“I’ll try, darling. But you know me. I’m hopeless with secrets. I tell all the boys who come here, ‘Don’t tell me anything.’ I can’t keep a secret to save my life. I’ve been an inveterate gossip ever since school. Remember what the little doctor said to me once?”
I knew she was referring to Josef Goebbels, whom we’d both known well in Berlin.
“‘I have two ways of releasing information to the world,’” she said, speaking German and imitating perfectly Goebbels’s impeccable, professorial, High German accent. “‘I can leave a memorandum on the desk of my secretary at the Leopold Palace. Or I can tell Princess Elena Pontiatowska something in complete confidence. ’”
I laughed. I remembered the occasion when Goebbels had said it, not least because the same night I had slept with Elena for the first time. “Yes, that’s right. I remember.”
“I do miss him sometimes,” she sighed. “I think he was the only Nazi I ever really liked.”
“He was certainly the cleverest Nazi I ever knew,” I admitted.
She sighed. “I suppose I had better go back and join my other guests.”
“It’s your party.”
“You don’t understand what it’s like, darling. Entertaining the troops like this. They all fancy their bloody chances. Especially the count.”
“The count?”
“My Polish SOE colonel, Wlazyslaw Pulnarowicz. Carpathian Rifle Brigade. He’s liable to challenge you to a duel if he sees me talking to you like this.”
“So why do you bother doing it? Entertain the troops.” I laughed. “Jesus, I make you sound like Bob Hope. Is Pepsodent paying for this party?”
“I do it for morale, of course. The British are very keen on morale.” She stood up. “Come on. Let me introduce you to some people.”
She took me by the arm again and led me back onto the terrace, where several British and Polish officers now eyed me suspiciously. There were other women at the party by now, but I didn’t pay them any attention. I just meekly followed Elena around the terrace as she introduced me to one person and then another. And I made her laugh. Just like we were back in Berlin.
Eventually we went in to dinner. I was seated between Elena and her Polish colonel, who seemed none too pleased that I had usurped his position on Elena’s right-hand side. He was a striking man with dark hair, a longish chin, a Fairbanks mustache, and a beautiful speaking voice that seemed quite unaffected by the harsh-smelling tobacco he rolled in his neat little cigarettes. I smiled at him a few times, and when I wasn’t speaking to Elena, I even tried to make conversation. The colonel’s replies were mostly monosyllabic; once or twice he didn’t even bother to reply at all. Instead he just busied himself sawing at a piece of chicken as if it were a German’s throat. Or mine. He wasn’t the only Pole at the dinner table. Just the least friendly. There were eighteen guests, of whom at least five other officers present, not including Colonel Pulnarowicz, wore the shoulder patches of the Polish army. They were much more talkative. Not least because Elena seemed to have a limitless supply of excellent wines and spirits. There was even some vodka from the famous Lancut distillery in Poland.
Toward the end of the meal I lit us both cigarettes and asked her how it was that there were so many Poles in Egypt.
“After the Russians invaded Poland,” she said, “many Poles were deported to the southern Soviet republics. Then, after Germany attacked Russia, the Russians set many Poles free in Iran and Iraq. Most joined the Polish army of General Anders to fight the Nazis. Here, in the North African theater, the Polish army was commanded by General Sikorski. But, as you know, relations between the Poles and the Russians collapsed with the discovery of the bodies in the Katyn Forest. Sikorski demanded that the Red Cross be allowed to investigate the site. In response, Stalin broke off all relations with the Polish army. A few months ago, Sikorski himself died in a plane crash. An accident, it was said. But there isn’t a Pole in North Africa and Egypt who doesn’t think he was murdered by Stalin’s NKVD.”
A captain on Elena’s left was also Polish. Overhearing her, he added some comments of his own. These left me in no doubt that Elena had let the cat out of the bag as far as my report on the Katyn Forest massacre for FDR was concerned, despite my having asked her not to.
“She’s right,” he said. “There isn’t a Pole in North Africa who trusts Stalin. Please tell Roosevelt that when you’re compiling your report. Tell him that when you get to Teheran.”
I shrugged. “Perhaps you know more than I do,” I told him.
“That the Big Three Conference will be in Teheran?” He laughed. Captain Skomorowski was a large man, with dark hair and a nose as sharp as a draftsman’s favorite pencil. Every few minutes he would remove his glasses and wipe away the moisture that had collected on the lenses from the heat generated by his large red face. He laughed again. “This is no big secret.”
“Easy to see why,” I said pointedly.
“Darling, it’s true,” said Elena. “ Everyone in Cairo knows about Teheran.”
Elena’s colonel laughed with contempt as he saw the look of surprise in my eyes. I was beginning to dislike him almost as much as he seemed to dislike me.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “We know all about the Big Three in Teheran. And, by the way, that’s another city full of displaced Poles. More than twenty thousand of them, for your information. There are so many Poles in Teheran, and in such disadvantaged conditions, that the Persians have even accused our people of spreading typhoid in the city. Imagine that. I wonder if you can.”
“Right now I’m still trying to imagine why a colonel would be so free with this kind of information across the dinner table,” I said stiffly. “Haven’t you heard? Walls have ears. Although I’m beginning to think that walls in Poland have tongues instead.”
“What do you Americans know about Poland?” he asked, ignoring my rebuke. “Have you ever been to Poland?”
“The last I heard it was full of Germans.”
“We shall suppose that means no.” The colonel snorted with derision and looked around at his fellow officers. “This makes him the ideal sort of person to be writing a report for the president of the United States about Katyn. Another stupid American who doesn’t know anything about Poland.”
“Wlazyslaw, that’s enough,” said Elena.
“Everyone knows that Roosevelt and Churchill are going to sell Poland out,” persisted Skomorowski.
“Surely you can’t believe that,” I told him. “Britain and France went to war for the sake of Poland.”
“Maybe so,” said Colonel Pulnarowicz. His eyes widened. “But will it be Britain and France that throw the Germans out of Poland, or will it be the Russians? For us, there’s nothing to draw between them, the Russians and the Germans. That’s what the Americans don’t, or won’t, understand. Nobody can see the Russians giving up Poland if the Red Army reoccupies it. Will Roosevelt persuade Stalin to return land for which the Red Army has sacrificed so many men? I think I can hear Stalin laughing about that one now.”
“After the war is over,” a third Polish officer pitched in, “I believe it will be discovered that Stalin was much worse than Hitler. Hitler is only trying to wipe out the Jews. But Stalin is trying to eliminate whole classes of people. Not just the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, but the peasant class, as well. Millions have died in the Ukraine. If I had to choose between Hitler and Stalin, I’d choose Hitler every time. Stalin is the father of lies. By comparison, Hitler is a mere apprentice.”
“Roosevelt and Churchill will sell us down the river,” said Skomorowski. “That’s what we’re fighting for. Two knives in the back.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “I know Franklin Roosevelt. He is a decent, honorable man. He is not the kind of man to sell anyone out.”
My heart was hardly in this argument. I could not help but recollect my own conversation on the subject with the president. His words hadn’t exactly suggested a man who felt any obligation to protect the interests of Poland. Roosevelt had sounded more like someone intent on appeasing Stalin, in much the same way as the former British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, had appeased Hitler.
“This report you are compiling,” said Pulnarowicz. He lit one of his little cigarettes and exhaled smoke in my face. It looked thoughtless rather than deliberate. But that was just how it looked. “Does it mean the Americans are going to pay any more attention to what happened at Katyn than the British?”
I hardly felt like telling him that my completed report was already buried on the president’s direct order, exactly as the colonel had suspected it would be.
