by Mary Nichols
‘You cannot fight for freedom or be reunited with your husband if you are dead, can you? If and when the war ends and you are still alive, then is the time to worry about the name you use.’
It was not as if changing identities was something unheard of. She knew it happened frequently. Taking the identity of a dead person had its risks because of the chance that relatives or people who had known them would turn up, but it was a risk the underground deemed worth taking in certain circumstances. A safer method was to use birth certificates of dead babies from twenty-odd years before. Priests in sympathy with the underground, and that was most of them, would find suitable ones in their registers and pass them on and with these a new identity was forged, work permits and ration cards obtained. Some underground workers had two or three of these, providing them with extra rations and different addresses, to which they could move in the event of searches.
‘What is her name?’ she asked.
‘Krystyna Nowak.’
‘What about her family?’
‘All dead. She was brought in by the janitor of the building where she lived. Her mother and sisters died in a bombing raid at the beginning of the war and her father was shot in a round of reprisals last year, so the man told me. She was living alone in the cellar which is all that’s left of the building.’
Rulka knew what that was like. Ever since she had buried her parents, she had lived in the bombed-out cellar of their home. There was no gas or electricity but thankfully the chimney still stood above the ruins of the building and she could light a fire in the grate, burning furniture and odd pieces of wood, not only what had been in the house but what could be dragged from elsewhere. Keeping warm was a major concern as well as keeping fed. The hospital, though damaged, still functioned and she availed herself of the opportunity to have a bath in the nurses’ quarters while she was there. Sometimes she was given food, sometimes she queued for hours for half a loaf of black bread.
‘What about the underground? You are not suggesting I should stop that work, are you?’
The Polish underground was the most organised of any of the occupied countries. It was a state on its own, answerable to the government-in-exile in London. It had a political wing, an army with a proper military hierarchy, medical staff, schools and university. Afraid of an educated population who could challenge them intellectually, the Germans had shut the schools, retaining only those producing skilled manual workers who could be useful to the Reich as labour. The Ministry of Education building in Szucha Street had been turned into the Gestapo headquarters. Nevertheless, the young people of Poland were being educated, usually by teachers and lecturers who had been turned out of their jobs. But the most important function of the underground army was sabotage, propaganda and the collection of intelligence to pass on to the Polish government in London. Communication between Warsaw and London was difficult, though not impossible, and agents, money and supplies had been parachuted in, but not nearly enough. Lech and Rulka had been involved from the start.
‘No, but how many of them know your real name anyway?’
‘I am not sure that any do. They know me as Myszka.’ Everyone used a code name without a surname for security’s sake and she had chosen Jan’s pet name for her: Mouse. Apart from one’s immediate superior there was no upward contact. No one at the lower level knew who was really running things. ‘How did my real name come to be mentioned?’
‘I don’t know. You have lived in Warsaw all your life, so perhaps someone recognised you on that last operation, an infiltrator or someone terrified out of their lives.’
‘Do you know who?’
‘No, but if it was an infiltrator, he or she will be rooted out and dealt with.’
She shuddered, knowing what that meant. ‘What about my job here? We’re short-staffed as it is.’
‘You can be replaced. Your life is more important.’
‘Very well.’ She sighed. ‘Rulka Grabowska dies and Krystyna Nowak lives – for the moment.’
He signalled to someone waiting outside the room to come in and take the body away and quickly filled in the death certificate. ‘Pneumonia’, he wrote as the cause of death, refraining from adding ‘starvation’. The little cortège had no sooner disappeared along the corridor than a new patient was wheeled in.
Why Rulka went to the mortuary when she went off duty she did not know; sympathy, she supposed, because there was no one else to mourn the girl and she was taking something precious from her. She found old Father Karlowicz kneeling beside Krystyna’s body, praying. Rulka dropped to her knees beside him, as he intoned a prayer for the dead.
‘Amen,’ he said, when he finished and crossed himself, but he did not immediately stand up. ‘Someone came to my church for confession this morning,’ he went on in the same sing-song murmur he had used to pray. ‘He needs help.’
‘Who is he?’
‘A British prisoner of war. He ran off from a stalag work party. He has been hiding in the forest.’
‘Are you sure he is genuine?’
‘I think so. Can you help him?’
‘What makes you think I can do anything?’
‘I don’t, but I hoped you could, or would know someone who can.’
‘Where is he?’
‘I’ve hidden him in the crypt.’
‘I will come this evening after I have taken advice about what to do with him. Seven o’clock.’
‘Come to the confessional. I will be waiting.’ The confessional box was the safest place to talk; so far the Germans had respected it.
‘Father, I am not ready to confess my sins, though they are many. At a time like this it seems an irrelevance.’
He sighed. ‘More relevant than ever, I think, but never mind, we will forgo it for the sake of helping the young man.’ He crossed himself again, rose and blessed her, then left.
Rulka followed a minute or two later and set off through slushy streets heaped with the rubble of half-demolished buildings. It was strange, but the starkness of the ruined cityscape, with its covering of snow, was almost beautiful. Mounds of snow-covered earth and little wooden crosses dotted along the verges marked burials and on a corner near the station the paving stones had been torn up to make a mass grave for the soldiers who had died defending the city. In summer it had been covered with flowers and visited daily by people who knelt to pray. It had infuriated Ludwig Fischer, the German governor, who ordered the bodies to be dug up and buried in the cemetery, but that had not deterred the people who still came to the spot to pray. Rulka paused to cross herself, then turned up a side street where Stanisław Roman, her immediate superior in the underground movement, lived.
He was in his thirties, a thickset man going prematurely bald but with a large drooping moustache. He was, according to his papers, an undertaker, someone so necessary to the functioning of the city he was usually left unmolested to get on with his work. It was he who hid guns and ammunition in his coffins, whose men dug graves all over the city that contained more than just bodies, who decided on who was going to sabotage what. He was fanatical, uncompromising and courageous. But he was also very careful and a stickler for security. Rulka was one of the few people who knew what he did and she worked for him as assiduously as she did for Lech at the hospital, but even so, she was reluctant to disturb him at an unscheduled time.
He answered the door himself. ‘Did anyone follow you?’
‘No. I came by a circuitous route.’ It was something they were all trained to do and he did not really need to ask her.
‘Come in.’ He opened the door wider and led her into a comfortable sitting room. There was a crumpled newspaper, a glass and a bottle of vodka on a small table beside an armchair. ‘Sit down.’ He motioned her to take another chair and fetched another glass from a cupboard to pour her a measure of the spirit. ‘What brings you here?’
‘A young girl died in the hospital today with no one to arrange her funeral and I thought I would do it for her and thought of you.’
‘Very well,’ he said, returning to his seat. ‘Now tell me the true reason. You have intelligence?’
‘No. There is an escaped prisoner of war hiding in the crypt of the Church of the Holy Cross. He is asking for help.’
‘Is he Polish?’
‘No, according to Father Karlowicz, he is British. He ran away from a stalag work party and has been hiding in the forest.’
‘Why did he come into the city? The forest is by far safer.’
‘I don’t know. Looking for help to go back to England, I assume.’
‘What do you expect me to do?’
‘You know how other escaped prisoners have been helped.’
He was thoughtful for a moment. ‘He’ll have to be thoroughly checked. There have been Nazi infiltrators. And I do not want him here. Take him home with you. Does he speak Polish?’
‘I do not know, but I speak a little English. Jan taught me.’
‘I will send Boris Martel to you at ten o’clock. Don’t open the door to anyone else. I assume you are still living in Jasna Street?’
‘Yes, but my official residence is still Zabowski Street. I go there now and again to make sure everything is as it should be.’
‘Don’t go there anymore. It is the first place they will look for you.’
‘Oh, you know—’
‘That there is a search on for you, yes. I told Dr Andersz to warn you.’
‘He did. He suggested I should change names with a dead patient.’
‘What was her name? What do you know of her?’
Rulka told him what she knew which was little enough. ‘I have no idea of her background at all,’ she said. ‘Dr Andersz knows where she was living but as far as he could tell she had no surviving family.’
‘How many of your neighbours know who you really are?’
‘None that I know of. The original tenants of neighbouring houses, who might have known my parents, were all killed in the bombs that destroyed the street.’
‘Good. Leave it with me.’
He saw her to the door and looked up and down the street carefully before letting her out. On the way to her cellar home, she queued up for bread, a single skinny sausage and beetroot with which she could make ćwikła. It was little enough to feed her, let alone a hungry escaped prisoner, but it was all she could find. Since Germany had invaded Russia, the food situation had become worse; the Reich needed all the supplies they could get to feed their hungry army battling the Russian winter as well as the stubborn Russians, and if it meant starving the Poles, so be it, they were only Untermenschen, after all.
Before the war, Jasna Street had been the home of exclusive shops and expensive apartments. Now it was a heap of broken stone, splintered wood and shattered furniture. She clambered over the rubble to what appeared to be a broken door, but which was the entrance to a staircase. She felt her way down, then stopped at the bottom to light an oil lamp. It lit a room furnished with a table, a cupboard, a couple of upright chairs and a sofa salvaged from the wreckage of the house above her. In a bowl on a small table in an alcove were the plate and cup left from her breakfast. She washed them up, using water from a standpipe, which Lech had set up for her when she first moved in. It was connected to the boiler in the next room which was fed from the mains, although the boiler didn’t work anymore. Then she tidied the room and prepared a camp bed in the boiler room, fetched an old overcoat of Jan’s from the room where she slept, and set off for the church.
Father Karlowicz found her sitting in one of the pews in quiet contemplation. She turned when she heard the rustle of his skirt. ‘Come,’ he said.
She followed him through a side door, down some steps and into the crypt. On the far side was an altar covered with a cloth. He walked over to it and rapped on the top. ‘Come out.’ A man scrambled out from beneath it. He was young, about her own age, tall and dressed in the remnants of a British soldier’s uniform. His face was grey with fatigue, his cheeks hollow from lack of food.
‘Hallo,’ Rulka said in English.
‘Thank the Lord,’ he said, giving her a brilliant smile which lit his blue eyes. It reminded her of Jan; he, too, had a smile that could light up a room. ‘Someone who speaks English.’
‘I only have a little. What is your name?’
‘Colin Crawshaw. Sergeant, Royal Engineers.’
She handed him Jan’s coat. ‘Put that on, please, and come with me.’ To the priest, she said, ‘Thank you, Father. You may forget he was ever here now.’
‘Where are we going?’ the soldier asked as she led the way through the streets.
‘Do not ask questions,’ she murmured. It was gone curfew and only those with passes could venture out. Rulka had one because her work at the hospital meant she worked odd hours, but Nurse Grabowska was supposed to be dead, so it was better to avoid being asked for it. ‘The shkopy are everywhere and they have their spies. Please do not speak again until we are inside.’
He fell silent. Once in the cellar of her home, she set about lighting a fire in the open grate and boiling a kettle on a primus stove.
He was shivering with cold and reluctant to remove the coat. ‘You live here?’ he asked, looking about him.
‘Yes.’
‘It is very spartan.’
‘Spartan? What is that?’
‘Bare. Uncomfortable.’
‘It is better than some. I am warm and dry and I can cook what little food there is.’
‘Do you live here alone?’
‘Yes, but I am expecting someone later this evening. He might help you. Tell me about yourself.’ When he hesitated, she added, ‘You may trust me.’
He shrugged. ‘I suppose I have to trust someone. Besides, there’s nothing much to tell. I was taken prisoner in France, left behind at Dunkirk, and shipped from prison to prison until I ended up in Poland. The Poles are our allies, so I told myself that if I could escape I had as good a chance as any of getting back home. I managed to slip away from a working party.’
Rulka had to interrupt this frequently to ask him to explain and speak more slowly. He knew a few simple Polish words and a little German, but when she discovered he could speak reasonable French and it was a language she had learnt at school, they communicated in a mixture of all three which, together with a lot of expressive hand actions, caused a great deal of hilarity. She had not laughed so much for months.
‘Poland is a very long way from England, Sergeant, and the ports are in German hands.’
‘Yes, but maybe I could get to the Russian lines. Aren’t they supposed to be our allies now? Would they help?’
She gave a bitter laugh. ‘I doubt it. They would probably send you to Siberia. That would be much worse than a German prisoner of war camp, believe me.’ Rulka, like many Poles, trusted Stalin no more than she trusted Hitler.
‘Then what do you suggest? I won’t give myself up.’
‘Let us wait and see what my friend says, shall we? In the meantime, eat.’ She put a plate of food on the table in front of him.
‘What about you? Where is yours?’
‘I have my food at my place of work.’ This wasn’t strictly true but he looked as though he needed a meal more than she did.
He tucked in and by the time he had finished eating, Boris had arrived.
Rulka had met Boris once or twice before and had no hesitation in letting him in. Dressed in an ill-fitting overcoat and worn-down shoes, he was tall and slim but his slimness hid a wiry strength. Born in Poland in 1918, his parents had fled with him to England during the war with Russia in 1920 and had become British citizens. He had been brought up in England, but his parents never forgot their roots and always spoke Polish at home, with
the result he was completely bilingual. How he had arrived in Poland, or even if Boris Martel was his real name, she had no idea and knew better than to ask.
He had brought a half-bottle of vodka with him which he poured into three glasses, then took his to the settee where he sprawled with his long legs out in front of him. He appeared completely relaxed, but appearances were deceptive, as Rulka knew. ‘Tell me about yourself,’ he instructed Colin, who had stayed at the table, while Rulka busied herself clearing away the plates and washing them up. Colin repeated what he had told Rulka. At the end of it, Boris questioned him closely. He wanted to know where he had lived in England, where he had gone to school, what work he did in civilian life, when and where he joined the army, his regiment and his company within it, how he had been captured and what other camps he had been sent to. He asked him which football team he supported at home and the names of the players. He even asked him what picture had been on at the local cinema the last time he had been in England, all of which Colin patiently answered. Then he asked him his mother’s maiden name and where and when he had been born and whether he was married or had a girlfriend.
‘I am unmarried and unattached,’ he said, growing impatient with the cross-examination. ‘My mother was Ethel Rutherford. I was born on the last day of October 1917 in Royston. That’s a small town in Hertfordshire, in case you didn’t know.’
‘I do know,’ Boris said quietly. ‘We have to make these checks, you know.’
‘And am I entitled to make checks myself? Are you going to tell me who you are?’
‘No.’
‘Is that it, then?’
‘For now.’
‘Are you going to help me?’
‘Perhaps,’ Boris said, watching the other man carefully, as he had been doing all through the interview, which had been conducted in English. He turned to Rulka and spoke in Polish. ‘Can you keep him here while I make enquiries?’
‘I suppose I can, but I’ll need a ration card for him and some money …’
‘I’ll see about it. Now I must go.’ He stood up and withdrew a sheaf of papers from his pocket which he handed to her. ‘Arkady sent these. He said to meet him at the cafe at nine tomorrow morning for further instructions.’