Philly
It must have been the strong black coffee I’d drunk so late at night, sitting around the table with my new-found Polish comrades, or it may have been the excitement and adrenaline of finally being in France, because I scarcely slept a wink on my first night at the chateau.
I got up early and made my way down the curve of the stone staircase, attempting to retrace the dimly remembered route from the night before and find my way back to the kitchen.
But on my way the sound of voices from a half-open door leading off the hallway drew me in.
I tapped, a little uncertainly, and a voice called ‘ Prosz? wej??! Come in!’
Tall wooden shutters screened the bay windows of the high-ceilinged room, but the early-morning sunshine slanted in through the slats, casting fingers of light across the curlicues of an Aubusson rug covering the floor.
Marian Rejewski, the man Dilly Knox had told me was one of the chief cryptanalysts, got up from behind one of three desks positioned in the centre of the room.
‘Eveline, please, have a seat.’ We were already on first-name terms, Dilly’s present of the pouch of tobacco having proven a good ice-breaker on my arrival, although I’d still had to remind myself to use my cover name when I was being introduced to some of the team.
‘We are just looking at the gifts you’ve so kindly brought us. ’
The Baby had been taken out of its crate and sat on the desk between us. At a second desk, another man, whom I’d not yet met, was unwrapping a packet of squared paper with evident delight. He reached out a hand to shake mine. ‘Henryk Zygalski, pleased to meet you,’ he said.
His name was vaguely familiar to me, but it took me a moment to work out why. ‘Zygalski?’ I said. ‘Like the Zygalski sheets we used to use for solving the daily Enigma keys?’
He looked surprised, grinning broadly. ‘You are familiar with those in Britain? Yes, I was the one who came up with the idea. We used to have to make our own, but cutting out every square by hand was inefficient and far too time-consuming. When we met Alan Turing in Paris, he took the idea back with him and had machine-cut sheets made. He sent us a set, which we used until the damn Germans changed the enciphering method again.’
I nodded, feeling a little overawed at being in such company.
The brain power of these men was legendary among those of us in the know.
It was also dawning on me that, despite the difficulties and risks involved, it was no wonder that my bosses at Bletchley Park were so keen to keep the lines of communication open with this Polish team.
Just then, a woman put her head around the door and said, ‘There you are! They’ve kidnapped you already, I see, before you’ve even had your breakfast.’ She wore her hair in a plaited crown and was dressed in a loose cotton skirt and cardigan.
She turned to scold the men. ‘Where are your manners? You’ll wear our guest out, as if she wasn’t already exhausted enough after her journey here last night. ’
I took to her immediately. Her name was Janina Krakowska, she explained as she led me to the kitchen, and she was here with her husband, Jakub.
He was a radio operator, intercepting German messages and passing them on for decoding, and she was another mathematician who worked on codebreaking with the team of cryptanalysts I’d just met.
As she bustled around the kitchen, making coffee and toasting slices of bread, I noticed the curve of her belly, rounded like the edge of the new moon, holding the promise of fullness.
‘I’m four months pregnant,’ she told me with a shy smile, tucking a stray strand of her blonde hair back into its braid.
‘Even in the middle of a war, life goes on. Of course, it makes me miss my family back in Poland all the more. I wish I could be with them. Or, at least, I wish they could be here with me. Our country has been torn apart, yet again, by the invaders.’
‘Aren’t you worried about being captured by the Germans?’ I asked. I could hardly bear to think what their fate would be if their activities were to be discovered by the authorities.
‘Of course,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘But we are well taken care of by the French Secret Service, who pretend to work with the Vichy regime but remain loyal to de Gaulle. They keep us hidden here in plain sight. Apart from those in the Resistance with whom we work, people in the local community think we are simply a bunch of rather eccentric labourers, brought here from somewhere in the east to contribute to the war effort by cutting wood and working in the fields. As long as this part of the country remains under control of a nominally French government, we are left to get on with it. After all, Europe is full of people like us, exiles who’ve been displaced, uprooted from their homelands.
As far as anyone knows, we are just a handful of refugees among the hundreds of thousands who are on the move every day, looking for a safe place to stay. ’
She poured me a cup of coffee and set butter and jam on the table before me.
‘Now eat,’ she said. ‘And then we will go and join Marian, Henryk and the others and you can tell us more about the latest advances in codebreaking in Britain. I’m interested to know how you’re tackling the extra rotors the Nazis have implemented in the naval Enigma machines.
We’ve been trying to find new ways to hack the daily settings, but it’s tough without the means at our disposal to build a more sophisticated bomba . ’
I felt more relaxed in her company than I had done for days – in fact, ever since my mission to France had been proposed. Dilly Knox had been right. In more senses than one, the Poles and I spoke the same language.
We spent the morning working in the study with the others.
Janina showed me how she decoded some of the radio intercepts, which her husband received on a transmitter hidden in the attic of the chateau.
The Germans and the Vichy French were using a variety of coding methods – not just the Enigma machines – and messages transmitted by both police forces were relatively easy to decrypt.
They made chilling reading. Most were lists of numbers that, Janina explained, detailed people who’d been rounded up and sent to work camps.
‘See here,’ she said. ‘They’ve been grouped in categories: Jewish, Romany, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Political Suspects, Handicapped .
.. Anyone the Nazis choose. We pass these figures on to the British and French intelligence services .
It’s vital that we tell the story of what’s really happening.
The horror of what’s going on across Europe is unremitting.
I know my own relations back in Poland will by now have been sent to the camps.
I can’t bear to imagine how they are coping in such terrible places. ’
An expression of pain flickered across her features and, instinctively, she put her hands on her belly, protectively cradling the slight bump.
What would the future hold for her unborn child, I wondered.
I could see the strain she was under, and I dreaded to think what might happen if the group at the chateau were to be denounced by some suspicious local policeman.
‘Couldn’t you come to Britain?’ I asked. ‘I could try to ask the people who brought me here to get you out. You and your baby would be safer there.’
She smiled sadly, shaking her head. ‘France is the best place to intercept these messages. And the French have been good to us. We have to trust them to keep us safe. I’m grateful for your offer, but the British haven’t ever offered us the chance to leave.
It’s made more complicated, too, by the fact that Russia is a British ally.
What they’ve done to our country is really just as bad as what the Germans did, invading from the east just a couple of weeks after the Nazis invaded from the west. Poland has been torn in two, racked by those enemies, our people brutalised and murdered by both sides. ’
I nodded, understanding. ‘But Britain is not your enemy,’ I said. ‘We’re on your side. General Sikorski’s set up his command in London. Isn’t that a declaration of friendship?’
She shrugged. ‘Like I said, it’s complicated.
We’ve discussed trying to go, of course, but as long as this part of the country remains a zone libre , we feel we should stay.
It’s relatively safe, and the work we do here is so important.
Being Polish means we’re used to living with an enemy on the doorstep.
We have our ears to the ground here, so to speak, and we must continue to be the voices of those who’ve been silenced.
’ The tremble of her lips belied the strength of her words.
I reached across and gave her hand a squeeze, struggling to find any words to express how brave I thought she was.
She took a deep breath, regathering her composure, and we turned our attention back to the sheets of paper on the desk in front of us.
I redoubled my efforts to take in as much as I could, committing most of what she told me to memory and making a few short, coded notes where necessary, so I could debrief the Bletchley cryptanalysts on my return.
Even with the limited resources they had access to here, the Polish team had come up with new ways to tackle the range of ever-changing German codes with which we were faced every day.