Bristol where Christine had often dined with her first husband, Gustav Gettlich. Nevertheless she secretly met a number of old friends to secure their support, including several Zakopane highlanders who were already transporting people and money over the mountains.
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A few days later, dressed in fresh clothes, hair washed, lips painted, rucksack packed with a paper parcel of propaganda material, she was sitting on the train to Warsaw. Jan and ‘Richard’ had gone on ahead.

When Christine later recounted the story of this adventure, the given route was from Vienna to Kraków, a journey she never undertook during the war. Perhaps she was already being cautious about giving away too much information, but the gist of the tale was always the same. Realizing that armed guards were moving towards her, making spot-checks along the crowded train, she was growing increasingly uneasy about her bundle of papers. She considered her options: get rid of the documents, or jump out of the moving train with them before the next station. Neither seemed possible without drawing far too much attention, and certainly not when the compartment door opened and she was joined by a uniformed Gestapo officer. Christine gave him a quick, flirty, assessing look. Soon they were chatting away, and after a while she asked the officer if he would be kind enough to carry a black-market parcel of tea she was bringing to her sick mother. A parcel of tea might get her shot, but a packet of deeply incriminating papers would mean a brutal interrogation before the firing squad. Fortunately the officer was a gentleman and very willing to help: he put the parcel in his suitcase until they parted company at Warsaw central station.
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Christine, and her documents, had arrived.

The order and activity that met her at the station belied what lay ahead. Warsaw station had been left untouched by the Nazi bombing campaign, and trains still surged east carrying troops and ammunition into Poland, and westwards taking conscripted Polish workers back to Germany. Beyond the station, however, in the space of just six months, Poland’s capital had changed almost beyond recognition. On the elegant boulevards in the centre of the city there was now hardly an undamaged building. In several quarters whole streets of proud homes and public buildings had been completely destroyed, and the pavements were strewn with crumbling brickwork, the remnants of broken furniture poking through the snow, and piles of rubble through which paths had been cleared down to cellars used as storerooms or classrooms, to house secret printing presses and, more often, simply as dormitories for Warsaw’s inhabitants.

After just twenty years of independence, Poland had again been carved up by Germany to the west and Russia to the east, with a so-called ‘General Government’ zone, where Warsaw sat, between them. Martial law was enforced throughout, with execution or internment in concentration camps the only penal alternatives. In the German zones citizens were obliged to register with the Nazi authorities, who would rate them as either ethnically German, a German national within three generations, non-German but also non-Jewish, or a Jew. Within these groups people were ranked according to their work capacity and political loyalties, and given identity passes and ration cards that reflected their value to the Nazi regime: a German worker received 4,000 calories a day; a non-productive Jew was entitled to less than 200 or nothing, except starvation in the ghetto, which had been established in the autumn of 1940. There were shortages of petrol, salt, sugar, meat, clothes and fuel. Bread queues formed outside the bakeries long before dawn. Beef was reserved for Germans and any Pole caught with it could be executed. Any sign of resistance, such as sheltering a Jew or possession of a wireless set, was also punishable by death. Selective executions took place daily. These would later give way to indiscriminate shootings and hangings.

Once she reached Warsaw, Christine was supposed to blend in with the subdued inhabitants of the city, taking care to draw no special attention, before getting in touch with the organized resistance. Instead, shocked at the devastation the new regime had wreaked on the capital, she walked straight to her mother’s apartment. The city’s Jewish population had been separated from their Aryan neighbours almost immediately, but Stefania was still living in the undamaged suburban house that Christine and her brother had once shared with her, at 15 Rozbrat Street.

Confident in the protection of her aristocratic name, her conversion to Catholicism, and the fact that she spoke fluent German, Stefania refused to register as a Jew, preferring the risk of denunciation and arrest to life in the ghetto. From her mother, Christine learned that, having fought against the invading troops, her brother Andrzej, along with several of their cousins, had joined one of the clandestine Polish resistance groups that would later come together to form the official ‘Home Army’. In return Christine told her mother about her journey across the mountains and the bodies frozen in the snow, but did not speak about why she was back in Poland. She stayed with Stefania for two days, talking, crying, laughing and arguing as she begged her mother to leave the capital. On their third morning, Stefania insisted that they brave the streets together to light candles and pray at St Alexander’s Church in Three Crosses Square. Fearing that her continued presence was likely to place her mother in even greater danger, Christine then slipped away into the city.

‘Warsaw is the source of all our misfortunes’, wrote Hans Frank, the brutal governor general of German-occupied Polish territories. It was ‘the focus of all disturbances, the place from which discontent is spread through the whole country.’
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Frank, Hitler’s former legal adviser, had been appointed to his post in October 1939. By early 1940 he was waging a campaign of terror aimed at subduing the burgeoning Polish resistance and the population in general. According to Himmler, Poles were to be taught ‘to count to 500, to write their name, and to know that by divine order they owed obedience to the Germans’.
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The entire population lived in constant fear of arrest, torture, transportation or extermination. They were shot on almost any pretext, not just for hiding arms, defying the curfew or trading on the black market, but for anti-Nazi comments or failing to make way for a Wehrmacht soldier on the pavement. A policy of ‘Collective Responsibility’ had quickly been introduced, under which random Polish civilians were killed in reprisals for German deaths. The official reprisal rate was one hundred Polish lives for every German killed, but occasionally four times that rule was applied, with the names of the dead then broadcast in the streets.
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Confiding to a colleague that his ‘mission’ was to ‘finish off the Poles at all costs’, Frank boasted that he could not advertise the names of all the Poles he had to shoot because ‘the forests of Poland would not be sufficient to manufacture the paper’.
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But Polish resistance escalated in direct response to Nazi brutality, and soon Poland was statistically the most dangerous part of German-occupied territory, with Third Reich officers dreading postings to Warsaw in particular.
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