Finn
‘I remember him,’ said Philly. ‘He was Scottish, a young lad from Stirling. See, it says it here on the stone. He was one of the many pilots who came through Tangmere – not flying Lysanders, but Wellington bombers.’
‘Did you know he was going to be here?’ I asked.
‘Yes. I looked up all the war graves on the island before I came. Everything’s online nowadays. I can show you when we get home if you like.’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘There are two more from the same date.’
She nodded. ‘More of the same crew. Their plane went down while they were on a mission in the Bay of Biscay. At that time, the Germans had made what they called the Atlantic Wall, a line of defences stretching all the way from the North Cape of Norway to France’s border with Spain.
These boys would have been on one of the missions to try to weaken it. ’
I decided to make a rubbing of John Patrick Muirhead . While I was doing it, Philly went and stood in front of another headstone in the next row. It said
An Airman
Of the
1939 – 1945 War
Found 15 January 1943.
She put her hand on that headstone and stayed like that for a very long time, not saying a word. The sun glinted on her wedding ring, which she still wears even though Ben has been gone for more than 70 years.
I did some thinking while I finished taking my rubbings.
It definitely wasn’t her leg she was looking for because she thought that was probably buried in the south of France.
And it wasn’t the Poles from the chateau because she kept looking at British war graves more than any other nationalities.
I made a deduction, which is what it’s called when you rule out options to try to find an answer to a problem, just like in maths when you eliminate the common terms that you can on either side of an equation, to help you boil it down to what they’re really looking for.
‘Are you looking for Ben?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Still. After all these years.’
‘So do you think there’s a chance he could be buried on the island?’
‘It’s a slim one, but it’s not out of the question. I’ve looked everywhere else and eliminated most of the other more likely possibilities over the years.’
‘Do you think that’s him?’ I asked, pointing to the grave of the unknown airman.
She shook her head. ‘The date’s not far off, but it’s still wrong again. You know, Finn, I’ve managed to find so many others. But not him.’
‘There are some more war graves in the cemetery at Saint-Martin. We can go and look there tomorrow if you like.’
She laughed. ‘I’m not sure trailing you around cemeteries looking at graves is exactly what your parents had in mind when they agreed to leave you in my care.’
‘It’s OK. I like cemeteries. They’re peaceful.
And we are getting fresh air, so Mum and Dad will be pleased about that.
So it will be fine if we go to Saint-Martin tomorrow.
’ I repeated the bit about Saint-Martin because I’d noticed she hadn’t said yes.
I thought she might be giving up her search.
She probably doesn’t have as much persistence as I do.
That’s one thing Dad says I definitely have.
She still didn’t reply, and she seemed a bit tired, so before we cycled home again, we went and sat down on a bench in the shade of a tree.
‘What happened to the rest of the Poles after they left the chateau?’ I asked.
‘Well now, that’s a very good question,’ she said.
‘As you know, Marian Rejewski and Henryk Zygalski made it to England. Gwido, Maksymilian and Antoni weren’t so lucky though.
We’d heard that the three of them were betrayed by their guide and captured by the Nazis as they tried to cross into Spain.
The British Intelligence Services were still in touch with their French counterparts and heard from Bolek that the men had all been interrogated by the Gestapo.
They’d realised that if they denied everything they’d simply be executed.
So they confessed that they’d been working as codebreakers but managed to convince the Germans that they’d been beaten by the complexity of Enigma once the additional rotors had been implemented.
They gave away just enough detail to save their lives, but still kept the secret of the French and British success. ’
She sat up a bit straighter. ‘You know, Finn, Winston Churchill said the Bletchley codebreakers were “the geese who laid the golden egg and never cackled”. Do you understand what that means?’
I thought about it. I know the story about the goose and the golden eggs because it’s in a book I used to read when I was younger. ‘Yes, I think so,’ I said. ‘Even though you were doing something very important, you never talked about it?’
‘Exactly. Well, Gwido, Maksymilian and Antoni never cackled either, even when they were put under the immense pressure of interrogation. Imagine having that presence of mind. They protected us all.’
‘So after they’d been questioned, what happened to them next?’
She slumped against the back of the bench again. ‘They were sent to a concentration camp called Sachsenhausen.’
I thought maybe she’d gone to sleep because she went quiet then and closed her eyes. But after a few moments she opened them again. ‘Do you know about the concentration camps in the Second World War, Finn?’
‘Yes. I did a project about them, even though Dad didn’t really want me to. But I haven’t heard of Sachsenhausen.’
She sighed. ‘It was the first one created by Himmler when he was appointed Chief of the German Police. He used it as a model for those that followed, and it was especially brutal. Many political prisoners were sent there, especially from Poland and Russia. They were treated appallingly and many of them were executed. Those that survived were made to work in the brickworks there, and a munitions factory. But you know, Finn, even from there the Poles managed to get a few messages out. Some of the work they were forced to do made them realise the Germans were building something big, some sort of secret weapon. The metal cases they were working on were being sent to a place called Peenemünde, in the far north of Germany on the Baltic Sea. A team of Polish engineers who’d been interned in the camp were sent there to work on the project and they managed to smuggle out a message, via a Resistance network, telling the Allies to look closely at what was happening in that location. ’
‘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 Ci??ki 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.