The dark of the moon, p.19
The Dark of the Moon, page 19
‘And what was happening?’
‘The Germans were developing a new weapon there. It was the first ever liquid-propellant rocket, called the V-2. It could be fired from Germany and hit Britain. A whole new way of waging war. The intelligence that had been smuggled out helped the Allies launch bombing raids against the facility at Peenemünde. And while they didn’t manage to destroy it completely, they certainly hindered operations.’
We both sat quietly for a bit while I thought about that. Then I said, ‘But you haven’t told me yet what happened to Gwido and Maksymilian and Antoni. Were they still at Sachsenhausen?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And there were Allied bombing raids there as well. Antoni was killed in one of them.’ She looked at me for a while. ‘You know, Finn, I’m not sure these are appropriate topics of conversation. They are very hard to talk about.’
‘I know,’ I said. I repeated something Dad had said to me when I was doing my concentration camp project. ‘Sometimes the world is a very hard place. Sometimes people do terrible things. But we need to know about them so we can try to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself. We need to make sure they are never forgotten.’
She made a surprised expression, with wide eyes and raised eyebrows. ‘You’re absolutely right about that.’
‘So Antoni was killed,’ I said. ‘That was very sad. Especially when he’d been so brave in the interrogations. But what about Gwido and Maksymilian?’ I thought she was procrastinating, which is another word Dad uses quite often when I’m busy doing something and he wants me to do something else.
‘Gwido Langer and Maksymilian Ciężki survived Sachsenhausen. The camp was eventually liberated by the Allies when the war ended, and they were brought to Great Britain to join their colleagues in the Polish Intelligence Service, which was still operating out of London at that time. But their return to safety and freedom at long last wasn’t what it should have been. Bolek – the head of the French intelligence bureau – had made a report, you see. Fingers were being pointed at him for the Poles not getting out of France in time and he wanted to shift the blame elsewhere. So he said Gwido was the one who’d been indecisive and hadn’t had the nerve to move. His report made Gwido, as Chief of the Polish Cipher Bureau, responsible for the deaths of those of his men who’d been lost. When Gwido and Maks arrived in London, they were given a chilly reception by their compatriots. And then they were sent, in some disgrace, to a signals station in Scotland, where more Polish servicemen were stationed.’ She was quiet again for a few moments, then she went on.
‘Maksymilian never made it home to Poland. He died in England in poverty, living on government assistance. Gwido died in Scotland a couple of years after arriving there, aged just fifty-three. I think his health had been badly affected by his interrogations and his time at Sachsenhausen. And he was consumed by a sense of betrayal, by shame and bitterness at how it had all turned out, feeling he and his team had been cast off by the French and British once they were no longer of use to them. He left word that he wanted to be buried with other Polish servicemen, in the corner of a cemetery in Scotland, because he didn’t feel worthy of going home to Poland.’
She was quiet for a long time after that, and she closed her eyes again. So I didn’t think I could ask her the other questions I had, about what happened to Janina and Jakub and their baby. I left her sitting there for a bit, in case she wanted to sleep, and went off to look at some more headstones. But when I was doing a rubbing of Arnaud Leblanc Le 6 Juin 1922, she came up behind me and said once I’d finished it was time we cycled home.
It was very hot on the ride home, because we’d stayed so long in the cemetery in Ars-en-Ré, and after we got back and had lunch Philly said she definitely needed a lie-down after all that exercise. I spent the afternoon in my room, laminating my new rubbings and typing up everything she’d told me about the Polish codebreakers because I knew Mum would be very interested to read it when she got back. She might even put it in her book and so I would have helped her a lot.
Then I looked up Sachsenhausen on the internet because I wanted to add a bit about it to my project on concentration camps. Philly wasn’t exaggerating when she said it was especially brutal. More than 200,000 people were interned there between 1936 and 1945. As well as forcing them to work in factories and the local brickworks, the Nazis did experiments on them. They tried out drugs, which they hoped would make Hitler’s troops fight harder. And they also had something called ‘shoe testing detail’. They set out a track with different kinds of surfaces round the edge of the parade ground and prisoners had to march around it for days on end carrying heavy packs, wearing shoes with different materials making up the soles, testing which were the toughest so they could be made into boots for the German army. Some of them dropped dead from exhaustion. Overall, tens of thousands of the prisoners died, from starvation, bad treatment, disease, forced labour and medical experiments. I thought about Antoni and Gwido and Maksymilian who were there among those thousands of people and how brave they’d been.
And then I read about the extermination chambers. There was one they called the ‘neck shot unit’, which is pretty self-explanatory. But they decided it wasn’t an efficient enough way of killing people so they built the first gas chambers there. It was completely horrible.
I stopped researching about Sachsenhausen then. It was too upsetting and was making me feel a bit sick. I knew what I’d learned would probably give me nightmares and I’d need to jump on the trampoline for a very long time.
We made fish fingers and boiled potatoes for supper and Philly let me count out my own peas from the packet to put into a separate pan of boiling water, so I knew it was an even number and didn’t need to count them on my plate. It was a very good day, except for knowing about what went on at Sachsenhausen. I was glad Gwido and Maksymilian made it out of there alive when so many others, including Antoni, did not.
While we were eating our supper, I asked Philly if there could be any possibility that Ben had been sent to a concentration camp. ‘Those were the first places I checked,’ she said. ‘The Red Cross compiled lists of people who’d been there. It was awful looking through them – there were so many names. So many people who’d had to endure those hellish places. I think even the ones who survived never really recovered. But Ben’s name wasn’t on any of the lists, so as far as was possible I could rule that out. Of course, it’s still not impossible. Those lists could never be complete, and many families had to live with the not-knowing where their missing loved ones had ended up. But it seems unlikely Ben was sent to any of the main camps. I exhausted that line of investigation many years ago.’
I like having Philly looking after me. Dad was having his supper with the others at the sailing camp and Mum phoned to say she was really enjoying the writing course.
I think maybe Mum was right when she said it would do us all good to have some time apart, although it will be nice to have everyone back again.
Philly
I must admit, I’m quite enjoying my extra time on the island. Finn is an easy enough charge, even if he does ask a lot of questions. All that cycling too – who’d ever have imagined I’d be riding a bike again after all these years! Thank goodness the Île de Ré is as flat as a pancake. We make a very odd couple, I know, and we attract smiles and waves wherever we go, as well as shouts of encouragement from other cyclists as they go zipping past us on their much more serious bikes, clad in their Lycra shorts and their aerodynamic helmets.
The sea air and sunshine must be doing us both good. There’s a bit more colour in Finn’s cheeks and he seems to be sleeping a little better – at least, I haven’t heard much midnight trampolining. I’m sleeping well enough too, although the questions he asks have stirred up ancient memories. Spending so much time in graveyards probably isn’t helping either. It’s brought the dead closer. I keep having vivid dreams of Ben and Amy, Gwido and Antoni, Noor and Violette. Full-moon dreams. They say it has an effect. Almost eight decades have gone by since I last saw any of them and yet they appear in my dreams as if it were yesterday. Every one of them so full of life. I have aged, where they have not. They wouldn’t recognise me if they were to see me as I am today. An old woman, my body ravaged by the years. Better that than the alternative, though, as the saying goes.
I wonder whether that hobby of Finn’s, making those rubbings of the epitaphs on people’s headstones, is entirely healthy. But it serves my purposes well, the excuse to go looking in cemeteries. It’s rather nice having someone to help me with my search. A lifetime of searching. A fool’s errand, probably. Most people would have given up long ago. I’ve helped find so many others along the way, yet never found the one I’ve really been searching for down the years. Finn seems genuinely interested in hearing about my life as well though. He takes his task of recording my memories very seriously.
‘I’m helping Mum write her book,’ he told me as he set things up to record the next instalment. ‘Then we can make some more money and Dad won’t have to be so worried that we’re spending too much, without him doing a proper job anymore because of looking after me.’
The expression on his pinched face makes my heart ache at times. What a funny combination he is of naivety and wisdom beyond his years. It must be hard for him making friends of his own age when he’s simultaneously older and younger than them.
‘Right then, are you ready? Chocks away, all systems go?’ I asked. And that made him smile as he gave me the thumbs up and hit record.
In the wake of Ben’s disappearance, I sleepwalked my way through the next few months in a state of shock. All I wanted to do was to crawl away into some dark cave and be alone with my grief. But I had to keep going, the twins gave me no choice. The Bertrams took me under their wing, both Tony and Barbara, and I spent every day I could at their farmhouse with my babies, where there were lots of extra pairs of hands only too willing to cuddle them and help with the endless routine of feeding them and changing their nappies. I suppose it was a welcome distraction for the French agents who’d been brought over, playing with the children in between their training sessions. Maybe for some of them it was a reminder of happier times with their own children back home.
I hated not knowing where Ben was. How he was. His German captors knew he was a pilot. Would they treat him with respect, or would they torture him? Would he be sent to a proper prisoner-of-war camp, or to one of those grim-sounding work camps somewhere in Germany or Poland? I couldn’t get the thought of Noor out of my head and what we knew of what had happened to her. The passengers in Ben’s plane had been three French agents being returned to work in one of the Resistance networks. Would they have been able to withstand interrogation and torture? Would the whole circuit have been compromised?
It was a bright April morning and I’d gone over to the farmhouse to help Barbara with the cooking. I’d had a sleepless night with both twins. They were fractious and unsettled, perhaps beginning to teethe or maybe just picking up on their mother’s mood. I was relieved to be able to hand them over to Barbara’s boys, who loved being given the responsibility of pushing the babies up and down the road in front of the house in a big pram. Tony’s car pulled into the driveway. Barbara glanced up from the pastry she was rolling out and frowned. ‘I though he was going to be busy over at the airfield all day today,’ she said.
Through the window I saw him ruffle his sons’ hair and bend down to smile at the twins, then he came into the house, calling my name. I hurried to meet him in the hall.
‘Philly, there’s some news. I wanted to come straight over and tell you. Here, let’s go into the drawing room.’
I perched on the edge of the sofa, nervously wiping my hands on the hem of my apron. ‘Ben . . . ?’ I said, scarcely daring to hope.
‘We brought back one of our agents this morning. In fact, you might remember her – her cover name is Louise.’
I nodded, recalling a pretty, dark-haired girl who spoke with a cockney accent. Her real name was Violette, she’d told me. Like me, she’d been given a poem to learn, which would be the basis for the codes she’d need to use to transmit messages from France. She’d needed a bit of extra help with her Morse code to get up to speed before her first deployment. We’d practised, using lines from her poem, which bore a striking similarity to mine. I wondered whether the original author had been the same for both.
Tony continued, ‘Well, she was dropped in a few weeks ago but was caught by Vichy police and interrogated. She was released, though, and found her way to a local Resistance cell, who managed to get a message out. One of the Special Duties boys picked her up last night.’
He cleared his throat before going on. ‘One of her contacts over there spoke of a British pilot who’d been captured by the Germans in the western area of the Loire, near Tours. It has to have been Ben. He was taken to Poitiers to be interrogated by the Gestapo but gave nothing away. He’d attempted to escape from the prison there, but was recaptured. When he was last seen, though, he was in good health.’
He stopped. My heart lurched with a jolt of simultaneous hope and despair.
‘That’s it?’ I said, unable to keep the disappointment out of my voice. I’d hoped for more. I was always hoping for more.
‘Yes. I appreciate it’s not much, but at least we know for certain that he’s still alive. And we’ve moved the focus of our search to the Poitiers area. There’s a circuit operating there. We’re asking them to try to get us more information. He’s most probably being held in a prison in the area.’
I knew I should have been grateful that they were going to so much effort. Ben was just one of many who’d gone missing. Once I’d been able to swallow my disappointment that they hadn’t found him yet, that he still wasn’t coming home, I did give thanks for the news he was still alive. But if he was in the hands of the Gestapo, his future was uncertain. He was incarcerated somewhere. He could still be executed on a whim, or sent to the camps at any moment. The news had punctuated the not-knowing with a glimmer of hope, but the clouds of doubt and grief soon obscured it once again.
Like so many others, I clung on to the thinnest of hopes as the days turned to weeks and the weeks turned to months. I asked every French agent I met to listen out for any word of a British pilot with dark hair and blue eyes. They promised me they would, and I prayed that someday one of the coded messages trickling back to us through the ether might contain the news I’d been waiting for. But that message never came.
We became aware that something big was coming as spring turned to summer. The ground crews at the airfield were kept busy painting distinctive white stripes on to the wings and fuselages of Spitfires and Typhoons, as squadron after squadron passed through. They were called invasion stripes, designed to make Allied aircraft stand out during D-Day in the chaos of the onslaught from the air that would support the landings in Normandy.
One afternoon in early June, just before the D-Day landings, Tony Bertram told me they would be bringing back a very special pickup that night and he’d like me to be there when they landed. We were in the Ops Room at the cottage, preparing a French agent for his return and a British wireless operator for insertion into a network in the Corrèze. I was updating the map with the latest intelligence we had, showing the areas most heavily defended by flak and preparing the maps the Lysander pilot would be using to navigate. We needed to cut the maps into strips and stick them together to form a long roll that could be unfurled as the journey progressed, making it easier for the pilot to follow the safest route, then we’d add a much larger scale section at the end showing the landing site, helping pinpoint the darkened field where the maquisards would be waiting with their torches. I could picture it all so well, after my own ‘visits’. But these days I always felt a pang of dread as I added the final, large-scale map, wondering whether this mission might end up being compromised as Ben’s had been. Would the faint pinpricks of light guiding in the pilot be torches held by local members of the Resistance, I wondered, or might we be sending him into another trap where German soldiers lay in wait in the darkness?
I was at the airfield the next day in the early hours as the welcome party gathered – a more sizeable one than usual. We’d heard the pickup had been successful and only then had Major Bertram told me who it was they were bringing over. The Lysander landed, taxied, came to a standstill beside the hangar, and the three passengers were helped down the ladder.
The first wore a priest’s robes, and I recognised the unnamed man who’d led me to the château on my arrival there, and who’d appeared at my bedside from time to time as I hovered between life and death.
The second was a woman, dressed in a tweed suit and a smart hat, carrying a handbag, as if she’d just popped out to the shops rather than escaped from the heart of Nazi-occupied France.
And the third was her husband – the man I’d known as Bolek. British Intelligence had finally brought their most important French connection across the Channel and back to England. Gustave Bertrand stepped forward and shook my hand. ‘Eveline,’ he said. ‘It’s very good to see you again.’
My feelings towards him were a little mixed. I’d got the impression he was the one who’d been stalling the Polish team’s escape from France, that British Intelligence wouldn’t have sent me to deliver their message to the Poles if he’d heeded it in the first place. But then I remembered I owed my life to this man, who’d procured the chloroform that had enabled the French surgeon to operate on my leg. I knew, too, that he had looked after the Polish team, found a safe place for them and given them sanctuary when their lives were at risk. The British could have tried to bring them across earlier in the war as well but had simply taken their invaluable intelligence – which had helped Alan and Dilly get such a head start with their continuing work on decoding Enigma – and left the Poles in France. Nothing is ever black and white in life, especially in the world of secrets in which intelligence officers operate. I knew that as well as anyone. So I welcomed him and Madame Bertrand, and stayed with them in the cottage until the car arrived to take them to their new temporary home. They were to be living in Hertfordshire, close to the Polish intercept station where Marian Rejewski and Henryk Zygalski were now working. I never understood it all. I just knew that the complex links between British, French and Polish intelligence continued, that uneasy confederacy of convenience born out of the necessity of war.
