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Lest We Forget

‘Lost in Poland?’ the publisher Heinemann asked in October 1939 in a newspaper advertisement for Martin Hare’s new novel Polonaise. The last correspondence the publishers had had from the novelist, a letter from Warsaw sent just before the outbreak of war, assured them that ‘We are perfectly calm here.’ The advertisement went on: ‘Nobody now knows the fate of the author of Polonaise.’

At that moment, neither did the author herself. As later recounted in her memoir, My Name Is Million (1940), she and her husband were at that moment huddled inside a guard post on the border between Russian-occupied Poland and Lithuania, waiting to hear whether they would be allowed to cross. They had been on the run for weeks. I first came across Martin Hare as the author of the novel Butler’s Gift, a light comedy set in Ireland on the brink of civil war, and assumed its author was a man. Curious to know more I began to investigate.

To my surprise, a newspaper article from late 1934 identified ‘Martin Hare’ as an Irishwoman named Zoe Girling. In it she was pictured with her husband, Aleksander Zajdler, a Polish nobleman and former army officer whom she had married the year before. The couple had met in Paris. She knew no Polish and he had little English, so they communicated in French. They later moved to Poland, where they divided their time between Warsaw and his family’s estate in the Carpathians. And there they might have lived happily ever after with Zoe continuing to write clever comic novels as Martin Hare, had history not intervened.

Zoe posted the manuscript of Polonaise, her seventh novel, set in Poland, along with that reassuring note to her publisher, on 31 August 1939. The next day, the Germans invaded. The speed with which the Blitzkrieg rolled over the weak and ill-prepared Polish forces stunned everyone. Luftwaffe bombs began falling on Warsaw on the first day of the war, and by the next day the

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‘Lost in Poland?’ the publisher Heinemann asked in October 1939 in a newspaper advertisement for Martin Hare’s new novel Polonaise. The last correspondence the publishers had had from the novelist, a letter from Warsaw sent just before the outbreak of war, assured them that ‘We are perfectly calm here.’ The advertisement went on: ‘Nobody now knows the fate of the author of Polonaise.’

At that moment, neither did the author herself. As later recounted in her memoir, My Name Is Million (1940), she and her husband were at that moment huddled inside a guard post on the border between Russian-occupied Poland and Lithuania, waiting to hear whether they would be allowed to cross. They had been on the run for weeks. I first came across Martin Hare as the author of the novel Butler’s Gift, a light comedy set in Ireland on the brink of civil war, and assumed its author was a man. Curious to know more I began to investigate. To my surprise, a newspaper article from late 1934 identified ‘Martin Hare’ as an Irishwoman named Zoe Girling. In it she was pictured with her husband, Aleksander Zajdler, a Polish nobleman and former army officer whom she had married the year before. The couple had met in Paris. She knew no Polish and he had little English, so they communicated in French. They later moved to Poland, where they divided their time between Warsaw and his family’s estate in the Carpathians. And there they might have lived happily ever after with Zoe continuing to write clever comic novels as Martin Hare, had history not intervened. Zoe posted the manuscript of Polonaise, her seventh novel, set in Poland, along with that reassuring note to her publisher, on 31 August 1939. The next day, the Germans invaded. The speed with which the Blitzkrieg rolled over the weak and ill-prepared Polish forces stunned everyone. Luftwaffe bombs began falling on Warsaw on the first day of the war, and by the next day the city was ablaze. To its residents, the advance of the Germans seemed like ‘a green wall of water racing inland, in just that fraction of a second before it topples over and breaks and drowns the land’. By 4 September, Zoe and Aleksander had left Warsaw, taking with them only what they could fit into a couple of rucksacks and joining thousands of other refugees clogging the roads to the east. If the German invasion of Poland was one of the great sweeps of history’s broom, My Name Is Million is that history told from the dust’s perspective. All the certainties of life the couple had known quickly crumbled. As petrol supplies ran out, a car became an encumbrance: you could have bought a Rolls-Royce ‘for a cigarette’, wrote Zoe. She and her husband avoided speaking to one another in French for fear of being taken for spies or fifth columnists, while he worried that her imperfect command of Polish might put her at risk. Money lost any value. Aleksander resorted to what his wife called his ‘officer manner’ to beg cart rides from peasants: ‘The officer manner could always, in the end, get us out of the village and, once we had moved, obtain, say, ten kilometres where fifteen had been promised and six really intended.’ While riding in one of these carts, Zoe watched as a Heinkel bomber swept down over their column of refugees. A moment later, she was lying in a ditch, blood streaming into her eyes, her scalp sliced open by shrapnel. They managed to find a field hospital in Lublin where they persuaded a nurse to stitch it up. When they reached Chelm, they found not a town but ‘a crater in hell’. Like millions of Poles, they were homeless, with ‘no plan, no provisions, no idea where they were going; nowhere to go’. One of Zoe’s few remaining comforts was her diary, in which she recorded her chaotic impressions: ‘I was caught in a machine of whose working I had no real knowledge, battered about by the horrible ebb and flow of rumour, with all landmarks and seeming certainties underwater.’ Crammed in a railway car with a hundred others, creeping cautiously towards yet another town in the hope of finding sanctuary, she came to appreciate the fine margin between comfort and discomfort: ‘It may be, in fact it cannot be, more than some knack evolved of freeing an arm or a leg for an instant from the pressure of all the other arms and legs above and below it; or perhaps being nearer to what air there is, or farther from it.’ Eventually they headed for the estate of an elderly noblewoman whom they knew in the Polesian marshes near the border with Russia. They were warmly welcomed, but only a few days later they awoke to the news that Russian forces were crossing into Poland. Many Poles still remembered the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland during the 1919‒21 conflict. ‘The stream of refugees now began to flow in the opposite direction,’ observed Zoe. And now their status became a death warrant. Zoe was a foreigner. Aleksander was a nobleman: ‘An engineer, with Paris diplomas. An officer. A veteran of the Bolshevik war. Decorated.’ The peasants on the estate began to talk of confiscation, of trials and firing squads. Zoe buried her diary, and together they began to hike toward the Lithuanian border, hoping their French passports would secure them passage to England or France. On 8 November 1939, a small notice appeared in the Guardian: ‘News reached London yesterday that Martin Hare, the novelist, and her husband, who it was feared had lost their lives’, were safe in Lithuania. Eventually, they were able to get to Sweden, where they boarded a ship destined for England. Unfortunately, soon after leaving Swedish waters, the ship was seized by a German cruiser and escorted to Lübeck, where they were thrown into a Gestapo jail. Zoe was released after a few days and allowed to travel on to Denmark, from which she gained passage to England. Aleksander disappeared. Even when she was safe back in England, Zoe never relaxed. Whenever she went out, she wrote, ‘I instinctively look for my passport and make sure it is safe. Without it I know that I am lost. Without a passport you are nothing more than a number in a concentration camp.’ Knowing that her husband, if still alive, was sitting in one of those camps, she chose to publish My Name Is Million anonymously to protect him and their friends in Poland. In it Aleksander is referred to only as ‘A’. My Name Is Million is an account of war and flight as immediate as any news story from Ukraine, Syria or Ethiopia today. Its author did not claim to provide an objective account, only ‘fragments and nightmare glimpses and words removed from almost the whole of their context and a view darkened by personal anguish’. It was, she wrote, ‘A shaken kaleidoscope, true in every one of its details but not the whole picture.’ With My Name Is Million, Martin Hare was left behind. Zoe Zajdler, as she now preferred to be called, no longer had room for fiction in her life. She continued to hope that Poland would be liberated and that she would be reunited with Aleksander. With the help of General Władysław Sikorski and his wife, she began to collect reports of life in occupied Poland and of the exile of Poles to Siberia during the months of Soviet control of eastern Poland: ‘One of the last things I heard the Polish radio say was, “Remember, all of you who are listening. Learn by heart names and places and evidence. If necessary, remember for years.”’ Zoe Zajdler took on that duty of remembrance. She compiled stories of the Soviet occupation and repression and published them in The Dark Side of the Moon (1947), with an introduction by T. S. Eliot. This book too was published anonymously, this time to protect those mentioned from Soviet retribution. Her sole credit was a reference in the preface by General Sikorski’s widow to ‘a woman of scrupulous integrity and fairness’. Only when the book was reissued in 1989 was her authorship disclosed. Decades before The Gulag Archipelago, The Dark Side of the Moon revealed the horrifying details of the arrest, transport and imprisonment of those caught up in the Soviet penal system. Zoe Zajdler’s last book was a collection of Polish fairy tales published in 1959. In her introduction, she wrote that she brought to these stories ‘her own memories and evocations of all these places, where their sources lie’. But she never returned to Poland and she never saw Aleksander again. He is assumed to have died in a Nazi prison or concentration camp. Zoe herself died in Kent in 1968, and so never saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the return of an independent Poland. The Irishman I first knew as the writer of lighthearted comedies turned out, in the end, to be a woman who became a custodian of another nation’s memories.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 75 © Brad Bigelow 2022


About the contributor

Brad Bigelow edits the Neglected Books website www.neglectedbooks.com and is writing a biography of the American writer and editor Virginia Faulkner.

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