Yvette  wrote regularly throughout 1947 from Belmont and  from Villard.  Thanks to the Italian brigands, we are deprived of her war time letters but now both sides of the correspondence survive.

 “Leave Palestine,” she urged again  and again, and to help regain your strength and optimism, “Listen to Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony “. She  shared her responses to the upheaval in post war France  reported that she had  joined the communist party , wrote of  those “bastard Trotskyites” responsible for the Renault strike  and the dreadful sectarian communists whom she detested as much as the “opportunists who also abound in the Party”. Her account of the  local  responses to the war in Indo China mingled with descriptions of the beautiful French countryside in letters that soon  began to  glow again with affection.  Was it the act of writing then, that re kindled her love?

 “Today has been painfully unhappy. A storm has been boiling within me for months… It’s about you, Henri, about a shared life with you…. Every day I feel a little more that I want it, that I desire it.. Today I  re- read almost all your letters, to test this new life that’s growing within me and plunge back into the past…You asked me to promise to call if I needed you. So I am calling for you now. I need you. To love you each day, to be loved by you each day. I call you with all my heart. And I don’t know how to let you know it.” ( May 7, 1947)

When the children’s colony job was over and she had moved back to Belmont ,she wrote again. ”Come, come. I want you. I want to have a baby, so I want you with me, every night. I want to be your wife, Henri, to be sweet and good for you. I want to rest under your wing, protected strongly by you.”   As I read these letters, I marvelled at her mysteriously revived ardour  which Henri, judging from his letters ,  did not receive.  Were they exercises in writing?  “For the last five days I have been writing.I spend my afternoons and evenings, pen in hand and I write and write. I don’t know what it’s worth but I write easily.” (May 15 1947).  Ten days later she called to him from Belmont,“ I am leaving for Paris this evening.  I say, cherie, what about coming to visit Paris?”((May 25 1947)

Early in the month of June  1947, each  wrote to the other, Yvette  on the  sixth, Henri on the fifth;  she to Tel Aviv and he to Belmont.

Yvette wrote to say that  she was leaving Paris the following  day for one of the occupied zones of Germany or Austria,  where she would work for three months as a nurse in a medical team, hired by the National Immigration Office of the Ministry of Labour to inspect prospective immigrants living in Displaced Persons Camps. 

Henri’s letter  was headed “Warsaw”. “My  little darling, I left Palestine a month ago and here I am in Europe. As you can see, in Poland. It is here that I must live, work and try to begin a new life”.   He had spent a miserable month on the road, he wrote,  travelling through Egypt, Italy, Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia. A journey filled with “stifling depression” and “ violent instability” made worse by memories of their times together. “I ask myself, darling, whether there  is any countryside, any river, tree, any sky, any stars and any bit of earth that will not plunge me into the depth of melancholy thoughts? So I am now in Poland. In one word: it is a strange experience for me. I can’t speak to you of it straight away but I feel it is  to you, above all,  that I will talk of it in the future. Tomorrow I begin work.  Responsible, political work and very interesting. I have been wonderfully very well received, as there is a dearth in this country of  politically convinced men. But the future looks very good and we are all very confident.”

There is no longer a sea between us, darling. That makes me very happy every minute of the day. Though I yearn without relief, for the calm and beauty of your soul. Write me  a lot little one, as often as you can and as long as you want to.”(June 5 1947)

As neither of them was where the other supposed, neither received the letter.

At the end of the month an excited Yvette wrote from Vienna; her sister had forwarded  a letter from Henri from Poland. “Now there is only than land between us; only one country, Czechoslovakia. It is a long time since I have been so happy.” (June 27 1947) She suggests they meet in Prague, breathlessly asks questions about his job in Poland and throughout the month repeats her emotions and her questions over and over again. “You cannot know how happy I am that you have left Palestine. First of all because the sea no longer divides us… And then because I will see you, have you, embrace you… There is so little distance between us now and so much desire in me”(June 27, 1947). Three letters a day  she writes, urgently, passionately ,confidently assuming their meeting and finally , having received no reply, she sends a telegram.

It was on the last day of June that the telegram arrived in Warsaw.  As Henri had received none of the Vienna letters, his  reply was incredulous and immediate.  “I was as astonished to learn that you are in Vienna as you were to learn that I am in Warsaw…The telegram you sent me quite frankly bowled me over. You can’t believe how much a word from you – a word through which shines a tiny feeling for me – can throw me into confusion…..After that telegram I began to think, to dream, to listen to the music of the wind and of the heart ….”(June 30, 1947)

Censorship still operated in mid 1947 and the censor’s  rough black stamps, like symbols of the wild passion revived, obliterate  words in both letters brimming with practical matters and revolutionary faith.  “The nature of my work does not permit me to talk of it in length.  I like the government but I still don’t like the people. The difference between the two is enormous.  It’s a matter of raising the people to the height of its government. It is our deepest wish.

The country is ruined. The ruins in Warsaw (and above all, the ghetto!) surpass everything that I have seen before. All that has to be reconstructed, better than before, for the nation…There are many problems… to resolve…However the leadership is animated with such good will that I am infected with their hopes. I will write in greater length in my next letter. But it would be false to end like this. I must tell you again that I am happy  because you are. And that I love you.”(June 30, 1947)

From early July Yvette spends every off duty hour writing. Vivid accounts of  Vienna, imagined journeys to Warsaw. In an amazing turnaround, even before she received his response to her telegram, she employs  Henri’s earlier phrases and repeats his confessions of dependence and vows of love.. “You know how in France when we marry the husband swears to “help and protect” his wife. I want that too.” (July 5, 1947) And echoing  her  war-time Henri: “You will say I am a mad woman, my well beloved. Two hours ago I wrote you a long letter and her I am starting again. Mea culpa darling. I am a mad woman, that’s for sure and have been for quite a while. I have tried to knit and to read, here in my office. I haven’t succeeded in either. Decidedly not. Neither the prospect of a new cardigan, nor boning up on the life of Michel Angelo who I am reading about, can fill my soul. Your face dances between the stitches and between the lines.” (July 5, 1947)

Yvette now pats his nose, rubs his chin, nibbles his ears, twines her legs around his , with a pen more powerful and a spirit less  inhibited than Henri’s. “ I wonder if you still love me? Aren’t I awful?” she teases  and flirts. “Let me love you darling. Let me be your sweet wife. There is no other gift that I can give you than the gift of myself, of my heart. Of that poor mad heart you so much loved and, I feel, still do.” (July 5, 1947)  Enough to rouse her man to a frenzy.  “Yesterday I received your two first letters from Vienna. I am mad with happiness. I am so happy that I cannot think or talk or write. I tremble all over. Body, heart and hands. My darling little Yvette, what a great moment! “(July 7,  1947)

But despite pages of ecstasy, this time he  cannot rush to join her. “You must come to Warsaw.  Listen hard. I have a pretty important job, the logical consequence of  my whole political past. The long-term perspective of this job is certainly a foreign mission. But at present I have to stay here.  Would you live in Poland? I earn enough to support three and then four…I cannot be more precise because of the  nature of my work.Tell me that you agree. And when you can come. Then I will quickly and easily arrange the Polish visa…I am ready; I await you with the most beautiful love  to demonstrate that you are the best-loved wife in the world.”(June 7,1947

At that time, in those places, they could not communicate by telephone and while he waits for her to agree to the proposition which she has not yet received , the letters  pass regularly  between Vienna and Warsaw  on a higher plane of expectation and exhilerated  flights of fancy interspersed with  practical arrangements . “Let us leave suffering to poets and writers. We will live close together in body and soul with the fruits of our love. We will have a small, tidy house with – since you have long wanted it – an old lamp in a corner of the wall above our large divan. And curtains on the windows. We will have two armchairs near a low table with ash trays and a quiet pretty room for the babies. And another for the big boy. We will feel our love in every corner of the house… If possible, I won’t work. I feel an urge to be a housewife .” (July 9 1947)

Henri’s fantasies are even more vivid than they had been in 1943 and now, powerfully affected by the miracle of their coming together again, emphasize the “majestic strength” of his love and the dark magnetic force flowing between them. “I wrote in one of my last letters about the Beethoven Concerto and the infantile and naive words that I put to it in the Cairo hotel. Now the same day, you wrote exactly the same thing. The Concerto and the words… Coincidence? No. It is much more. It is two hearts that beat as one. Not one half in me and one in you. But one only. The same. Beating to the same rhythm, living the same life.…I want you and I crush the pillow under my head. I want you, walking, reading working. I don’t work any more; I love you.(July 15, 1947)

And this even before her extraordinary letters from Vienna had reached Warsaw.

“ I have recently received six letters from you, filled with your love for me each more tender than the last, each filling me with the most perfect happiness the most delirious joy.” (July 19, 1847)

Delirious joy overflowed from both sides and Yvette,  burdened with less work, sometimes wrote three letters a day discussing the  problems created by his important new job, the difficulties of her moving to Warsaw which would mean abandoning mother and grandmother and once again uprooting her little boy.

Yvette’s life in Vienna must have been lonelier and less satisfying than life in Warsaw and from her lowly position she looked up to the elevated Henri and abandoned herself daily to seductive letters.. “I washed my hair tonight. Quite a job since it is so long. I have just finished. If you were here, it would tickle your neck, your ear and the end of your nose. I am quite clean and fresh. What a shame not to be in your arms or leaning against your heart. Tonight I would cover you all over with kisses and love.”(July 10, 1947)

 “You know darling, I am quite intimidated to know that you are such an important gentleman. I wrote, laughing, in one of my letters that you should become Ambassador in France. And now that you already have a responsible position, I won’t laugh any more.” (July 19,1947)

Henri’s looks far ahead to their future .” In  a month or six weeks I will already have the apartment. You understand that here everything is in ruins. We have in Warsaw already 700,000 inhabitants. But the houses destroyed by the occupation amount to 80% of the total. … But they are building. And are about to finish a block especially for the employees of my Ministry. Part of it is already finished and in a few days some of my colleagues will be living there. They are women. Because I said I was alone (bachelor) they put me lower on the list. Today, while carrying out the tasks to get your visa I also raised the question of accommodation. With success! In six weeks cherie!  Now I am living very poorly in a place without furniture and dreaming of the apartment I will furnish for you. For us. I make many plans cherie! Listen little one, you now what a romantic imagination I possess!…I fly up to the sky and I see in my mind’s eye pictures of our future life.

In the morning, I go to my office. Before leaving, I don’t forget to bring you a cup of hot tea to bed. I embrace you and I smile and I say ‘good luck cherie, see you soon.’

I say “good luck” because the plan is that while I am at the office, you will write. (One writes more creatively  in the morning.). At 15 hours I return. We eat. Then we rest stretched out one beside the other. And it is a mixing of love, of tenderness, of exchange of impressions of the day and of work. I tell you my stories and you read me passages of your work.(July 22, 1947)

Yvette’s account of her love of writing and the power of her letters had clearly impressed Henri. She will be a writer.

“Then we go out. Or perhaps, friends come to see us. Or perhaps we go to see friends. We have until 6 o’clock in the morning! And everything is so sweet. And the air in our room sings the song of our united heart. Throughout a white winter the Polish snow is blue with our love. For Xmas Helene will come to visit us. We will welcome her kindly, lovingly; she will be enveloped in a fine warm cloak of forgetfulness, inspired by our happiness and our tenderness. In the spring we will go to France. For the child must be born in France, you know. And perhaps we will stay there.” July 22, 1947)

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So twenty three years after he had flown with his family, Haim  the eagle, now Henryck the  Trojan, settled back in the storm zone which was the land of his birth. New  borders had been  drawn and a new government established in the wake of the liberating Red Army; Poland was on the new way to “Peoples’ Democracy” and Henryck was happy to be involved in the journey.

Rough sketches of his new life appear in his letters to Yvette  but since these end they end as soon as the two are together and Henri never talked of it, only from outside can I make a more detailed picture.

Nobel prizewinner , Czeslaw  Milosz, was Henri’s almost exact contemporary, though from the Lithuanian part of the country and educated in the city of Wilno. He was a Catholic who had survived the complex horrors of Poland’s  occupation and resistance to the Nazis and remained to work for the People’s Republic after the war. In the wise and  moving autobiographical Native Realm he looks at  pre-war  Poland .  “The whole country was … permeated by an unhealthy atmosphere. Christians, when they said someone was a Jew, lowered their voices as if a shameful disease were being mentioned, or added, “He’s a Jew, but he’s decent”. Worse still, the same scale of values was more or less adopted by “assimilated” Jews who were diligently erasing their traces.” (p99)  The unhealthy  atmosphere had not  blown away with the war and since  the new Poland was the Dabrowski Brigade writ large, it could have come as no shock to Haim Adler that he was  re-named Henryk Trojan. This time for good. ‘My father’s name in Poland was Trojan, everyone in the family was Trojan,”  his daughter told me many years later, in Paris.

 Did he feel reluctant to make this symbolic renunciation of his Jewishness?  Not at all, I imagine, after reading his letters from Italy and Palestine. We learn what Yvette felt from her memoirs..  Rather, we learn what she wanted her readers then to believe she felt. We learn what she believed Henri should have felt about it from the same suspect source.  Suspect because her “Beni Falker” was not simply a pseudonym  for Henri devised to prevent legal action, but, as we have already seen, an invented character in her own story, a character drawn with  venom, self justification and meanness of spirit.

Had luck and fate  not provided  me with those letters, her mendacious fiction would have been almost my only source for their  life together in Poland.. 

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The  longed for reunion brought the delight each had  contemplated. That is clear from the letters.  “These two days without you are already centuries… I am with you, entirely”  Yvette  wrote on 5 September , returned to Belmont. As  Henri had  mentioned earlier, he was being  sent to France and Yvette wrote almost daily; her happy letters a mark of how happy they had been together. She wrote telling him of her frantic dashes around Paris  looking for an apartment; how the cost of living had risen 40% since she was last there in June and about her investigations at the Institute of Political Studies- ‘ Sciences –Po’ where she hoped to enrol  him. “ I am with you, you know, entirely; in the streets and in Wtochy and in your heart. And in Belmont too, in my heart. Everything is quiet and so beautiful here! I so much wish that you could come here and rest a little.!  I pray God in heaven (?) to help me find an apartment next week and that everything will be ready for you and that you will come quickly…Nothing new on the physiological front. To put it another way, I am sure I am pregnant. Are you pleased darling? Say you are, I beg you. Smile darling and don’t be sad. Besides, I am sure that you are calm and absolutely tranquil, as I am myself. Entirely…

See you soon my love. I love you; I pine for you, but with peace in my heart and the joy of having you very soon,  with no more separations. Write my lazy duck. Only a few words, but write! I embrace you most tenderly. I am your wife, I love you.”

And Henri, in Warsaw, before hearing that glorious news: “It is Wednesday night, darling, six days after your departure. I am horribly alone; it is impossible to tell you how much I am pining. When I leave the office at 3pm I don’t know what to do. I walk like a crazy man through the streets of Warsaw and ask myself what I am doing there. I have a horror of the house. Everything is sad and empty of all feeling. Yvette, my little one, I am without you and I need you”(September 9, 1947)

 Until Henri  joined her in mid-October, Yvette  searched every day for an apartment in a Parisshe found, “more beautiful than ever” , its shops filled with the most magnificent goods though without sugar and butter . She examined apartments in Butte Chaumont, Bois de Vincennes and Champ de Mars,  horrified at the cost  and despaired of  having one set up when he arrives. She wrote every second day , tender loving  letters about music, love and distance, letters  filled with practical matters  and reports of their child: “The baby makes itself felt without discomfort, without pain. But how could it be otherwise? A child of love. Do you remember, cherie? I feel so strongly that it is our love inside me, slowly growing  into a little being.” (

Though Henri wrote less often from Warsaw, his letters show even more longing for Yvette and for the Paris he has always loved and now will share with her. 

 The dispersed Adler family rejoiced at the reunion.  From Melbourne. Manka wrote  “ I am so happy for your both, I would like to take you in my arms and cry on your shoulder.” and  from Zurich David, at Henri’s urging , sent  several hundred thousand francs to help Yvette with the key money she must pay to get any  apartment. Even Helene, Yvette’s formerly cold and disapproving mother, wrote kindly  from Belmont welcoming Henri into the family but setting him right, as was her wont.. “Don’t be filled with illusions about the current climate of France. Occupation and black market were here- and remain- two corruptions from which we are having great difficulty  “disinfecting” ourselves.  It would take much more effort and courage from our leaders. But I hope our Paris  will again become that island of friendship, of faith and generosity, it was in the time of our poverty and our courage.”

Henri’s Melbourne  family  received the news of his heroic return to Poland’s ruins  at the same time as  hundreds of fleeing Poles were  seeking refuge in their own city, among them  his brother in law Itzhak’s sister,  another Manya, and her beautiful young daughter, Erna.   Henri’s move was greeted with approval and elation but Manya received a cool reception from her communist brother, so she told me, years later, who gave her the impression, though he never said so, that she should not have fled the Peoples Democratic Poland. Knowing that my father’s coolness towards this sister had much deeper than political roots, I could say nothing.

When Yvette looked back on her past life and asked herself “Why ever did I agree to go to Warsaw?” her answer in the Souvenirs  is that she eagerly agreed to Henri’s suggestion that she pay him a visit at the end of her six months mission and travel through the ruins of eastern Europe since she had not herself witnessed them. “The war in Warsaw was unimaginable”, she dictated,…. Shame surpassed horror.  But I had no excuse for being caught in the double blackmail of Henri Adler’s love and Poland’s weeping.”  The “blackmail” of her own love, as we have seen it in her letters, had long disappeared form her story.

  Picking their way through the rubble of post war Warsaw at exactly the same time as Yvette, were an American architect Hermann Field and his English wife Kate. They were  with a group of  architects and planners who were examining the devastated post war cities of Europe.

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Henri’s regular letters to his sister revealed nothing about his working life and in later years he would say not a word about his “important work” for the Polish government. 

During my time in Paris In 1999,  I spent days  in the new  building of the Bibliotheque Nationale  de France (BnF),  the National Library named after Francois Mitterand, a huge,  intimidating place where millions of books and the most up to date technology are overwhelmed by the most outrageous architecture.

Daily journeys across  a windswept boardwalk  past rows of heavy metal cages  imprisoning  shrubby trees led to  hours engrossed in newspapers and books. Several days reading microfilm newspapers of 1947,1949 and 1961 and books about Poland to illuminate the dismal post war scene. Facts about Henri’s Polish life were hard to come by there, but soon after settling into the Keesing studio, I had a great piece of luck. Annette Becker, a historian and friend, invited me to lunch in the country with a  teacher of modern history who specialised in the history of  communism. We talked about my project.  A book he used in his course would surely interest me, Adam Rayski’s  Nos Illusions Perdus, published in 1985 and now out of print. He lent me his copy, which I began to read , with mounting excitement,  on the train back to Paris.  Here was an astonishingly parallel history which, when I thought about it, Henri must have read.

Adam Rayski had been born a year after Henri, also in Russian Poland,  in the town of Bialystock. His  first historical memory was of revolution and Red Army Cossacks arriving in  1920. His life shares Henri’s path of revolutionary adolescence but informed by a solid Jewish upbringing and a confident Jewish self image. Rayski also had left home without  finishing his school studies and settled in Paris; but unlike Henri, helped by his parents to escape arrest  in Poland for his revolutionary opinions.  During the second world war while Henri drove for the British Army, Rayski engaged in Jewish communist underground activity as a courier for resistance forces; each returned to their native land after the war, to build the new socialist Poland.

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It is Adam Rayski’s book that Henri’s  Poland  emerges most vividly. The Vice Minister for Defence in the new Polish government, installed after the first post war election early in 1947, was General Karol Swierczewski. Known in Spain as General Walter, he was first Commandant of the XIVth International Brigade and later rose to head a Division.  It could have been Swierczewski who  recruited Henri to the Polish service before he was murdered in April 1947 by Ukrainian separatists. It could have been another ex-Brigader , the jovial and debonair Menes Flato, who, like Henri had lived as a student in Paris in the Latin Quarter and there  found communism. Flato was put into  a  French internment camp at the end of the Spanish Civil  War but was released  and  recruited by the International Red Cross to go as a medical officer to China. Attached first to the Nationalist Army , where he met Chou En Lai, he later moved with him when the Nationalists and Communists split. Chou had also been a student in Paris; their first conversation in China had been about the Latin Quarter.

It could have been General Komar, who travelled to many countries after the war and recruited other Polish- born communist ex International Brigaders to the new Poland.  An apprentice bootmaker, Komar had left the fighting in Spain for the Soviet Union before the civil war ended and spent World War II there. In 1943 he was parachuted into Berlin with radio equipment and in 1945 he took part in the Liberation of Warsaw with the Polish forces in the Red Army.

In the new People’s Poland General Komar, with  Menes Flato as his first deputy, was given charge of the 2^nd Polish Bureau, an Intelligence service, under the Ministry of Defence, in Warsaw. Both experienced operators behind enemy lines, they were joined by Colonel Witold Leder, director of the analysis bureau and Colonel Roman Bielski, head of the operational sector. Yvette in her memoirs says  Komar recruited Henri back to Poland. In 1947, as Henryck  Trojan, he joined the Army Intelligence team with the rank of Major. These were the facts he was not been able to reveal in his letters  to Yvette. Neither does his name appear in Rayski’s book.

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Yvette had not succeeded in finding a Paris apartment  when Henri arrived from Warsaw in October 1947 and writes that they  first stayed in an hotel, for Henri was not short of money. They managed eventually, paying key money, to rent the modest two roomed apartment  in a public housing block at 3 Adolphe Cherrioux in Issy les Moulineaux , an industrial area on the south east gates of Paris “for it was necessary not to look rich”, according to Yvette.  Their standard of living was higher, they were better clothed and fed than Yvette had been accustomed to for years and  Henri also paid for a flat for Yvette’s sister  Jacqueline and her husband Andre Cassagnol. Both were civil servants in the Department of the Navy and both worked for Henri, according to Yvette’s son. His aunt, he believed, had been the more valued worker.

 Jaqueline refused me an interview in 1999 . Her husband was not well and besides, they were leaving for the mountains. During our earlier, happy meetings over many years in their  Montmartre apartment or their country house at Le Mont, near Belmont, I had never spoken about  Henri or his work. But the matter had never marred our friendly relations.  From Yvette I had picked up nothing but puzzles.  Henri’s cover in Paris, she had told me years before, was as representative of Czytelnik, a Polish publishing house.  In Souvenirs , where she admits to no knowledge of Henri’s true work, or her sister’s connection with it, she pretends to be shocked or her memory is playing tricks.“ He obtained a bizarre post that should have made me think, a job in Paris as deputy correspondent for a Polish publishing house. Quite frankly, how could this man who knew nothing of literature or publishing find himself made permanent delegate correspondent of a Polish publishing house?”  

This is the man who had quoted Verlaine in his love letters and to whom she had inscribed a volume of Rimbaud!

Among the puzzles hidden in the letters remains her strenuous efforts to  enrol him at  Sciences  Po. What could have been the reason for that? He had not managed to arrive in Paris in time to take the entrance exam,  but if he had, would it perhaps have been his cover?

While Henri  focussed on his secret work, most of Yvette’s energy during their first year France, her letters reveal, was concentrated on conceiving another child  for their first, conceived in Warsaw, had miscarried. She succeeded at last and in February 1949 , to their delight, arrived  a “superb pink and white baby who looked a pure blooded Pole”. Henri had during the war proposed they name their daughter after Yvette’s mother and when dedicating his war time letters to Helene  in 1980, he wrote: “ But ‘the baby’ so much desired arrived a little later, in France, and it was you, my dear.”

Dictating her memoirs at around the same time, Yvette, who had rejected religion and the notion of sin but  nevertheless  agreed  with George Sand  that giving oneself to a man one does not love is a sin. “Nothing is more unreasonable than a marriage of reason”, she wrote, about her own with Henri “and nothing is as dishonourable.” And she blamed this dishonourable marriage for all their beautiful baby’s adult difficulties . At the time, as we know from her letters, all was bliss. Even when she discovered  that she was a bigamist.  Since her Palestinian divorce, “the first civil divorce in Palestine”, she added proudly , was not recognised in France, her  lawyer’s advice was for her to re-divorce her first husband and  re-marry her second!. She had laughed  when she told me the story  of the day in January at the Mairie of Issy Moulineaux , when, twenty eight years old and hugely pregnant, she was married to Henri for the second time.

Later in 1949, as the Cold War pervaded Europe, a small conflict broke out between France and Poland. Diplomatic immunity disappeared,  a French Embassy official in Warsaw was arrested, and in Paris during November, without informing the Polish Embassy ,French police suddenly raided Polish associations and arrested twelve Poles, including three from the Embassy in Paris (one the Military Attache), M.Szczerbinski, the Vice Consul at Lille, the editor in chief of Gazeta Polska (Polish Gazette) and the President of the Association of Young Poles.  A Polish LOT plane was detained at take off and some of its passengers arrested; among them two miners, born, as it happened, in Henri’s town of Sosnowiecz. By the end of the year. I learnt from the files, more than twenty Poles had been expelled from France, including some who had  lived in France from infancy. 

Permission to teach was withdrawn from thirty  Polish teachers, employed, under a Cultural Convention between the two countries, so that the children of Polish miners in  the north and Alsace-Lorraine could learn their native tongue .

A telegram from Warsaw to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 24 November  denounced the raids and expulsions as a “reign of terror” and when at the end of December there was a violent attack on the Polish Embassy in Paris, Jean Baelen, the French Ambassador in Warsaw, received a telegram accusing the French government of stirring up hostility against representatives of the Polish government and giving asylum to Polish war criminals.   Protests,  arrests and expulsions continued and early in 1950  some  fifty more Poles were expelled, among them the Embassy’s Cultural Services personnel, the Embassy porter, consular employees in Paris and Lille and the correspondent of the Polish Press Agency.

 Why?   Because the Polish teachers  conducted propaganda for the Polish government, declared the anti-Communist Polish Committee in London. They were an “extended net of Cominform agents.”  The pro-communist Franco-Polish Committee, a wartime organisation, condemned the arrests and expulsions  as the war mongering work of “the Anders fascists, of Tito, Franco, …and other French factions.” Comfortably seated before state of the art micro film readers,  red carpet underfoot and surrounded by the  rich comfort of the BnF,  immersed once more in the dirty dangerous waters of the Cold war and   overwhelmed with gloom at the waste of it all, I reminded myself that  each side genuinely feared a Third, even more devastating and nuclear war.

In the middle of this Franco-Polish stand-off, as Yvette puts it in her memoirs “the iron curtain fell very heavily on my footpath at Issy les Moulineaux.” Henri suddenly packed his suitcase one day and left Paris for Poland  and after two months wait while her son was included on her passport, she too set off with ten month old Helene and ten year old Ouri.

At the same time, Adam Rayski who had become a Communist functionary, was asked to return to his native Poland where he became President of the Administrative Committee of the Polish Press. As a friend remarked, “Poland’s Hearst”.(P199)

****                               ************

The icy gale of Cold War vileness that swept over Eastern Europe after 1948, following Tito’s independent stand against the Soviet Union, had blown into Poland and communists with foreign connections, from President Wladyslaw Gomulka  down, were accused of being in the pay of foreign powers and arrested.   Gomulka was removed from office and kept under house arrest. Hermann Field remained secretly incarcerated in a Polish gaol. First in Warsaw and later somewhere in the country, under most inhumane conditions , he was blindfolded whenever he was moved and never knew where in Poland he was being held, let alone what he was accused of.

Yvette’s 1949 winter journey to Warsaw took longer and was harsher than her summer  journey two years before. After two nights break in Brussels , the Adler relations, Szymeck, Sonia and fifteen-year-old Annette put them on a plane for Prague.  She had passed through the city before, but not by plane and not since it had moved behind the Iron Curtain.  This time they were held for eight hours in a deserted airport terminal with nothing to eat and at the mercy of an obstinate airport official who refused to understand her requests to leave and find food for her children. Already angry and shaken,  she landed at Warsaw’s Okecie airport to another callous reception. The only passenger from the West, she was pounced on by customs and  while happy Henri and an unknown person waited smiling and waving on the other side of the glass, she was ordered to empty her large trunk full of clothes, linen, furnishings and knitting wool and then, after every item had been thoroughly inspected, to re-pack it. She refused, demanded a superior, and  quoted international law at him, in French. While a humane official allowed the children to be passed through to the waiting Henri, she sat implacable and watchful, as her trunk was carefully re-packed. By then it was mid night.

Had she known of the events which had taken place at exactly the same spot , she would have been even more fearful about her return to Warsaw than her memoirs describe.

For in that  customs shed, perhaps earlier on the very same day, had passed Hermann Field.  His wife had left for London to visit her parents and he was now en route to  Prague, following  a plea from his sister that he search for their brother Noel who had been named a communist in the trial of US Public Servant Alger Hiss and  then left for Prague where he had disappeared. Hermann Field, like Yvette,  had his luggage examined. Unlike Yvette, he was never released; he never caught his plane to Prague that day, or any other day.

  At the ticket counter he had surrendered his passport, informed it would be returned on the plane, but then the luggage examination over, he was taken from  the Customs shed,  interrogated and put into a van back to Warsaw. When he asked, “Where am I? ” he was told “You know very well” and to  “What is the meaning of all this” “You know very well”. At last, blindfolded and without explanation he was imprisoned. And remained imprisoned, without a trial, until 1954.

         ****                      *****

The day after Yvette and Ouri  arrived they presented themselves at the police station where , despite her protests,  she too had to surrender her French passport, as Hermann Field before her, but her fate was far happier, despite her memoirs. Henri had renounced his British citizenship, given up his Palestinian passport and recovered his original Polish nationality and both Yvette and her son were asked to do the same. “Beni” she wrote, “like Pontius Pilate, washed his hands and said to me ‘don’t forget that I’m not asking you to do it.’  Had he been sincere, he would have warned me, since he had been more than two months in Poland and had certainly summed up the changes since 1947. He could have taken the trouble to warn me of the hornet’s nest he was leading me into…. My son was followed by the police …to pressure him into asking for Polish nationality. He refused constantly….As for Beni, he did nothing to protect the child and intervene. It is one of those things for which I would never pardon him. He behaved in a contemptible  cowardly manner, letting us come in the full throat of danger. I had nothing to say to him any more. I was trapped, unable to leave. The thing was done.” We who have read her letters know better.

         ***********                 **************

The apartment Henri took them to was a spacious one of three fine well proportioned rooms on the third floor of  block at 19 Cziaskego Street, just by the Palace of Culture. He had  filled it with new furniture, which Yvette’s sharp eye for beauty decides immediately was too ugly and mediocre and declared that she would sell. Or so she said later in her Souvenirs . But remember her letters!  On every floor lived, she wrote then, people who worked in the same line of  business as Henri. Only later, when she had begun to acquire some Polish and move about did she realise that they had become part of what she called the “red bourgeoisie.”

After a year in Poland, the family was sent  abroad. To do what? Henri’s  activities as a fairly high ranking member of the military intelligence service,  are secret and  will remain so unless the  present Polish government throws open its security archives as the  German government has done.

 I never pressed Henri; inhibited, still, by communist constraints? convinced that he wouldn’t tell me? fearful of the truth?  Henri could not have been doing  such nasty jobs as Hermann Field’s interrogator,  “Cigarette”, Colonel Swiatlo the Security Police interrogator who defected in 1954 and revealed Hermann’s fate to the world . But if he had, did I want to know about it?

I hadn’t pressed Yvette either, satisfied simply to take down her stories from the Polish past as they came. In 1979 she recalled their trip abroad and the Swiss towns of Vevey, Lucerne and Lugano, where they had lived. She recalled Henri’s comings and goings during  the year but nothing of his work. I suppose she   knew nothing about it.  Her Souvenirs  dwell on her skill at home making and languages; her intellectual ability and beauty; her success with men; her generosity and humanity and anger in the face of  Cold War  communist  craziness and her disgust with the man she had twice married. In the unpublished part of her memoirs,  she talks of “ a mysterious military office” where Flato and her husband  did “mysterious work.” She  says she had no interest in what they did and had never been a communist. Again her letter readers know this to be untrue. Their whole time abroad is missing from both Souvenirs and the longer transcript.

 In the 1980’s,  Henri spent a few happy days in  Geneva with his Australian nephew Ian and his two great nephews and was strolling with them one day by the lake  when he pointed to a hotel on the other shore. “The wonderful old Hotel des Bergues,” my brother wrote “ the hotel of heads of state, film stars and smooth brown round faced men with cashmere sweaters, silk shirts, gold cuff links and lots of money in Swiss bank accounts. He said that when he was Uncle Henri, the Spy, it was there he had met his high ranking informants  and paid them money from his Swiss bank account.”

In the unpublished version of her memoirs Yvette declares that, eager to meet their Australian family and  shocked at the police order which forbade Henri from meeting his communist nephew in law, my husband Ian Turner, when he called  at their flat while in Warsaw as an Australian delegate to the 1951 World Peace Congress, she would have defied the order  and opened the door  to him. Had not Henri brought in a dear friend who I loved very much” to convince her that “we would all four be shot” if she allowed him into their apartment.”  She may have been exaggerating but it was certainly true that the delegates  had unkowingly landed  in a dangerous place. 

         ************

May 1999. In the pleasant comfort of his sitting room in Chilly –Mazarin, out past the RER station of Antony,  Henri’s step son Ouri is answering questions about the foreign life he was abruptly thrust into at the age of ten. His mother’s  accounts are not to be trusted, he has often said  and repeats now as he reflects on Henri’s work.“ It’s interesting, you know, how we  always travelled separately. Henri on his own; Yvette and the children on our own.” Part of the secrecy, he supposes.

He doesn’t know , of course, but  believes that in the fifties  Henri was setting up some sort of network in Italy. Why?  Because they spent so much time in that country  and because among their neighbours in  Warsaw  were a large family of  Sicilians, about ten children,  who had been working for Henri.  As they were about to be arrested in Italy, Henri whisked them off to Warsaw, and a flat in their own apartment building. “  I believe the kids are still there,” Ouri told me.

Henryk Trojan’s connections with Italian communists during his war time years  as Private Haim Adler made sense of this.

In the summer of 1952, Henri rented a large villa on the Italian Riviera at Lido di Camaiore and invited all the members of his family and Yvette’s to join them.  His sister  made the journey by ship from Australia to be met first by her brother Szymeck and nephews Jules and  Willy, who had all driven down to Naples in Henri’s  Fiat to collect her. What a tearful reunion that must have been after thirteen years with the war and death  in between.  Family photo albums record the wonderfully emotional time with combinations of bronzed smiling Adlers, arms entwined. Here is Henri, moustached now and stockier, with his high Adler forehead receding even further, smiling lovingly at his pretty little blonde daughter as she clutches the first of many toy koalas presented to European Adler children by their Aunt Manka  Here is handsome 36 year old  Willy with a French and Australian  aunts clinging admiringly to each arm. Henri joined  his family as they swam, talked, smiled and photographed each other luxuriating in the  sunny beaches  and the pleasures of reunion but from time to time he disappeared.  One day, he and Manka called on their blind brother in Zurich.  Disquieting news arrived from the East.

After  a number of Jewish doctors were  arrested in Moscow January 1952 and accused of being part of a Zionist plot to kill Soviet leaders in 1948 anyone with western contacts in eastern Europe was in danger. In Poland, Cardinal Wyszinski was arrested. Former members of the  International Brigades or the resistance movements  were under suspicion.  The International Red Cross and the Jewish Joint Distribution Agency were denounced as agents of western imperialism Rudolf Slansky, Secretary of the Czecho-Slovakian Communist Party and a Jew,  was put on trial in Prague. David counselled  his youngest brother :“You don’t have to account for this large sum of money you’re carrying about ,why don’t you take $1,000, put it in a bank and keep it? You may need it for your wife and children one day.” Henri laughed,  “Only you could suggest such a thing!” 

”David was right ; he could have used it later”, comments Willy drily as he told me the story in 1999. He believed the money  was to finance communist  groups.

 “We could have been brothers,” Willy reflected wistully, “only seven years apart. We spoke French. We were pals. He almost convinced me he was right about international communism. He was always talking about communism;  in Italy, after  the war, with Yvette in Paris.  But Tito changed all that.  Henri had a very interesting personality. He was polyglot. Spoke Italian like an Italian; spoke a good German; English. Very talented but in one direction. If Henri had put his energy into business he would have been a rich man. I told him many times.”

But Communist idealists who had thrown their lives begind Marx-Engels, Lenin and Stalin had nothing but contempt for business and riches.

Jules recalls that during that summer  he too believed something dire might happen to Henri,  and even more later when news came that he had been  recalled to Poland but Manka, her brother’s fellow communist,  scornfully rejected such anxious predictions from members of her family she considered naively anti- communist. She flew out for Tel Aviv and the next  family meeting .

After one night with her father and Mrs Lauffer  – because Manka never forgave her father for slapping her, said Willy -she left to spend  a few days with Itzhak’s old kibbutz mates at Ganigar and thankfully set off for Melbourne.

  The Italian holiday over, Henri moved with his  family  to Switzerland where Yvette’s mother Helene joined them and Zou passed an enjoyable term at a French school  in  Vevey. They wintered at Lugano where Henri came to visit. In December 1962, Rudolf Slansky was hanged. At that time, early in 1953,  Zou believes Henri was expecting the position of military attache in Mexico and life proceeded happily for his family;  the silence of Yvette’s memoirs about this long sunny interlude in her frozen  and difficult Polish life,  confirms its happiness. 

 “When Rudolf  Slansky was hanged in Czechoslovakia, we started to live with the feeling we were in danger,” Yvette had told me in 1979.  Adam Rayski’s picture of the times is deyailed and chilling.

 General Komar, Henryk’s boss, had already been removed from the head of the 2^nd Bureau, after  Soviet Marshal Rokossovski took command of the Polish Army; Jews and former International Brigaders had been removed from senior positions; little by little all the key people in Henryck’s outfit were imprisoned. Menes Flato, intercepted on his return from a job in the United States,  was arrested. He had become an intimate friend and in Yvette’s memory spent every Sunday, playing chess with Henri and waiting to eat her salmi of partridge. The man’s  extraordinary fate is portrayed with a wider lens in Adam Rayski’s book.  Sent to the United States and Canada to re-organise the Polish military intelligence service, he expected to return home through Paris but at the last minute received directions to return via Prague. After his plane landed , he did not appear, and his waiting friends, were  soon approached by an army officer and told not to wait any longer. They learnt later that he had been arrested  and imprisoned, like Hermann Field in Warsaw and his brother Noel in Budapest,  suspected of contact with the CIA while abroad.

Soon after, when their colleague Roman Bielski absented himself from the meeting of the organisation’s Party cell which expelled  Flato  and  someone was sent to collect him, he was found lying on his desk, dead, with a pistol in his hand. He had been heard to say that he would never go to prison again. One by one, during 1952 and 1953, all the leaders of  Henryck’s section were imprisoned. Witold Leder and his wife were arrested as they descended from the train after dining with Poland’s Prime Minister at his ski lodge in Zakopane. Adam Rayski, who with his wife had dined with the Leders the night before, waited in trepidation.

Again Henri’s lucky star shone on him. He was out of the country and on his return from Italy in the winter of 1952, remained at liberty. He never had to support the complex horrors of being a communist prisoner in a communist jail. But a lucky star can also radiate guilt and suspicion. The guilt that Primo Levi describes , of surviving Auschwitz; the good fortune of living when better men  have died, and the suspicion others feel that the survivors must have bought their escape in some shameful way. Adam Rayski’s  1999 suspicion of Henryck Adler, which I would discover later , may have had its origin in the fact that he was not imprisoned along with Komar, Flato and Leder, nor did he commit suicide like Bielski.

 Why can we not trust our lucky stars?

           Henri had not been posted to Mexico and when he returned to Warsaw, despite warning from Polish friends who  advised him against it, he no longer had a job. Still  paid by the ministry of defence, but  with nothing to do, he waited to be arrested until, early in 1953, Stalin died and the process stopped. But he remained dangling until he was employed by the French section of Polish radio. Yvette,  who had earlier, through the good offices of Flato, been employed in a research Institute, resumed her Warsaw work as teacher and translator.

 Henri cried when Stalin died, writes Yvette in disgust, but remained cool and stony as she rushed to greet Menes Flato on his release after two years prison  in 1954 , hanging back, she recounts in her Souvenirs,  half a floor below  while she was embraced and covered with  kisses by their friend. “My little Frenchwoman! My little Frenchwoman “ cried Flato cried, in gratitude for her kindness towards his wife. This doting self portrait, contrasting  with the harsh caricature of Henri, flattering as it was, paled in comparison to her account in her memoirs (which her friend and editor cut out from the published edition) of the Ball which Henri’s “mysterious”  military office put on for its employes twice a year. “Beni did not know how to dance, but he accompanied me, to show off the best looking woman at the ball…I was the ideal dancing partner. I was 30 years old, I was a coquette with a husband who did not know how to dance. It was perfect.”

How did Henri spend his last years in Poland? He wrote in 1953  to Melbourne; addressing Ian Turner and me as “comrades in the same noble and just struggle for the singing tomorrows” and happily accepting the role of “godfather” to his second great niece, my daughter Judy.  If Manka at the time had any fear for her brother, she never shared it and we  knew nothing, in Melbourne, of the arrests and imprisonments in the 2^nd Division. Or even of its existence.

While  trying to dig out Henri’s  hidden professional  life during  my time in Paris 1999 and in the following years, I also wondered about his private life. Did he ever look up his old love Paris love Maria, who had returned to Poland before the second world war? Naturally she doesn’t rate a mention in Yvette’s memoirs; an old love would deface her portrait of a dull, puritanical man.  How long did their own passionate relationship, revealed in 1947 letters, continue after she joined him in Warsaw?  In Souvenirs  Henri appears only in an occasional scene  that demonstrates his lack of initiative, his prudery, his stupid lack of jealousy, or his obsessions. One of these was his daughter, Helene.

****                 *****

In 1999, the Adler cousins living in Europe were Helene in Paris; Annette, daughter of Bernard in Brussels and in Germany, the two sons of David: Willy at Mannheim, and his younger brother Jules, near Frankfort.   Since my first return to Europe in 1968 I had spent time with them all for though our family ties stretched around the earth, they remained strong. Our ideas and formations, tastes and personalities were as mixed as one could imagine, we were all Adlers and all shared a concern for our uncle Henri. 

This year I have planned to  question all of my cousins  more closely about their own Adler childhood and about Henri’s life and work. I telephoned  them very soon after arriving in Paris.  All were comfortable with my project and agreed to answer my questions. All, that is, except Helene, whose phone rang and rang.  Cousin Annette soon  explained  why.. Some years before Henri had been rescued by the admirably swift  Sapeurs Pompiers based at the end of his street; now it is1999, Henri is dead and it is Helene who had been saved from death by the Pompiers of her area.

 Alerted days before by neighbours who hadn’t seen her for more than a week, her brother  and the firemen broke into the apartment to find her unconscious, crawling with lice, lying her own excrement. Helene was in hospital ; revived, cleaned up and being dried. Some time later she was discharged, because they needed the bed and was languishing at home now in the care of social workers and a helpful psychiatrist.

 Annette arrived from Brussels on a mercy visit, bringing  loving concern and a hamper of excellent food. She spoke with Helene about my arrival in Paris, told her about my project.  Helene was pleased I was there, Annette reported, and  interested but she did not want to see me, or even my brother, the most  sympathetic of her cousins. Not until she had recovered more of her looks.

It was thirty years since our first angry meeting and  our later encounters, though never as unpleasant, had always been difficult. I had long known of her youthful experiments with hard drugs, her escape with a fellow student to London to escape conviction and the child she had given birth to there. On later  visits I met the troubled young woman and the child, being cared for full time by Yvette because Helene, still struggling with drugs, could not cope. Our last meeting had been four years before; her problem then had been alcohol. 

         ******                   *******

At the end of my second week in  Paris I telephoned her again.  A soft low voice, gravelly with cigarettes and alcohol, welcomed my proposed visit. Her tone had been friendly, though depressed and I set off next day, eagerly but with apprehension.

Our cousin Annette earnestly advised me to take  wholesome food, prepare it, and see that Helene ate it;  her brother and his wife had earnestly advised me on no account to give Helene money ;   Helene instructed me minutely on how to arrive at her place: “Take Line 1 from  St Paul – Direction La Defense- to  Champs Elysees,  change there to Line 13- Direction Chatillon- Montrouge- passing through Duroc, Gaite and Pernety, get down at Plaisance”. Her father’s daughter!  Lovely station names that I had never heard of, for Helene lived in the fourteenth, an arrondissement quite new to me.

She supposed I could bring food if  it pleased me, but as for herself, she was not hungry. What she really needed was cigarettes. “Gitanes. sans filtres, Oh yes and kitty litter for my cat.” In  the vast ATAC supermarket on rue d’Alesia  I joined a  mixed crowd of  working class customers and noticed with interest the smattering of black and brown people, compared with my French teacher’s rue St Chappelle in the 18^th.    I chose as much wholesome food and kitty litter as I could carry and after arguing with myself (one pack, two?) picked up a carton of unfiltered Gitanes at the corner bar. Her building  in  rue Jacquier , a large square HLM, a low rent public housing block, had no frills but all necessities and even some amenities.

I press her bell and the soft, anxious voice answers as she unlocks the front door for me.  Bare walls, letter boxes, empty corridors; the place is prison like , the corridors  are narrow, the lifts are small and stink of smoke. Poor looking people join me as I rise to Helene’s floor.

Her front door is unlocked; she is  waiting for me inside and she embraces me warmly. 

With difficulty she walks to the sofa bed in the living room, where she has settled in front of the television, gratefully receives the carton of Gitanes and carefully laying aside  the butt she has been smoking, hungrily inhales a fresh cigarette. I sit on the edge of her sofa, trying to hide my shock .  Not at the sight of the apartment, which is light and airy.  About the same size as Adolphe Cherioux, with two decent sized bed rooms, a bathroom, kitchen and a small terrace facing into the courtyard. Sparsely furnished and neglected, it looks as though she’s just moved in, though she has lived there for several years; boxes of books and records stacked on the floor, cartons of clothes all over the two bed rooms. No, what shocks me is  the sight of Helene. Those lovely long limbs that had first enchanted me  in 1968  are now simply skinny; the fair skin on her arms and legs is as rough as sandpaper and greyish from lack of sun; her head, shaved in the hospital, is covered with light brown stubble not quite hidden under a smart scarf. Moles and freckles are prominent and the slanty cats’ eyes , I had so long admired  as they gazed so coolly and attractively from the fine black and white photo on the wall at Adolphe Cherrioux, are now watery and dull.

Her deep voice and intonation are uncannily like Yvette’s, though growled with grog and cigarettes and her sudden shouts and bursts of raucous laughter  disconcert me. Her ease in English is remarkable since she no longer speaks it from one year to the next. I  enquire about her condition but her report becomes a rave against her brother.  “I can’t even ring out on the telephone! He controls my money – MY money, after all,  money that Yvette left me in her will; he doles it out in little bits. I can’t go anywhere!  I don’t even have money for a metro ticket!”

“ Of course you haven’t”, I  reply in my head,

 “You’d only spend it on booze and end up in hospital again.”  And as there is no answer I can tactfully  make to her rage, I  try a diversion and  propose some lunch for us both . In the sordid kitchen to prepare it, I find the cupboards and fridge  are stuffed  with food. As she again assures me  that she is not hungry and lights  one cigarette from another, I allow myself to burst out , “ But how could you be, when you smoke all the time!”

I clear a space on the dining table and eat Helene smokes as she lies in front of the telly,  amiable and talkative, pleased to have my company and happy to talk about her father.

 My first questions concerns the photograph. The photograph story had begun when Annette , on her mercy visit from Brussels, told Helene I was in Paris and what I was doing here. ”Then you must pick up the photo!” Helene had insisted. Nearby at the photographer on rue Alesia , she said, was a superb  photograph of the Adler family, taken in Poland when her father was a small boy, which she had selected it  from his things after his death and taken it to be copied for the family, but now was without the F200 to pay for it, since  her brother  left her without a penny . “I’ve got the ticket! “ Annette had refused to leave the money on the sensible grounds that Helene might spend it on drink, but thought I would be interested. As I was.  Now  Helene revealed that this had all happened three  years earlier and though I  could not believe that the photographer would still  have it,  hit on the idea, when the smoke got too much for me, of using the photograph to lure her off her bed and into the air and even tempt her into eating.  “OK, let’s go  one day soon and see if it’s  still there. I’ll pay.’

 The morning we had agreed on,  I arrived at rue Jacquier to find her waiting, dressed in an earlier style –down at heel cowboy boots, jeans, short jacket and head scarf- like  the old, hip, sexy Helene.  Touching now, for she was so weak she had to take my arm as she tottered along on her down –at – heels, guiding me carefully  through the dog shitty street to the photographer’s. We passed some tough looking youths hanging about the buildings who called out “Bonjour Helene!” ”Dangerous” she said, “ Philippe and I once had a gun turned on us by one of these  drug dealing young Arabs”.  Five minutes from her block we reached the photographer who responded amiably to the charm that Helene could even now exude as she handed over the three year old receipt; he promised to search his storerooms for the photo when he had the time. 

We stopped in at her favourite Chinese restaurant on rue Alesia and shared  good food and  conversation. She was a pleasure to be with.

On later visits she remained friendly though sometimes aggressive as she seemed to  compete with me in  knowledge of her father;“ Did you know that Henri couldn’t swim and couldn’t ride a bike?   When  they landed on the shore n Italy, bullets flew  all around and he couldn’t swim!”

“And did you know about what happened in Spain??

“Tell me”

“His group was hungry. He had a dog named Chico, no one had any food and his friends said – Hey we’ve got to have some food- went out of the tent with bones for the dog calling “Chico, chico”. Later the dog was on the  plate. Henri vomited when he discovered what they had done. He always had a bad stomach after that.”

Should I have doubted this story?  Don’t know but I did.

What did she remember about life in Poland, I asked.

“My first memories are of Poland. Going by train to ski at Zakopane. Father stood skis I front of me to protect me from a drunk.

Another thing I remember, I was playing in a park with a friend, father was with us and reading the paper.  I said to my friend “we are going away” and we did. We passed a big street. When I got home, I said “I think I did something bad;” I went and hid in the toilet. When father came home he  found me and spanked me. The first and only time. I remember that on my ninth birthday, he took me on his knee and told me all about my birth. But  I didn’t see him very often, he was very busy.

“Anything you remember about your Polish school?”

Yes, we had slippers and an abacus for counting.

My mother took me from school because they wanted me to learn religion. Anti semitism was terrible in Poland. In the whole house there were plenty of Jewish children. I came in one day and said “I don’t want to play with Mashka ,she’s a bloody Jew. Mother  told me we’re Jewish. I wanted to jump from the window, but someone held my jumper.  In Polish you say the same word for Jew as for vomit.”

 I didn’t believe that either. This time I was right.

“In Poland, I was my father’s little girl. And I was until he died. My brother was my mother’s little boy.” I listened , intrigued, as she  repeated the account of her brother’s schooldays I had read years before in  Yvette’s book; an acount her brother had already denied was true.“He used to come home with frozen tears and he used to go to school with special paper, abrasive paper, to take off what other kids wrote on his desk. Anti semitic things. Nothing could be done about it.”  She described the lay out of the Warsaw apartment, recalled the baker who lived in the cellar, made bread on the same kitchen table where the kids did their homework and spoke of their  maid  who slept in the kitchen.

“Her name was  Helene Parmentier”

 “Wait a minute! Isn’t it odd that her name should be so like Posmantier, the name of Henri’s mother.”

“Oh no it wasn’t!” cried Helene firmly, “ His mother’s name was Sarah Poch.”

Later, after she had began drinking again and became incoherent, I  took a rest from the smoke and the raving and rode out to Nanterre, home of the Hautes de Seine departmental archives where the Archivist, youngish, slightly tousled and informally dressed, explained the workings of French bureacracy. He suggested that prison archives would not reveal much at all, except dates, ( like the Army book) but that records of marriage and of death in France  could reveal a lot, especially, for a foreigner in the enclosures, the “pieces annexes” to the marriage certificate. He suggested that I get hold of Henri and Yvette’s marriage certificate at the Mairie d’Issy.

Good idea,  then Helene would see who was right about our grandmother. Poch or Pozmantier.

Next day, armed with a letter explaining my project and a copy of my birth certificate proving  my Adler credentials I  set off  to ride the well travelled  Line 12 to its terminus at  Mairie d’Issy. At Issy les Moulineaux  improvements everywhere. Gentrification has proceeded year by year. The signs had been clear on my last visit in  the cluster  of estate agents sprouting on Avenue Victor Cresson;  since then along my customary track from the metro to Adolphe Cherrioux whole buildings have been demolished and replaced by apartment blocks and smart shops.  Thankfully  much remains. Henri’s bar, across the little side street  is still there; the bakery on the edge of the Place de la Mairie and  the fish shop on the corner of General Leclerc and rue Danton.  The news stand  in the square, which used to keep all its papers and journals inside a simple shed, now spills out with smart extra stands offering many more local and foreign papers.

The bus station is enlarged with pleasant shelters for each line and the whole square is much better kept and prettier.  But with gentrification has arrived modern security: the Guardien has disappeared from 3 Adolphe Cherioux but you cannot now just cross the courtyard and go through one of the corner doors. They are locked and need a code punched in to open them. The large iron gates of the  Mairie, like those of the Departmental Archives, are now also locked and I am directed by voice across the road  to a very recent building of glass with red and blue decoration across the road . Close to Monoprix where I have often shopped for Henri, I now struggle  to remember what has been pulled down.

The pleasant young chap  who carries my credentials  behind the screen to a superior returns apologetically in a few seconds.

Since Henri and Yvette’s wedding  had taken place less than 100 years ago, it seems he cannot let me see the certificate or the “pieces annexes”, without the agreement of the Procureur de la Republique.

Had I been his daughter, he adds, the law would allow me to see the documents, or his son. But not a niece…….

So I would have to ask Helene to come with me. But she had recently taken to her bed, drinking secretly,  declining to leave her apartment when I suggested a meeting and I am afraid that had talked on the phone rather than pay her a visit.

To my surprise, she agreed to meet me at Henri’s bar near the Mairie at eleven o’clock and bring her own birth certificate and Henri’s death certificate.  I arrived early , surprised  again and delighted to  see her standing on the corner. In the  weeks since we had met, her hair had grown to a pleasant length,  no more head scarves, and she had taken more trouble with her gear: a dark blue flowered dress, with a long skirt coming over the top of fawn leather boots and a blue cotton short sleeved cardigan on top. Passable and altogether a marvellous sight to me as she smiled and waved across the road. We embraced, took a coffee and chatted. She doesn’t drink any more, she says. Her friend Philippe doesn’t like it. She used to drink a litre of alcohol a day but has stopped but for an occasional beer now, and a glass of wine with meals. This time I am inclined to believed her. “Look, as I told you!” she cried triumphantly,  as she produced the death certificate,  “His mother WAS called Sarah Poch.”

 “ But look,  it says  his father was Bernard. You know that Bernard was his brother, not his father.”

“Yes, that’s a mistake.”

“But listen, I know his mother was Hannah Pozmantier.  I’ve seen the name on Bernard’s papers and Szymeck’s; Manka told me that was her mother’s name and so did Henri”

“Then how did this name come about?”

“Zou must have given the name to the Mairie after he died. I’ll ask him.”

“You don’t forget your own mother’s name. I remember he told me, years before he died but when he was sick, ‘Now if I die, you must go to the bank and ask for Madame X and tell her you are my daughter.’  He told me then his mother’s name was Sarah Poch.  I’ve  always believed my grandmother was Sarah Poch. Now you tell me she didn’t exist. Then who was she?  And who am I? Why would he tell me that?

We went over and over this and jokingly Helene repeated, “but who am I then? If Sarah Poch didn’t exist? “

“Come on,” I say, “I’ve always believed that my grandmother was Hannah Pozmantier. You’ll learn to love Hannah Pozmantier.  Much more harmonious name too.”

We sit and wait in the brand new open- planned office and Helene, who has obviously been in this situation before, wonders why they don’t provide numbered tickets. Then it is our turn. I watch admiringly as  Helene asks  politely and simply for a copy of the wedding certificate; I provide the date and add “avec annexes” as advised by the archivist. Another amiable young public servant gives us a little lecture about annexes. There won’t be any for a wedding certificate. But the divorce may be annexed, says Helene. Which turns out to be true when  the young  man returns with a photocopy of the certificate, signed fifty years before, on the 29 January 1949 at almost exactly the same time of the day, uniting in marriage Henri Adler and Yvette Raymond.

Both were living at 3 rue Adolphe Cherrioux, Issy les Moulineaux, she divorced from  Abraham Ben Jedidia Gorochov and daughter of Helene Laguerre, who was one of the witnesses. We knew that. But here again is Henri, “ son of Bernard Adler and his deceased wife Sarah Poch!”    So this is where Sarah Poch was born, at least in her French life.

Laughing and speculating about who was right, we Sarah Poched our way out of the building and down towards a bar, to buy  Gitanes sans filtres for Helene and a pack of Camel for her friend Philippe and head along rue General Leclerc towards the metro at Corentin Celton, together marvelling at the changes in the neighbourhood.

“When I was a little girl and told people I lived at Issy les Moulineaux they would turn up their noses. It was a very poor area. People lived in shanties.”

We discuss Issy’s desirable qualities and inspected, as though prospective buyers, a large and rich looking block of apartments  which has just gone up in rue General Leclerc. From there, by metro to Alesia and its stock shops to stroll along and look  through  the racks of  cheap clothes with famous brand names. After a good lunch at a café Helene told me she and Henri used to frequent,  we went our separate ways. It had been our best meeting by far and we planned more.

A debilitating and worrying pain intervened and kept Helene on her bed and back on the  grog.  I called again and the mystery was how she managed to pay for the bottle of Vodka ,hidden under her bed, from which she took surreptitious swigs, unless by the kindness of her Melanesian neighbour who assured me one day when we met in the passage outside her apartment that he looked after my cousin.

We had made a date to meet at rue Jacquier after  Easter

 “Don’t bother going to Helene’s this morning” rang Zou, “she’s not there. She’s left Paris for the country,  to be with an old friend dying from Aids”.

She had rung to ask for the train fare and  tell him of our appointment. She said she had turned the power off.

 ‘And the fridge?’ Zou asked.

 ‘That’s your problem!’ 

As he was at work, it became my problem and during the hour and a half it took to clear the muck out of the fridge , I  snooped through boxes of letters in the hope of finding some of Henri’s stuff.  But there was nothing except official letters enclosing  forms she needed to fill in, for her pension, for  rent assistance, for medical treatment. None had been filled in.

When two days later, Helene rang from the country to apologise for standing me up, enquire about my health and report on her feeding and caring for the three people at the house, she sounded happier and livelier than I had ever known her.

 ‘Who knows how it will turn out?’ her brother remarked dryly, ‘She may die, or it may cure her.”

         *********            **************

With Helene away from Paris, I stepped back to Poland in the 1950’s. A thaw  had began even before Nikita Krushchev’s shattering , liberating 1956 speech, when in June of that year the miners of Poznan revolted , shouting “Russians go home!” and “Bread and Freedom”.  Former President  Gomulka was released and  reinstated at the head of the Communist Party and  later stood firm against Krushchev’s bluster and  threatening Soviet tanks, herald of  hope for a new Poland.

Though Yvette and Henri  had been  firmly on the side of  liberalisation , their  responses were quite different. Henri, committed communist though never  a commissar by nature,  remained optimistic: now the light was shining towards the singing tomorrow, people  with life experience outside the Soviet bloc were more precious than ever; to leave just then was a decision that needed justifying.   And Yvette agreed in the unpublished sections of her memoirs agreed. “I had some heartbreak because I had to leave at the moment when Poland humanised herself and received much criticism  for it. Many friends were vexed with me for going despite the progress.”

I was one of those. Not vexed, but puzzled, I had written to her from Melbourne to ask why leave now?  She had stayed through all the bad times, why leave when the good ones are in sight? Her reply was  convincing. “Who can guarantee me that all the evils will be abolished? “ Geo politics will prevent Poland from ever gaining its liberty from the Soviet Union. “ And all these years later,” she reminded me, “I am proved right.”

 Then her choice was clear, her decision to leave simple. Not for Henri but, as before, he supported her and when her school principal asked Yvette to go as interpreter with a group of  senior students on a month long visit to France, Henri   suggested she enquire about the possibility of settling back there, with the children , “because this country is no good for us any more”.

Her son, now aged eighteen had already decided and received an exit visa. He stayed on only to complete  his matriculation exams.  Without waiting for the results, Ouri left Warsaw  for Paris by train with Henri’s approval and financial support and on the way he stayed a week with David Adler and Friedi in Zurich.

Ten days later Yvette and eight year old Helene also left Warsaw.

What an emotional scene there must have been at the railway station!  Unrecorded in Yvette’s narrative, it remained locked in Henri’s heart and all fifty year old Helene could only recall, with guilt and amusement,  was their arrival at the Gare du Nord.  Suddenly in the centre of the strange city where, she believed, people walked in high heels on cat’s heads (cobble stones),  she had kicked her grandmother Helene, jumped into her brother’s arms, “and refused to say “Bonjour” or speak a word of French”

Ouri had language problems too , after nearly ten years in Poland, and they were helped by a boy who had, like himself, spent the post war  years in Warsaw.  He was the son of Adam  Rayski. Rayski had arrived  from Warsaw after the thaw in July 1957, to edit a paper in Paris. Later when  his illusions were finally lost, he decided to give up both Poland and the communist party and settle  in France. In his firat years the Rayskis’ Paris  apartment was an oasis for the newly arrived Ouri. Help came too from the Adler brothers in Zurich and Brussels;  each provided Yvette with money and moral support and she felt  grateful enough  to leave her summer camp job for Brussels to  attend her sister in law Sonia’s funeral and  caring enough to stay a few extra days to help and comfort Szymeck and  fifteen year old Annette. I learnt this from Annette’s  happy memory; the Adlers get short shrift in Yvette’s Souvenirs.

Alone again in Warsaw,  Henryck  Trojan was embroiled  in  indecision. Like idealistic Communists all over the world, he had reeled from Krushchev’s devastating revelations and faced terrible choices, while outside the cold war  still deformed all political behaviour. Now it required a different courage to remain behind, though disillusioned , when one could have “chosen freedom” and the comfort of confession. Henri, a former military intelligence officer, tried but could not expect to  received the papers  that would free him join Yvette and the children. Without papers he could only leave by  presenting himself to a western Embassy and asking for asylum. He would have received a warm welcome. Brave, stubborn, proud and guilty and perhaps recalling the fate of his colleagues, Henri would not leave by defecting.  Neither  would he  stay  without Yvette, their daughter and Ouri.

 Lucky again, a  year after the three  had settled in Paris, he had told me, Henri was  rung one day by an old International Brigade comrade, restored to a high position in government, a man whose name I didn’t write  down and have forgotten.  Perhaps it was  Eugene Szyr, who  from 1959-1972 was Vice President of the Council of Ministers . Perhaps it was his former boss  General Komar.  “I have your paper ready and stamped,” the man told him,   “You  have 36 hours to leave. After that you will be arrested.”

 In October 1958, exactly eleven years after he had arrived to join Yvette for their second rapturous reunion, Henri arrived again in Paris.  Eight year old Helene , settled with her mother and her eighteen-year-old brother into an engrossing life in Paris had already  forgotten her doting father. Fifty years later, she could  remember nothing of her father’s return from Poland . Her brother’s memories were clear.. “Yvette was like a young woman in love when Henri arrived in Paris,” he told me. “She was excited, happy, she had written passionate love letters to him from Paris. But no more than two months later, all had finished.” The family spent their first French Christmas together  with a large group in a house that belonged to a colleague of Yvette , and while the proud self proclaimed coquette flirted.  Henri , said Ouri, looked on morosely.

After the holiday, as Yvette tells it in Souvenirs ,  as she left him at home each morning  and set off  before dawn for her teaching job, her thoughts grew  bitter.  She had set out on a new career in her forties.  Serious study had won her a job in a technical school and later  elevated her to the Lycee Balzac; she had retrieved their former apartment, fed and clothed her family and successfully introduced everyone into their French life. Her son, despite a Polish secondary education, had obtained a place at the Cite Universitaire where he was living and studying physics. Henri had found nothing to do .

 She had  succeeded, why couldn’t he? “How could Henri, feel his pride wounded if he had to pick up a broom, when it was our pride, my son’s and mine that we had grappled with life, as soon as we had disengaged from socialism”, she asked in the un-published memoir.

 From this distance the second Paris reunion appears not a subject for indignation, but tragic; Henri’s newly depressed state seems inevitable and Yvette’s  death-bed memories heartless. Here he was, rejected once again by a beloved wife and a self absorbed  young daughter,  politically disillusioned , forty six years old, with no prospect  of resuming that common life of love and work he had so long dreamed of and achieved, for a time, in Paris and Warsaw.  Outside the relentless Cold War  continued.  No wonder, as his daughter in law Dedee recalled, “He was anxious the whole time.” 

 I pictured  Henri  making breakfast for nine year old Helene after Yvette left for work and walking with her along the few streets to the local school at rue Jules Ferry , a school  she remembers with unhappiness. Her days there were miserable, she told me, they called her a“Polack” and she felt most unwelcome. I saw him after leaving her at school,   walking back anxiously, to that favourite bar near the Mairie, drinking coffee and writing to  his Melbourne relations. Troubled, he admits,  about the devastating revelations, believing that the defiant Poles will be able to reform communism from within, but adding that for his part, all he is prepared to assert from now on is that two and two makes four.

Without a job and colleagues  and Yvette’s love his tendency to withdrawal and secrecy intensified and his black moods must have been difficult to live with; Yvette’s  account in the unpublished sections of her memoirs , though cruel, has the ring of truth.

And to make matters worse for Henri, another man had entered his wife’s life. A childhood friend of her first husband, whom she had met in Egypt at the end of the war,  he appeared again in Paris where they fell into each others’ arms and remained there, off and on, until Yvette’s death, despite the wife  he refused to abandon.

What was Henri to do? His passion for Yvette and for Helene had led him to leave Poland during its time of hope and landed him on  the other side of the Iron Curtain to confront dangers from both Eastern and Western  Intelligence forces. If he applied for a job, what might it be? Though irrelevant to Yvette, in her memoirs, these were real difficulties. He had no French papers and his previous experience would not help much, unless he defected.   Which he still refused to do.

 Why?   Looking back, the decision to stay silent and put up with the consequences of having been an agent for a government whose ideology one has abandoned may now look ludicrous.  But at the time, it meant taking up arms for the other side in a war one no longer believed in.  Hermann Field, who was not a communist but a Quaker and a socialist idealist, made the same decision. When he was released after five years secret and brutal  imprisonment in Warsaw, and flown out of Poland, he refused to land first in any country involved in the Cold War, unwilling to allow his case to be used in its battles. It was in Switzerland that he was finally reunited with his wife.  Kate Field, like Yvette, could not comprehend such a response to five years imprisonment. I think Henri would have totally understood Hermann Field. 

Keeping house and waiting; demeaned in occupation and  low in spirit, he passed much of the summer months of 1959 quite alone , while Yvette and Helene returned to the children’s colony up in the mountains.   And all the while the Cold War was approaching him. Henri’s  fate was being decided far away in Japan . Adam Rayski’s was too . As he tells the story, in September 1958 his friend Jerzy Bryn, the first secretary of the Polish embassy in Tokyo, had spent a weekend on the beach at Okinawa while his French wife was away visiting her parents in Paris. Both had been friends of  Henri and Yvette in Warsaw . Nearby was an American base and it seems that while there Jerzy had defected to the Americans in Okinawa.  Some time after his wife in Paris received a visit from some Americans asking her to accompany them to Frankfurt, and a telegram from her husband telling her to agree. While she was interrogated in Frankfurt about their life from 1947, she was told that her husband had disappeared and that she was free to return to France. Later  Bryn was kidnapped in Japan, put on a boat and returned  to Poland, tried in Warsaw, convicted of treason and sentenced to death. According to Adam Rayski’s book, the President  commuted the sentence to life imprisonment after a telegram from Madame Bryn.  He died ten years later in a psychiatric centre.

In Okinawa, Bryn had talked about his work  in Paris in1947-8 and had given the Americans  names of contacts, including Adam Rayski and, I have no doubt, Henryk Trojan. These  names  were then traded with the French Secret Service.

One day , not long after the rentree  on Monday  September  14 1959, after he had delivered Helene to school and  was drinking his morning coffee and reading the paper , Henri was approached by a man he had known in Poland. “Come into my car, I have  something to talk to you about”. It was a call he must surely have been expecting. In the car were two Americans.

 “We know all about you.  Come to the Embassy with us and we’ll give you protection from the French police. Otherwise, you’re on your own.”

Henri refused.

“ You  know that right now , they’re in your apartment?”

  Henri got out of the car and began to walk along to rue Adolphe Cherioux..

15,008 words

He was  about to come in from the cold.