“There’s no law against speaking Polish so far as I know.”
The aggressive defence of the girl confirmed Zagorsky’s guess that Josef knew all about Anna’s attitude to Moscow and the Party.
“Don’t play the committee secretary with me, my friend. It won’t work.” Zagorsky slammed his fist on the table. “I want her back here in the department no later than next week. You understand?”
“Yes, Comrade Zagorsky.”
“She is entitled to use the crèche. The child will be properly cared for while she is working.”
Two months later they were notified that both of them were being transferred to Warsaw to work with the Polish Bolsheviks, Josef as liaison with the Polish section in Moscow and Anna as secretary to the Commissar for Internal Affairs.
Josef’s liaison point in Moscow was Zagorsky. It was not an easy relationship and Zagorsky seemed to go out of his way to keep their meetings formal; showing no signs of any personal friendship. Although it was obviously he who had arranged their assignment to Warsaw. The years of struggle and imprisonment were finally beginning to take their toll on him. He was only five years older than Josef but he looked much older.
They had the top floor of a small house in the centre of Warsaw and Anna had time to make it comfortable and there was room for a small bed for the toddler.
Their lives were very different from their time in Moscow. They had few contacts away from the Party and they were part of an underground movement that was being constantly harassed by the Polish government whose hatred for Moscow was traditional and bitter.
There were new problems for Anna who daily recorded the Bolshevik plans for the overthrow of the Polish government. Meetings where men coldly and calmly discussed the assassination of the President of Poland, Pilsudski, and the planning to turn Poland into another Soviet state disturbed her. She found herself suddenly more patriotic and nationalist than she had ever thought possible in her first surge of enthusiasm for the reforms in Russia. What was good for the virtual slave population of that sprawling continent seemed obscenely inappropriate to a civilised culture that was determinedly Western not Slav. Even in Russia there were still large armed forces actively fighting Moscow for the independence of the Baltic States and the Ukraine and Transcaucasia. And when in the spring of 1920 Moscow offered Poland a peace treaty, the Polish government saw it as a sign of Moscow’s weakness and a chance to ensure Polish independence by fostering the independence of Lithuanian, Belorussian and Ukrainian states.
On April 25, 1920, in agreement with the weak government in Kiev, Polish forces launched a surprise attack into the Ukraine. It met little resistance and by May 6 Kiev was occupied by Polish forces.
But the foreign invasion invoked a patriotic upsurge against the Polish invaders and in the space of a month the Polish forces were pushed back to their own borders and beyond. Moscow saw its success as the herald of a communist Poland and in a small town in occupied Poland Feliks Dzerzhinski was set up as the supreme Bolshevik authority in Poland. But the spread of Communism in Poland was a dismal failure and in Moscow the blame for the lack of success had to be allotted, not only for that failure but for the lack of warning about the Polish invasion of the Ukraine. It was easier, and to some extent logical, to heap the blame onto the shoulders of Moscow’s Poles rather than its Russians.
When Josef opened the envelope that one of the committee had brought from Moscow the message inside was chilling. It said briefly that they were both wanted urgently in Moscow for discussions. His hands trembled as he folded the half-sheet of paper and tucked it into his jacket pocket. They made arrangements to leave the next day and arrived in Moscow that night. An official from the Internal Affairs department met them at the station, and from him they learned that Zagorsky had been arrested. When they asked what he had been charged with the man merely shrugged. They were taken to a hostel and given a room. There was just a mattress on the floor.
They were careful to say nothing to each other of any significance and they lay with their son between them. It was already getting light the next morning before either of them slept.
Josef sat with their son on a bench outside the room where Anna had been taken and it was three hours before she came out, her face white and tear-stained. A Cheka officer stopped them from speaking to one another and pushed Josef roughly to the door of the room, knocked and waved him inside. There was a militiaman on each side of him as he stood facing the three men sitting at the trestle table. The man in the centre looked down at his papers and then at Josef.
“You are a friend of Boris Zagorsky?”
“Yes.”
“How long have you known him?”
“Since October 1917.”
“How did you meet him?”
“I was cabin-boy on a British ship berthed in the docks at Petrograd. The crew had been arrested by the docks committee; Comrade Zagorsky and I were left to guard the ship.”
“Did he talk politics with you?”
“Yes.”
“Tell us what he said. An overall impression.”
“He was very pro-Bolshevik. He said that the Bolsheviks would take over and put the country right.”
“Why did you join the Party?”
“Because Comrade Zagorsky said I could help in the struggle.”
The man looked down at his papers and then back at Josef.
“When did he start criticising the Party?”
“I never heard him criticise the Party.”
“How did you come to work for him?”
“I was ordered to by the Party.”
“Your wife is Polish?”
“Yes. She
