Towards the end of his life Max asked me to write down all that he could remember. We sat in his library with him talking and me writing, for many hours. When Max died I also had access to his papers, written in tight old-fashioned handwriting.
I came across a brown envelope, on which was written a short note addressed to me, asking me to check through the contents and include them only if I saw fit.
I read through the pages, moved, horrified and desperately sad in turn. How could all this have happened and we had not known?
I include a heavily edited version because, if I didn’t, the story would somehow not be complete.
I was seconded to the army legal service, attached to humanitarian relief and the displaced persons courts. I, for some reason probably based in misguided romanticism, asked to be attached to the section based in Rennes, in north west France. I was successful in my request and spent much time in the years between 1944 and 1948 in Brittany. I spent my leisure time at a bar in Audierne, a town I had visited in another life, in the mid 1930s when I was a law student in Vienna.
I first noticed her in the early summer of 1947. She was sitting on the wall looking out to sea.
At around the same time the next day she was there again – or was it still? Had she moved at all? Who was she? Where did she live?
I was involved in the work of finding refuge and repatriation where possible for the thousands of “children of the state” that still roamed homeless and rootless in post-war France, so I felt I had some responsibility. I did wonder if she could be the woman I sought but she seemed far too small and too young.
“Who is that young girl” I asked the patron of the café “does her family come from around here?”
I spoke in French, my French was good even though I knew my accent was strong, I liked to think the strongest element was English – though I am sure they were suspicious of the German influences.
“No Monsieur, she is a stranger. But she has been here every day now for two weeks, sitting on the sea wall, looking out to sea. She is a clever girl because the time she comes varies with the tides – later and later every day.”
“Does she eat here? Drink? Where does she go when she leaves?”
“Why are you interested, monsieur? Do you have an interest in young girls?”
As he spoke he raised his eyes to the ceiling. I could not miss the looks on the faces of the men in the small bar, trying so blatantly not to hear my answer as they hunched over their glasses. I did not rise to his tone of voice, deliberately not taking offence and answered as well as I could.
“Yes, indeed I am. It is my job to get young girls, and young boys, who have no homes and no families to faces of safety. To give them a chance in life that up till now they have not had. There are many children still suffering from the recent hostilities.”
“Monsieur, of course I meant nothing other than that. She has been here now for several weeks. I do not know where she eats or sleeps. She just appears here every day and looks out to sea.”
I left the bar, conscious of the attention being paid me by the patron and his customers, and walked slowly across to the sea wall.
Standing two arms lengths from her I waited for several minutes to see if she would walk away before I spoke.
“What do you watch so closely, young lady?”
“I spoke to her in French, she did not reply. I tried again in a dialect of German that, had she been the person I sought, she would have known.
She did not move away, nor did she turn to look at me. After a while she replied, quietly but clearly “Die unterseeboot.”
Several minutes passed and still she did not turn towards me.
It was a perfect description of what she was watching. As the tide receded the sharp lines of the prow of a boat emerged. The boat had obviously been driven ashore some years before and the salt and waves were beginning to break down the structure and it was becoming something of a skeleton. It was not a submarine but it was certainly a boat under the sea.
We sat watching as the tide went lower and lower down the beach. She neither spoke nor moved for some time. I felt a little uncomfortable but was determined to find out more about the child. It was a good hour later, when the boat was again being covered with the waves, that she turned towards me, unsurprised that I was still there;
“It is time to go Monsieur” she said, this time in French.
“Will I see you tomorrow?”
“I shall be here.”
The next day I was waiting at the sea wall when I spotted the slight figure walking round the bay. The sea was just beginning to expose the ‘unterseeboot’ again.
“Good morning Monsieur”
“Good morning Mademoiselle”
“Madam”
“I apologise. Good morning Madam.”
That single word shocked me.
She was so young. She was so tiny and vulnerable. She looked no more than 12 years old. I had completely misjudged the situation and felt very foolish. Yet now she was facing me and when I could see her face and into her eyes I realised she was older, but surely still no more than 17.
Over the next few days I met and spoke with Monika, for that was the name she gave, several times. I found her to be polite, answering questions in French and German, equally easily, with as few words as possible but never rudely or brusquely. She gave nothing away about herself at all. I discovered only that she was living in Plouhinec, an hour’s walk away from Audierne but came here when she could, to watch the water rising and falling over the shell of the boat.
In the office in Rennes where we were trying to do what we could for everyone and anyone who came to our centre I raised the subject of the girl.
“What can I do about her George?”
“Absolutely nothing old chap I’m afraid. You can do absolutely nothing about her at all.”
“Just because she is older in years, George, just because she is no longer a child?”
“Absolutely old chap, there are rules.”
“If you met her you would know that she is still a child in her mind. Her age may be older than 15 but her mind isn’t. Believe me.” How could I explain this child – as it was as a child I thought of her. “She must have seen so much and been through so much that she has never grown up.” If you saw her you would think she was only 12.”
“But I haven’t and I won’t so leave it be.”
It was good advice which I should have taken. But I couldn’t leave it be.
Two weeks later I was drinking in the café when Monika appeared – as I hoped she would when the tides had worked through their cycle. I walked down to the sea wall.
“Bonjour Madame”
“Bonjour Monsieur”
I asked if she was well, she replied she was and asked if I was well. I replied I was also. The formalities were performed as if we were in a pantomime.
“Do you speak English?” I asked, in English
“A little” she replied – also in English
“Enough to live in England?”
“But that would not be possible Monsieur. I have spoken many times to men from England and have the language a little but I do not think to live in England.”
I did not want to think what Englishmen she had met and what language they had taught her. I asked more.
“When did you speak to Englishmen?”
She did not answer with words, simply a shrug of the shoulders.
I understood, but had hoped that that would not have been the answer.
“Why would they do that Monika, you are so young, almost a child, why would they do that to you?”
“They pay me, monsieur, they have food, I have hunger.”
I hoped that it was her lack of english that made her speak in the present tense. Perhaps it was the same now as it was during the war, perhaps nothing had changed that much. This is what happened to all people in war. Even though they did not die their spirits were killed.
“Would you like to leave France?”
“Only if I can have a roof and food. And no need to do things with men.”
We spoke now in French. Her French was better than her English. Perhaps she had had to be with more French men. I was sure it was not her native language.
“Where do you come from Monika? Where were you born? What is your real name – it is not Monika is it?”
She did not answer until the tide had turned and the sea was yet again exposing the boat to view.
“I know my real name is not Monika. It is what my mother always called me when we had left the farm. I don’t know where I came from, I have been in this country for a long time but we came here from another place. We took many days to pass a big lake. There were mountains and snow. There were boys in brown uniforms.”
Her voice tailed off and I realised she was meeting pictures in her mind that she did not want to see and had not seen for many years.
“Boys in brown uniforms,” she repeated, very quietly.
Austria, or southern Germany. She must have come from there.
“You are Austrian?” I asked but she had not heard. She was still thinking of the words she had just spoken. In a few moments she turned and walked down the sea wall, away for another day.
“She is Austrian, George, not French. I do have a responsibility. It is up to me to see her safe.”
“Just because you are also Austrian, Max, does not mean you are responsible for every lost Austrian girl in the entire world.”
“What would you have me do then?”
“Leave her be – she has survived, she will survive. She’s not your responsibility. Leave herMax.”
I had to return to England for some weeks and I decided to leave it to the hand of fate. If she was still in Audierne when I returned I would help her. If she was not I would not try to find her.
I got to the café well before the tide was to turn, and waited anxiously with my coffee and cognac. She did appear, walking slowly along the sea wall, around the bay. I was so very pleased to see her. I drank the glass dry in one and walked down to the wall.
“Good afternoon Monika.”
“Good afternoon Monsieur”
She took up our relationship where it had left off, as if I hadn’t been away since the summer, it was well into the Autumn as the chill wind coming off the sea sharply reminded me. Monika still wore the cotton dress she had worn at every meeting we had had. I went to take my coat off and put it around her shoulders. She shrugged. “That is not necessary Monsieur, I must become used to the cold.”
I decided we could not go on as if time was no object, they said it was going to be a long cold winter. I do believe she would not have survived that winter of 1947 had I had not insisted she allow me to help.
“Monika, I am from Austria. It is a country you may know. It has mountains as you have described, beautiful mountains with snow on them through most of the year, even when it is warm in the valleys. There are many large lakes, beautiful deep blue lakes which reflect the sky and the mountains. The quiet life that existed there, a quiet life led by good people, was disturbed by war and...”
I fought to find the right words to convey the multitude of sins that had befallen my homeland and ended, very lamely,
“bad people.”
“Do you remember anything of the mountains?”
She looked at me sadly. Said nothing and walked away – even though the sea had not yet turned to cover up the boat.
She was not there the next day. Nor the next.
I had long since given up trying to explain my interest in the ‘young girl’ to the patron and his customers. They had accepted my presence and my conversations on the sea wall. I asked the patron of the café to find out what he could.
“I have frightened her away George. She has so much fear and I have frightened her with my questions.”
“She will come back, she sees you as a way out. She will come back when she thinks she has frightened you enough.”
I did not want to think that she could be that calculating, and so I still went down to the café every day for a cognac. I was getting worried, it was getting colder and I had to go back to England soon.
After several days when she had still not reappeared the patron had some news.
“She has gone, Monsieur. Your young lady.” Though he did not say the correct word for ‘lady’.
“Do you know where?”
I had spoken out loud not expecting an answer but received one anyway.
“She is held by the gendarmerie. They have taken her to Rennes. She is a thief.”
You will not need to know the details but I found her in Rennes, paid off the police and took her under my protection. It is probably true to say that the gendarmerie believed my interest to be exactly that that the café’s patron had thought it to be those months before.
She seemed pleased to see me. It was the first time I saw her smile.
Monika was completely quiet as we drove to the girls’ camp. I made some sort of explanation to the matron and hoped that she would think Monika no older than 12.
For the time she was in the camp, throughout that frighteningly cold winter, I visited her when I could. She began to talk to me, offering me tea in a very formal manner as she entertained me in the hut that passed for the camp’s common room. “She said nothing about the boat or anyone she may have known through those months we had been watching the sea do its work. But slowly she confided in me some things of her life.
On one occasion, with great ceremony, she showed me her envelope.
It had been sewn inside her clothes for years. It contained her real papers. I could hardly believe she had kept them through all she had been through.
And they proved me to have been right in my instinct that day on the sea wall and right to have persevered. I knew now I would have to lie for her, do whatever it took to win her confidence and get her to England
At first she not only dwelt on her past, she dwelt in it, always talking as if the events she spoke of were happening now. But gradually her months in the camp helped her. She found children more vulnerable and frightened than she was, she found that she could help others. She made herself useful to the women in charge of the camp, she looked after the young children, she comforted them through their nightmares, she played with them in the snow, she learned to care for children and not be afraid of them, she learned to love their innocence and she found they trusted her. Perhaps, with regular meals and safety and security she was able to experience something of the childhood she had never been able to have.
As she gained weight, and filled out like a woman should, she began to look her age.
I had to get her out of the camp and out of France before it became obvious that she was not a young girl. It was an infuriatingly frustrating wait but eventually, in early summer 1948, news came of a boat going to England carrying 200 children to be adopted by English families. I had to get Monika on it. So I lied, I forged papers, I got her on that evacuation boat.
“Max she is leaving tomorrow with the others.”
“Thank you, George. Thank you.”
All I had to do was persuade her to go.
What would she think of England? Would it be a better life for her? She spoke very little English so what could she do? But they were problems for the future, first I had to get her to England and to safety.
It was surprisingly easy to persuade her. She was happy to go where I suggested, I believe she had come to trust me.