by Clare Mulley
A talented linguist and socially adept, by the 1920s, when he was in his thirties, Jerzy was established as a secretary in the newly opened Polish Legation in Washington, developing a new interest in intrigue. ‘The activities of our legation had no secrets for me,’ he later boasted, ‘I was the only one … who had the key to the safe where we kept our codebook.’9 Jerzy would always maintain warm links with Polish diplomatic circles, but after a few years of conspiracy, and regular tennis matches with the Ambassador, Prince Kazimierz Lubomirski, he left the service to visit New York and London. There he joined the team preparing for Poland’s first national participation in the Olympics. In 1924, carrying a huge Polish flag, he led the athletes into the Paris Olympic stadium. The following year he took part in an expedition to West Africa, acting as secretary and photographer to the Polish explorer Anton Ossendowski. It was a trip that instilled a deep love of Africa in him, and that led to the first of a series of books. Having done his part to contain the local elephant population, and contracted malaria, Jerzy felt he could tick off the main safari activities, and returned to Poland in 1932.
But Poland disappointed him. It was ten years since the heroic war with Russia that had followed the First World War, but Marshal Piłsudski’s peace had not brought the economic stability or social improvements that Jerzy, like so many Poles, had expected. A natural enemy of conformity, he began to criticize the country’s leaders and formed a brief friendship with General Sikorski, who, since Piłsudski’s coup in May 1926, had been unpopular among the political elite and who Jerzy felt had been particularly ‘shabbily treated’.10 In between games of tennis, and escorting Sikorski’s daughter, Zofia, to her riding lessons, the two men discussed the future of their country, and the roles that each might play in it. But despite this friendship, Jerzy found Warsaw life ‘normal, uneventful … and devoid of excitement and emotional elements’. He soon moved on again, to Zakopane and what he called his ‘beloved Tatra Mountains’.11
Jerzy knew the Carpathian mountain range well, having spent some months skiing them with his mother and three sisters when he should have been studying engineering. He now settled down to ski some more, hike, write, and socialize with the great and the good who came to stay in Zakopane. Although independently wealthy, Jerzy was unable to resist the call of the Polish Foreign Office, and at one point he spent ten months in Ethiopia ostensibly as consul, but secretly to report back on the possibilities for Polish colonialism on the basis of the Italian experience.* After a brief stop in Rome, where he added another language to his collection while fraternizing with the local business, diplomatic and intelligence communities, Jerzy returned to Poland.12 While he was never entirely settled, Zakopane would remain his base until the Second World War.
‘My constant companion there was Countess Krystyna Skarbek’, Jerzy later wrote in his memoirs. ‘Excellent horse-woman, fair skier, and the most intrepid human being I have ever met – man or woman.’13 In those days the wooden skis, buckled on with leather straps, weighed a ton, and without steel edges they would slide almost uncontrollably across ice. Story has it that Christine lost control of her skis during a perilous descent in a blizzard so fierce that the forest trees ‘rose and bowed in waves as though a field of wheat’.14 Jerzy, who, though approaching fifty, was nearly six foot tall and as strong as an ox, reached out and literally grabbed hold of her. One account even has him saving her with a lasso, catching her like a heifer on the American plain, before whisking her off for some vodka to steady her nerves.15 However he did it, and despite being nearly twenty years her senior, once Jerzy had caught Christine he refused to let her go.
Intelligent, financially and emotionally secure, well connected and patriotic but not hugely political, Jerzy neither needed nor wished for anything in life except to satisfy his appetite for freedom and adventure. He had spent half a century avoiding commitments of any kind: study, work, political party membership, alcohol except in moderation, and relationships. ‘Fortunately there were no women on the ranch,’ he had pronounced as a young cowboy, ‘so we lived peacefully and harmoniously.’16 But Christine was not only young, sporty and very attractive, with good legs, bone structure, posture and deportment: she was also possibly the only person in Poland less domesticated than Jerzy. He was sunk. Theirs was not a one-sided affair though. Jerzy was the only man other than her father who ever dominated Christine, and she would later refer to him as her ‘Svengali’.17 Like Count Skarbek, Jerzy was a handsome, powerful and popular figure, larger than life and not a man to be easily contained, but unlike the count he was intellectually rigorous and had no regard for convention, or prejudice, of any kind. ‘We liked each other, and despite some considerable difference in our ages, we became lovers’, Jerzy recorded simply. ‘Then we got married.’18 In fact Christine did not marry Jerzy until November 1938, at Warsaw’s Evangelical Reformed Church, by which time their relationship was well established.*
Christine and Jerzy made a charismatic couple, and both before and after their marriage were regular guests at Zakopane’s many parties, which were attended by a wide circle – including well-brought-up young women from ‘good homes’ who enjoyed the thrill of mingling with authors, journalists and politicians. With Jerzy in a good humour, Christine’s confidence sailed high, and she enjoyed winning over any audience. And if his mood grew dark or bullying, or simply when she got bored, Christine could just as effectively withdraw, in time developing the useful ability to blend into a room that she had captivated only moments before.
Both essentially restless, when they tired of Zakopane, Jerzy and Christine travelled through Poland, calling in at parties and press clubs in Warsaw, Kraków and Cieszyn, where Jerzy introduced her to writers, painters, and the Diplomatic Corps. It was about this time that the first rumours began to surface that the unfathomable Christine was working for British intelligence. Then they headed to Europe, Christine finding a use for her most sultry Miss Polonia photograph in her new passport. Long months were spent in Paris, then they travelled across France to Switzerland where, having broken his collarbone in an accident, Jerzy wrote books and visited clubs, while Christine improved her skiing, perfected her French, and played at being a journalist. The peripatetic but moneyed lifestyle suited her, and she wallowed in the freedom she now enjoyed. Routine domesticity would never have suited her. She was happy, and despite the pleasure she got from mixing in a more intellectual and international set, she gave little impression of paying any attention to Jerzy’s heated arguments about the rise of fascism, the pros and cons of Poland’s various international alliances, or the developing crisis in Europe in general.
Towards the end of 1938, the Polish Foreign Office once again called on Jerzy’s services, this time to open a consulate in Kenya with responsibility for Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and Zanzibar (now Tanzania), and Nyassa (now a province of Mozambique), which together formed a territory about the size of Western Europe. Jerzy was to serve his country as a senior diplomat in a colonial state full of European émigrés and upper-class British officers, lending an aristocratic tone to the white settlements flourishing on the revenue from tea and coffee plantations. Christine was not perfect diplomatic-wife material: she was too edgy and unpredictable for that; but, determined, attractive and increasingly socially adroit, she was definitely an asset in the male world of diplomacy. Despite Jerzy’s concerns about colonialism, with his love of Africa and Christine’s love of luxurious adventure it must have seemed an ideal future for them.
Their first stop was London, where, while waiting for the official formalities to be concluded, they spent some weeks accepting Embassy invitations and catching up with friends from across Europe. But while Jerzy was in his element, Christine began to feel claustrophobic – their relationship was increasingly intense and demanding. She started to spend more time with friends of her own such as Florian Sokolow, the London correspondent of the Warsaw Press, and son of the Zionist leader Nahoum Sokolow, who had been ‘very fond’ of Christine.19 As
Florian had his hands full, being attached to the BBC, the Warsaw Press, and also contributing to Zionist papers, Christine even overrode her dislike of office work to offer him some secretarial support while she was in London.20 As a result, and perhaps for the first time, she began to consider the alternatives open to Polish Jews, the growing anti-Semitism that faced them across Europe, and the attractions of Palestine.
After some weeks in London, Jerzy and Christine finally boarded a steamship to South Africa, Jerzy overseeing the safe stowing of the British estate car, fitted with extra petrol tanks, that was to take them the 2,500 miles from Cape Town to Nairobi. On arrival in South Africa they spent some time with the Polish consul general before heading north. Like Jerzy before her, Christine now found that the wide horizons of South Africa quickly got into her blood. As winter faded into spring, the countryside came into its own. Once across the mountains north of Cape Town they were in the Karroo, ‘the land of great thirst’. These usually dry rolling plains would just have been bursting into flower as Christine and Jerzy drove between the few ranches in the shallow valleys. At one point some ranchers used their mules to pull the car through a river, swollen by the last of the winter season’s heavy rains. Some of the baggage got soaked but Christine just laughed, stretching her legs out to dry with their clothing in the sun as Jerzy tended to the car. They were making slow but mainly very pleasant progress.*
Having driven nearly 900 miles they reached Johannesburg, a city ‘full of Polish Jews’, Jerzy recorded, at the end of August 1939. On 1 September Hitler invaded Poland, without a declaration of war, on three different fronts, and with one and a half million troops. Two days later Britain, quickly followed by France, declared war on Germany, the only nations to take the initiative and not wait for a direct attack.
Although in 1934, the year before he died, Poland’s Marshal Piłsudski had signed a pact of mutual non-aggression with Hitler, within five years it had become clear that Germany coveted both Gdansk and Poland’s prosperous western territories. In March 1939 Britain gave Poland an assurance of support should their independence be threatened, and the two countries signed a treaty of mutual assistance in August that year. Unknown to them, that same month Germany and Russia signed a non-aggression pact, which included a secret protocol, detailing a new partition of Poland, and this now spurred Hitler into action.
In Poland the summer of 1939 had been long and hot, a last glorious hurrah before the country descended into a war for which they were ill prepared. The first reserves only began to receive their army summons towards the end of August, when call-ups started to arrive daily. One of Christine’s friends later remembered a romantic last view of ‘unploughed stubble in the fields, [which] shone in the golden sunlight’, before reporting for duty.21 This sense of nostalgia was percipient: they were leaving behind a young nation but one still proudly steeped in the traditions of centuries. The German invasion ended nearly twenty years of freedom and independence for Poland, but also a social structure that, for better or worse, would be completely destroyed.
Having received no instructions from the Polish Foreign Office after the German invasion, Jerzy and Christine turned their estate car round and headed back for Cape Town. Any dreams they might have had of a diplomatic role in the sunshine, and perhaps of land, freedom and horses, disappeared overnight. Despite their connections, like most Poles they were stunned by news of the German invasion, but unlike most they were over 5,000 miles from home and unable to play any role in the defence of their country. The return drive was miserable. Hot, exhausted, shocked, terrified for his country, and in a rage at his own impotence, the worst side of Jerzy’s domineering character came to the fore, and Christine, who could be equally fierce in her own distress, was no longer in a mood to humour him.
In Cape Town they sold the car and, after a frustrating wait, managed to buy passage on a mail steamship bound for Southampton.* It was, in Jerzy’s words, ‘the most nightmarish trip’.22 German submarines had been sighted along the western coast of Africa, so they were forced to travel in convoy, their speed set by the slowest cargo boat, and they stopped for days in different ports on the way. Every morning, news of the latest Polish defeats, and the rapid advance of the German Wehrmacht into Polish territory, was posted up on the ship’s bulletin board.
Germany had gained air supremacy within twenty-four hours of invading Poland, bombing both the Polish air force on the ground and targeted sites within Warsaw later the same day. Working through a well-prepared plan, key bridges were then destroyed, trains derailed and refugee columns strafed from the air. Polish troops mounted a constant attack, with some incredible acts of heroism against German armoured tanks, but the wonderful Indian summer worked against them. ‘Hitler’s weather’ they called it, while praying bitterly for rain to fill the marshes and hold up the German tanks.23 But the clear skies held, and by 6 September the Polish Command was forced to abandon its courageous defence of their frontiers. With a huge advantage in both numbers and technology, and few natural defences to impede their progress, Hitler’s Panzer divisions now rolled with relative ease across Poland’s plains.
Warsaw was surrounded within a fortnight. Under the terms of their agreement with Britain, Poland had been asked to hold out for two weeks before the Allies would launch a major offensive. Instead Britain’s only action was an air campaign that dropped thousands of ‘perfectly useless’ propaganda leaflets on German cities, and which as even the head of the British Mission to Poland, Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, raged, ‘had no physical effect on the Germans, and no moral effect’ on the Poles.24 Then, on 17 September, just as Poland was beginning to show signs of withstanding the German assault, the Soviet army crossed Poland’s eastern frontier ‘uninvited and unannounced’, and the Polish president, government and commander-in-chief were forced to cross the border into Romania to evade capture.25 Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, claimed to be taking measures to protect the Polish population, with the result that many Polish regiments welcomed Red Army troops only to be marched into Russia as prisoners: 181,000 in all. It was Poland, not Germany, that now faced a war on two fronts. Within a week of entering Warsaw, at the end of September, Wehrmacht troops were the victorious occupiers. Poland had been crushed between two invading armies, both better equipped and prepared for war than herself.
On 28 September, the day that the Polish capital fell after a brave defence mounted by both the military and civilians, the bulletin board on Jerzy and Christine’s ship announced: ‘Lost – a pair of lady’s pink panties. Lost – Warsaw’. ‘A sample’, Jerzy wrote bitterly, ‘of the famous British sense of humour.’26 Poland had lost at least 60,000 troops in the September battles, and many more civilians both in the fighting and in the campaign of terror that the SS Death’s Head Division now unleashed on the population while hunting down Jews and other ‘suspicious elements’. In the industrial town of Bydgoszcz, 800 individuals were immediately arrested and shot, the first victims a group of boy scouts aged twelve to sixteen.27 The figures were even more terrible in Warsaw. Jerzy had no idea what had happened to his mother and sisters, and Christine had had no news of her young Skarbek cousins, let alone her mother, who she could only hope had found shelter when needed in the basement of the nearby Prudential Building, or her brother Andrzej, who would certainly have joined the defence of his country.
By the time that Jerzy and Christine reached Britain, on 6 October 1939, Polish casualties were estimated at 200,000. Christine felt the humiliation of her country deeply, but although Poland was being brutally occupied, the Poles had never officially surrendered to the Nazis. The words of the national anthem, ‘Poland has not yet perished, so long as we still live’, must have been ringing in her head. There were no instructions waiting at the Polish Embassy in London, but sitting out the rest of the war in Britain was not an option that either Christine or Jerzy would countenance. It was too late to enlist in the army at home, but they could still offer their services abroad to hel
p defeat a common enemy.
Before 1939 few Poles knew much about Britain except that it had a large fleet and a vast colonial empire. Only the very well-to-do, like Christine and Jerzy, had visited. France, however, had long-standing political and cultural ties with Poland, dating chiefly from the Napoleonic era, and until June 1940 France was widely regarded as the most likely agent of Nazi Germany’s defeat. It was there that the Polish army was re-forming under the leadership of Jerzy’s old tennis partner General Sikorski, and there too, in Paris, that the fledgling Polish government-in-exile would soon be established. Jerzy travelled to France but, to his disgust, although he was on the reserve list, at over fifty and with several serious ski injuries behind him, he was rejected for military service. He tried to join a Red Cross unit in Paris, but was again rejected.
Christine was just as determined and impatient to help her country, but she too was barred from active service – because she was a woman. It would take her just a few weeks, however, to find a brave and innovative way around this seemingly insurmountable barrier. Unlike Jerzy, Christine would soon be employing her gift for languages, her adroit social skills, formidable courage and lust for life directly against the occupiers of her homeland.
3: HUNGARIAN EMBRACES
In December 1939 a ‘flaming Polish patriot … expert skier and great adventuress’, according to British Secret Service records, submitted a bold plan to ski into Nazi-occupied Poland from Hungary, via the Carpathian mountains. The patriot was Christine and her aim was to take British propaganda into Warsaw to bolster the Polish spirit of resistance at a time when many Poles believed they had been abandoned to their fate, and to return with intelligence on the Nazi occupation. ‘She is absolutely fearless,’ the report continued, before concluding rather pathetically, ‘she says the matter is urgent.’1