Robert Craven - Get Lenin

Eva quickly explained her plan to the girls. They were to leave the day after next and get themselves and their families to Gdansk and on to England. She handed over the documentation. Silvia noted they had the stamp of the German Eagle. Eva told them that the invasion was imminent. No-one was going to question these papers once the shooting started,

‘What about Grandpa?’ Eva asked, mindful that they were the only ones in the pews within earshot. Still she pitched her voice to the lowest whisper, looking furtively around. She thought she saw the figure of a man slip back into the shadows behind them.

‘He’s turned everyone’s help down,’ whispered Michaela. A strand of pure blonde hair fell over her eye and she angled her head so it would fall away, Eva thought she was a real beauty, a heart-breaker.

‘I’ll help him then. You two go. Go now and do not talk to anyone. Good luck.’ She kissed them both and left them without looking back. As she reached the last pew, she genuflected again, looking up at the cross and the exquisite stained glass windows, and asking God for the strength to endure the years to come.

Peering through the gloom, she could no longer see the girls and assumed they had slipped out through another door. She paused, checking and re-checking that no one had followed her, then left as silently as a ghost, walking through the market square, head down, scarf pulled tight about her, avoiding any eye contact.

No one seemed to realise what was going to happen, what horrors were about to befall them should Germany invade their country.

The stall holders were breaking down their pitches for the night and the square was beginning to clear. Eva felt as if she was a modern-day Cassandra and prayed to God that her family would believe her.

As she left she heard the mournful bugle call of the Hejnal from the Basilica. It was a sound she heard every night in her dreams, and would continue to do so until her dying day.

The house was quiet when she entered. She called out her grandfather’s name and made her way through every room searching for him. No lights were on. The old floorboards creaked under her steps as she ascended the staircase. The library was the last room past the bedrooms and a light shone underneath it. She looked in.

Henk Molenaar lay slumped at his desk, the lamplight washing his features white. Eva touched his arm and found it cold, she felt for a pulse in his neck and his wrist. Nothing. He was dead.

Eva gently kissed his cheeks and said her goodbyes, running her fingers through his hair. These past days it had regained its old sheen and texture. It felt like the hair of young man. He was smiling peacefully and his arm was held out across the desk, the fingers coiled as if holding someone else’s hand.

Eva climbed the ladder that swung across the shelves to the volume she was seeking. It was a large Bible, sturdily bound with a heavy hide cover and an extremely valuable illuminated codex.

Henk had told her it was an original Coptic Bible, possibly first century Roman, almost priceless. Moving about the house and through Henk’s writing desk, she located the house deeds. Every legal document was placed between the Bible's perfect ancient pages. She located his cashbox and removed all of the bank notes. She then went through Aga’s dusty unopened jewellery box. She found a diamond ring, and several gold bracelets and pearls. She put them all on, covering them with her dress.

Discovering her old bicycle, she rode to the train station, leaving the dead man behind in his favourite place. A man who had once gotten drunk with Rimbaud in Paris, fenced with Ezra Pound and debated with Freud was now at peace. At his favourite writing desk, he was holding his beloved Aga’s hand surrounded by his treasured tomes.

Eva was grieving, but she couldn’t show it. Her life as she had known it was gone. it was a sensation she couldn’t shake. As the train hurtled overnight toward Berlin, she said goodbye to Krakow and Warsaw, to Poland, and to the ghosts of Henk, Aga and Jonas. Absently, her thoughts drifted to Theo. Had he ever become the artist he had aspired to be?

Her conscience juggled the fact that she was saving lives but losing her very essence. Tomorrow she would drape herself in the finery that Donald T Kincaid would lavish on her. She would dine, drink and dance with the men who were engineering a war. There were plenty of girls like her, pretty little moths drawn to the flame of power, basking in its dangerous rays and loving every moment of it.

When she arrived in Berlin, she purchased sturdy brown paper. Wrapping the bible in it with the valuable documents between its pages, Eva took it to a bookstore off the Potsdam Plaza.

Amid the lines of books she found the clerk; Hugh O’Connor, an Irish friend of Chainbridges. She handed him the parcel, giving him the code word ‘Tome’. He took it and smiled. He’d have it sent to Chainbridge’s shop immediately.

One week later, at 4.45 am on Friday September the 1st 1939, the guns of the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the city of Gdansk on Hitler’s orders. The warship was stationed in the harbour, supposedly on a good-will visit and rained down its shells upon the population indiscriminately whereupon German Army Group North, under the command of General Von Bock, and Germany Army Group South under the command of General Von Rundstedt, commenced the invasion.

Two days later, the United Kingdom, its Commonwealth countries and France declared war on Germany. Seventeen days later, Generals Kovalev and Timoshenko poured their armoured divisions into Poland from the Russian borders. The speed of the German advance had caught everyone by surprise, and Stalin didn’t want to be left behind.

The British and French had estimated that Poland could hold out for two months, giving them time to prepare assistance. The invasion by Germany and Russia from the North, South and West, committed two million men against the Polish army numbering only 950,000.

The invaders captured every moment on film. Night after night the cinemas screened the newsreels across Germany. Eva would sit with Kincaid as the martial marching music and belligerent commentary boomed out. The audience around them would cheer and applaud at the images of their soldiers, their tanks and their fighter aircraft. These scenes would jump-cut to Hitler reviewing the progress of the invasion with his generals and sweeping his arm across maps of Poland, appearing to make brilliant decisions.

Eva flinched with every shell fired from German 88s, followed by the thick blooming explosions of Polish soil. Within a fortnight, the Polish Army had been routed once the Luftwaffe had gained air superiority. The film reels in the cinemas now showed the German armoured divisions driving through the streets of Warsaw, cutting to bombers' sights dropping their payloads onto the cities below. Eva lost contact with her cousins, all communications cut by the invasion. Then word filtered back from Gdansk that people boarding ferries were being turned away as German warships and U-Boats were now blockading the harbour and the seas around the coast. Her family never made it to the ships outward bound to England.

Thor Schenker sat nervously waiting for his meeting with Himmler. He noted that over Himmler’s door was a sign that read ‘No Jews Are Welcome Here’. Three motorised Waffen SS divisions had left without him for Poland under Metzger’s command. The SS headquarters were moving at a different pace now; communications were a constant stream, the staff going about their duties in terse silence. After the Lowe farm, he and Metzger had attacked two more isolated farm houses, repeating the massacre and ensuring that the Gestapo was involved.

Schenker had done better on these subsequent occasions. Instead of killing an old lady, he had come up against someone nearer his own age. The boy, no more than eighteen, had surprised him in a barn, brandishing a scythe. Schenker, in a panic, fired off a round before the Thompson's breech jammed, the bullets missing the boy. They wrestled to the ground, grunting, gouging and punching, the machine gun becoming wedged under Schenker’s back. The rising dust had made Schenker’s wind pipe contract so that he wheezed throughout the struggle. With tears clouding his vision, he fought with all of his strength, managing to roll on top of the boy, the muscles in his arms twitching with the strain. He looked momentarily down at him, the mouth twisted back revealing perfect white teeth, the hair tousled. He wrenched the scythe away when the boy, distracted, twisted his head up at the sounds of machine gun fire outside, and buried it into the boy's chest repeatedly.