by Clare Mulley
The guards insisted that they unpack every piece of their luggage, including the petrol cans, and that it was all taken to a shed at the customs post. There they went through everything, even the powder in Christine’s compact. They found nothing, but were still not satisfied and told Andrzej to bring the tyres from the car. It was now raining hard, but despite the severe pain in his leg, Andrej had no option but to fetch and then refit each of the tyres. Christine was incensed, but refused to give the guards the pleasure of showing it. Then she found a subtle revenge. One of the guard dogs, a fierce Alsatian, snarled and lunged at Andrzej whenever he came back into the hut, making the guards roar with laughter. Christine went up to the dog, soothed it with a few quiet words, put her hand on its head and waited for it to look up at her. Then she sat down, cross-legged, beside the animal, and started scratching its ears while it contentedly pawed her – to the guards’ undisguised dismay. The following day, after endless phone calls to the Bulgarian police headquarters in Sofia, the border guards finally agreed to raise the barrier and let them through. Halfway across no-man’s-land, Christine asked Andrzej to stop the car. To his astonishment she got out, and stood there, in the rain, whistling. Suddenly the Alsatian bolted from his handler and bounded up to Christine, nuzzling her face when she knelt down to him. It was a small triumph, but satisfying. Friends later said that she flirted with animals as she flirted with men, exercising an uncanny power over both.35 After enjoying the moment she sent the dog back, but it would not be the only trained patrol dog she would subvert in her wartime career.
On the Turkish side of the border it was the Opel that stole all the attention. One of the customs officials, complete with rifle and bayonet, climbed in to escort them through before confiscating the car. Andrzej was loath to part with his car but he and Christine were both exhausted, and eventually he agreed to swap it for a receipt and a taxi to take them to the Park Hotel in Pera, the historic heart of Istanbul, recommended by Aidan Crawley. Here they washed, ate and slept, ‘diving’, Andrzej later wrote, ‘into the blessings of idleness’.36
Some time later Christine looked out of her hotel window to see old Istanbul rising steeply from the crowded waters of the Golden Horn. Another agent who stayed at the Park described the view of ‘the great mosques of Bayazid and Suleiman surrounded by a maze of houses … straight in front rose the six minarets of the mosque of Sultan Ahmet and beside it the vast dome of Santa Sofia. From there the ground ran down to the exquisite Seraglio Palace jutting out into the sea … Then … across the gleaming blue of the Marmara, lay the coast of Asia with Scutari guarding the entrance to the Bosphorus and the mountain of Chamblidja above it’.37 Not everyone was struck by Istanbul’s beauty, however. Crawley thought that, apart from some picturesque old wooden houses along the Bosphorus, the city’s architecture was ‘ugly and without character’.38 But, for once, Christine found it hard to drag herself away.
While Western Europe was being torn apart, in Istanbul things seemed strangely calm. The great domes and minarets piercing the mist on the Sea of Marmara, the regular refrain of the calls to prayer echoing and anchoring the streets sellers’ cries, combined with Turkey’s refusal to be directly drawn into the war, lent the city an air of immutability. At the same time, Istanbul was living up to its historic reputation as a centre of international intrigue. Hardly a nation involved in the war went unrepresented in the cafés along the Bosphorus or in the hotel registers of Pera. Germans and Italians, British, French and Russians passed in the same narrow streets, avoided the same stray dogs, bought books and ordered drinks, olives and Marmara mackerel in the same shops and restaurants.
Christine’s SOE records state only that ‘in Istanbul she assisted our Polish Section in their courier and contact work’.39 ‘We are waiting for all sorts of answers’, she wrote to Kate, but in general things were going well.40 Her first priority was to ensure that the courier routes to Poland were maintained, and that up-to-date information and funds were sent back to the Musketeers. Polish refugees often came through Istanbul on their way to join the Polish army in the Middle East, or to offer their services to Britain, and she soon received a further consignment of microfilm. She and Andrzej set about meeting as many Polish and British contacts as they could. Among them was a young oil engineer, Alfred Gardyne de Chastelain, or ‘Chas’ as Christine soon knew him. As SOE’s man in Bucharest, de Chastelain had been responsible for trying to sabotage Romanian oil supplies to the Third Reich. He was now running the Istanbul office, and was still engaged in sabotage. This time his targets were the warehouses full of Axis equipment, and Italian tankers docked on the Bosphorus, which were taking Romanian oil to the German armies in Greece. Crawley soon joined his team, having fled Bulgaria the day the Germans arrived in Sofia, but not before he had secretly photographed the most high-ranking Nazi arrivals at the airport. The other British Embassy staff from Sofia followed.
Although Christine and Andrzej’s work was still risky, being in Istanbul had removed them from the front line of the war. Christine’s biggest headache was where to hold meetings in the city without attracting the attention of the Turkish police, or of the German and Italian secret services. Most of the hotels were under surveillance, along with the SOE base housed in the former servants’ quarters of what once had been the British Embassy to the Ottoman Empire. She and Andrzej were also still being watched by Polish intelligence in Istanbul. Accordingly Christine would meet her contacts among the groups of European sightseers that still resolutely gathered in the courtyards of the mosques, on pleasure boats, or over little dishes of meze in the many cafés along the banks of the Bosphorus. This gave her plenty of time to regain her strength, soaking up the sun while wandering the streets of the old city, watching the wild birds flying in the great dome of Santa Sofia, or exploring the city’s huge covered bazaar. In March she sent Kate O’Malley a bracelet to protect her from the evil eye, along with a rosary that, she wrote, ‘smells like an old cathedral’ for her father.41 In the evenings she and Andrzej would go to diplomatic or journalists’ parties, or dancing in the city’s nightclubs, happily checking the seals on the bottles they ordered in case of German skulduggery.
Although Christine was having a wonderful time, Andrzej was feeling rather less comfortable. It was not the Nazis in Istanbul that bothered him, as much as the thought that Christine’s husband, the redoubtable Jerzy Giżycki, was on his way. Even the most hardened SOE officers found Jerzy intimidating: de Chastelain later described him as both the most difficult and the most capable man he had ever met, undoubtedly charming but ‘with chilly grey eyes in which a smile never appeared’.42
On arrival in Istanbul on 17 March 1941, Jerzy was given Christine’s address by his new SOE bosses. ‘She was glad to see me, she responded to my kisses, yet something was wrong’, he wrote.43 A very nervous Andrzej now met Jerzy for the first time since he had bought a pair of his old skis in pre-war Zakopane. Jerzy later claimed to have immediately understood the dynamics of the situation. ‘They were lovers and we had to part’, he wrote, before adding cryptically that ‘knowing my wife, I was sure that sex played a very small part in her decision or, even, no part at all’. While it is possible that he was simply protecting his own vanity, his last comment on the whole affair was certainly extremely generous. Andrzej was ‘an upright, fine man’, Jerzy wrote, adding that he obviously felt rotten about the whole mess. ‘I told him not to take it hard, that it was not his fault but the war’s, and that I understood how it had all happened.’44 In fact it seems likely that, at this point at least, Christine coolly kept Jerzy in the dark about the true nature of her relationship with Andrzej. There were certainly fireworks later. For now, however, Jerzy agreed to take over Christine’s former role as the British contact in Budapest for the Polish underground, and she and Andrzej spent some days briefing him.
Jerzy was given a British passport in the name of Gordon Norton, Norton being the name of a cowboy he had particularly admired in the American West twenty y
ears earlier, and a diplomatic pouch with secret documents to be delivered to the British Legation in Belgrade at his first stop. Having enjoyed the charms of Belgrade, although the girls were ‘a little on the hefty side’ for his full approval (Christine’s slender figure still setting the standard), he caught the train to Budapest, arriving on 1 April.45 Here he spent a week posing as a cipher clerk in Sir Owen O’Malley’s Legation, while being further briefed by Sir Owen’s daughter Kate. With an open-ended budget from the War Office, and the help of Helena Marusarz, the sister of the Olympic skier who had previously worked with Christine, and herself ‘a very pretty girl with lots of spunk’, Jerzy then helped to smuggle people and information out of Poland, and British money, a wireless set, codes, propaganda and explosives back in.46 Recognizing the ‘extremely hazardous’ nature of this work, the British put him forward for the King’s Medal for Service.*47 The situation was indeed getting more dangerous by the day. Helena Marusarz was caught on a return trip to Poland, and shot on the spot. Not long afterwards Jerzy learned that, for reasons he never discovered, one of his three sisters, and her children, had all been murdered by the Nazis in what is now the Ukraine. From that moment, the war became at once both deeply personal and almost unbearable. ‘His rage against the Germans has now reached a pitch where he would do almost anything to deal them a blow’, his SOE handler reported.48
The war was escalating fast across the Balkans. Having watched Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria slide towards alliance with Hitler, Yugoslavia’s regent, Prince Paul, succumbed to pressure to join the Axis on 25 March. Two days later a popular military coup, encouraged and supported by SOE agents in Belgrade, replaced him with the anti-Axis king Peter II. ‘Hitler was stung to the quick’, Winston Churchill later recorded rather proudly in his history of the war.49 At 7 a.m. on 6 April, hundreds of turtle doves suddenly started ‘circling in agitated manoeuvres’ above Belgrade: the Luftwaffe had begun saturation-bombing the city.50 Hitler had been so enraged by the Yugoslav coup that he launched the campaign, code-named ‘Operation Punishment’, without a declaration of war, or even waiting for talks with the new government.51 Caught by surprise, Belgrade’s residents huddled in cellars, school basements and the bars of hotels. The British Minister reportedly took shelter under the grand piano in his drawing room. Some 4,000 civilians were killed, many buried in the rubble, and the country’s key communications were destroyed. Despite a courageous defence, Yugoslavia could not stop Hitler’s Panzer divisions streaming in through Hungary. Eleven days later, the country surrendered and was immediately divided between its German, Hungarian and Italian invaders.
Britain formally broke off relations with Hungary the day after the invasion of Yugoslavia, and Jerzy was evacuated with the rest of the British Legation staff on 11 April 1941. While travelling through Soviet-occupied Polish territory he telegraphed Istanbul, asking Christine to wait for him there.52 But when he returned to Istanbul in late May, Christine – and Andrzej – had gone. His earlier telegram had been received as, ‘Please notify Granvil [sic] not to wait’.53 Jerzy was furious, convinced that the text had been changed deliberately. Nevertheless, he kept working, contacting the Budapest network through the Polish radio he had supplied. He also volunteered to be sent into Poland or Russia, but the British declined to use him in either country. Finally, believing that he was being poisoned by pro-German White Russian waiters in his favourite Turkish restaurant, Jerzy agreed to move on to Cairo.
The Budapest network continued to operate effectively for some time, working directly with the official Polish Intelligence Service.54 Father Laski kept the courier routes open under the cover of getting information on the persecution of the Church in Poland, with the unwitting help of an ecclesiastical office providing religious and social support to Polish refugees. He was arrested in October 1941 and died in a Nazi concentration camp in Poland. Michal ‘Lis’ Gradowski, ‘the Fox’, was caught trying to cross into Yugoslavia but escaped by jumping from a moving train. Managing to pass himself off as a Baltic German baron of Estonian nationality, he found himself entertained in a German airfield mess in Belgrade, where he was able to observe all the aircraft. He then accepted a lift to Istanbul from the German consul. In the early morning of the day he arrived Christine introduced Gradowski to de Chastelain, who enlisted him formally into SOE while still in his pyjamas.55 Marcin Lubomirski and Andrzej’s personal assistant, Antoni Filipkiewicz, continued to support the ‘exfiltration’ of British POWs from Poland, sometimes temporarily hiding the men in their homes. It was only in 1944 that the Gestapo broke the organization, with tragic results.56 The eight key remaining circuit members were all arrested. Only Lubomirski and Filipkiewicz would survive their incarceration in Mauthausen concentration camp, being released in 1945. The other six met their deaths in the gas chambers. ‘They were the best of the bunch,’ a report in the SOE files notes, but ‘as none of them has … any surviving relatives, posthumous awards in this case would seem to have no point.’57
Not long after Jerzy left for Budapest, Christine and Andrzej moved on to Cairo, where the British had a regional command base. They had somehow secured visas to travel through pro-Vichy Syria and Lebanon, then part of the French Mandate. According to SOE files, it was at the time possible to buy Hungarian, Bulgarian and German passports and visas ‘in blanco’ in Istanbul.58 On the other hand SOE specified that ‘only travel with a genuine passport is recommended. Other methods are still in the experimental stage, or are so hazardous as to be impractical’.59 In Andrzej’s account it was Christine who secured the visas, fluttering her eyelashes at the Vichy officials in the French consulate. The apparent ease with which she did so later caused a great deal of speculation about her contacts, but at the time Andrzej was more worried about retrieving his Opel from the Turkish authorities. A hefty bribe finally reunited them, and Christine and Andrzej were able to set off. When they stopped briefly at the British Embassy in Ankara they met Julian Amery. A British agent, who like Aidan Crawley later became an MP, Amery described Christine as ‘one of the gentlest looking girls I have ever met’, and found it hard to credit her with some of the exploits that had already earned her a fine reputation in intelligence circles.60 In mid-May, Christine and Andrzej quietly crossed into Syria.
Having wrapped up in coats and gloves as they drove through the wintry Balkans, Christine and Andrzej now wound down the Opel’s windows to try to catch the sea breeze as they drove through Syria on the narrow coastal road towards Beirut. Andrzej cursed the oppressive heat but Christine turned her face to the sun. Stopping in villages, or beside golden fields darkened by purple thistles and deadly nightshade, they lingered over figs, goats’ cheese, baklava, and local wine, soaking up the views of the Mediterranean and the crusader castles that dominate the Lebanese coast. At one point they stopped in silent admiration to watch thousands of storks gathering to migrate north, before pressing on in the opposite direction, the Opel sparkling in the heat, its chrome fittings too hot to touch. As they drew closer to Beirut, the monotony was broken by Christine’s shrieks whenever she saw a dog or cat dart across the road, until she became ‘almost hysterical’ if she thought one had strayed too close to their wheels, though Andrzej swore he always swerved in time.61 Once they reached the city, they headed for the St George’s Hotel, only to find it full of smartly dressed German officers. Seeing their British passports, the receptionist loudly offered them the best rooms at the standard rate, and Andrzej spent the whole night expecting to be murdered.
Next day they started early for Palestine. Unable to face the long hot queue at the border controls, Andrzej revved the Opel and made a final break for freedom. They were stopped by the police, of course, but when they handed over their passports the officers saluted them. The British authorities in Turkey had sent word that they were to be expected and they were quickly furnished with ration books, petrol coupons, and a room in a hotel in Haifa, on the northern slope of the great plateau of Mount Carmel. In the morning Christine insisted o
n taking some time to walk barefoot on the beach, curling her toes and smiling for Andrzej’s camera, and, with her tanned skin and dark sunglasses, looking as carefree as any tourist anywhere. Eventually Andrzej dragged her back to the car, and they followed the rising tide of military traffic moving towards Jerusalem. Now it was Andrzej’s turn to be the tourist, marvelling at ‘the weight of history which seemed to seep from the very stones’ of the ancient city.62
Having checked in with the British authorities, headed here by the sociable Peter Porter, Christine and Andrzej felt they could finally relax for a while. Christine arranged to meet Zofia Raczkowska, the sister of her journalist friend, Florian Sokolow. Like Florian, and their father Nahoum Sokolow, Zofia was a great advocate for an independent Israel, and she had toured Palestine for several years, promoting the Zionist cause. Andrzej and Christine also met Zofia’s twenty-year-old son, who was active in the Jewish underground, and many of their local comrades, as well as British military personnel and civilians working for the British civil service in Palestine. Even as the war against the Nazis continued, tensions were growing between the Jewish underground, fighting for a future state of Israel, and the British authorities, who had still not endorsed the idea. The British were well aware that Zionists were successfully smuggling arms into Palestine, but as Gladwyn Jebb told the head of SOE, ‘we simply cannot afford to alienate the Jews at this particular moment’.63 Despite, or perhaps partly because of, Poland’s own historic anti-Semitism, the Poles were more supportive of the idea of a Jewish state and had provided finance and training for Jewish insurgents since the 1930s. Half-Jewish, Polish, but working for the British, Christine must have had some interesting evenings at Zofia’s house in the hills overlooking Jerusalem. All Andrzej recorded of this time, however, was that she ‘fell in love with the family dogs, two fine boxers, which we used to take for drives’.64