And this sad story about this poor 18-year-old mother, who was forced to give shelter to a newborn son, born after the rape. She found him 34 years later, but things were, to put it mildly, shocking.
He took the message at 9: 00 one autumn morning 1977.
Sitting in the kitchen in his apartment in North London.
The message came to him through a small transistor radio, the one in accordance with his routine has always been included at this time in the morning.
Transistor radio, with which Erwin van Haarlem early autumn morning in 1977 received a disturbing and very troublesome message.
Short message which was the beginning of one of the most incredible and extraordinary spy stories, which only you can imagine, was as follows:
Your mother is trying to find you to Czechoslovakia through the Red cross. If the Red cross will find you, you’ll have to meet her.
It took a Dutch citizen Erwin van Haarlem, who since 1975 has lived and worked in London.
Outwardly he was a seller of art and Antiques, but deep behind the facade hid a spy of the Czech State security Service — Státní Bezpenost, the secret police of former Czechoslovakia.
The message was encoded and received a very worried and alarmed Erwin van Haarlem.
For concern, undoubtedly, was all about, but he saw no other exit, except how to meet a woman who gave her son in infancy, and now so hard it was looking for.
Woman, Johanna van Haarlem, living in the Netherlands, and the truth soon came out on the trail of his son in London and sent him a first letter in October, 1977.
He replied in a month, and that was the beginning of increasingly warm and friendly correspondence between a mother and son.
The mother began to insist on a personal meeting. The son was more reserved, but gave up, and they appointed a meeting in London in January 1978.
52-year-old Johanna van Haarlem was beside himself with excitement and joy that finally sees her son who was kept in mind all this time since, as one cold October day in 1944 gave him up for adoption to an orphanage one of the districts of Prague-holešovice in the former Czechoslovakia.
So she’s already at the end of December 1977 sailed to England with his 13-year-old son Hans, and they arrived in the British capital between Christmas and New year.
Sunday January 1, she could no longer cope with them.
She got out of bed, leaving his son to sleep, put on warm clothes and went outside.
She had planned only to pass by the home of his son on the street of Queens Gate Gardens. She wasn’t going to contact him, as the son said that he needs first to prepare for the meeting with her in January.
When she approached the house on the other side of the street she saw a man, similar to what was in the pictures that her son sent her. So similar, that she never for a moment doubted that it was him.
She did not speak with him, but he stopped suddenly and looked at her.
“You are Mrs. van Haarlem?” he asked from the other side of the street.
“Yes,” she answered and went to him.
“Hello, mother, I’m your son,” said the man.
She rushed to him and, after exchanging a few touching words, they were in each other’s arms.
After that, he invited her to drink champagne at his house and the mother told him its history.
A thrilling meeting between mother and son 1 January 1978 in detail described in the book of the journalist and writer Jeff Meisha (Jeff Maysh) called “the Spy with no name”, which was released as an independent edition January 6, 2017.
Mash is a British-American journalist who now works in Los Angeles. Details about this book and its author will continue in the article.
Working on his book, he simultaneously met with the main actors in the exciting drama and was able to illuminate the whole story that gave rise to this amazing story.
This book is one of the main sources of this article, along with various newspaper publications and the like.
All illustrations to this story by the newspaper Jyllands-Posten courtesy of Jeff Mach, and he made his Czech counterpart Jaroslav Kmenta (Jaroslav Kmenta).
Let’s for a moment return to one of the many starting points of this story.
We will move back in the fall of 1943, in a crowded compartment of a train in the Dutch Hague.
One of the places sits 18-year-old Johanna van Haarlem and another 23-year-old Polish soldier Gregor of Swarms, betrayed his country and served in the German army, which on Friday 1 September 1939 in the early morning invaded Poland, thus unleashing world war II.
They locked eyes and their flirting had gone so far that Johanna van Haarlem got off the train with him.
He walked her home, and they met again in a few days.
18-year-old girl born into a Jewish family. To avoid the Holocaust, her father decided to abandon his faith and joined the Dutch Nazi party NSB. So it was not unusual that they have hosted in the house of German soldiers and civilians the Nazis.
Four weeks after Johanna was met by a Swarm, he raped her during one of the holiday in her own home, and then they no longer met.
The rape had consequences in early 1944, she could no longer hide her pregnancy.
Family, especially the father, was furious and sent her immediately into a special clinic where there were Dutch women who became pregnant by German soldiers.
The child’s father was killed in the battle, when its troops went into Normandy in June of 1944 and August 24 Johanna gave birth to a son, who was named Erwin.
Three weeks after the birth she took the baby and went home to his parents who in no way wanted the boy became a member of this family. So the father ordered his daughter to go to a remote town and give the baby up.
Grief-stricken, but not configured so easily give up her son, she went through war-torn Europe. She was starving and could, begging for food for themselves and their children. She stood in the Greenhouse, very close to the German border. Here she tried for days to live, taking up any podvorachivaetsya work, but in the end she had to give up.
In October she went to an orphanage in holešovice in Prague and gave his six-week son.
She returned back to the family in Holland, but there was complete chaos. Father by that time was taken to jail for his relationship with the Nazis and the family lost everything they had.
The father told his daughter that he does not want to hear any mention of her son, and carefully destroyed all the documents for adoption.
Later Johanna van Haarlem married, but her husband forbade her ever to mention his son. After the war, an orphanage in Czechoslovakia sent a few emails in which she offered to come and pick up my son.
These letters she had never seen, and they have remained unanswered. But secretly the woman was constantly thinking about my son and was determined to find it, when possible.
After the divorce she became more purposefully looking for him, and in 1977, her quest was finally successful.
In the next ten years they were in close contact. She often visited him in London and he came several times at a family meeting in the Netherlands.
That he is actually a spy for the Czechoslovak secret police, the son said no and the mother.
Johanna van Haarlem was happy and suggested one day that will sell your home in Holland and move in with him in London.
She finally found her son, who longed for so many years, and ever since that day she gave him up, carried in his heart the burden of guilt for the betrayal.
But the story does not end there.
On the contrary.
Because something was quite wrong there, in depth.
Erwin van Haarlem diligently kept a terrible secret.
To better understand this mystery and what happened next, it is necessary to rewind time.
This time to another Central point of this story.
We find ourselves on a cold winter day 1967 at the Russian Embassy in Prague.
Here in the guard is 22-year-old Sergeant Vaclav Jelinek, and it is very boring to spend here long hours, opening gates for cars traveling to and from the Embassy.
In order to fill the time with something useful, he began to train to pronounce the German words that were written on the palm of your hand.
When it was noticed by the authorities, he was summoned to the office where he met with two young men in civilian clothes, which he quickly realized was working for the secret police.
Jelinek thought that it is waiting for some kind of disciplinary punishment, but this did not happen and the case was another.
Physically strong, attractive and gifted Sergeant noticed and wanted to recruit him as a secret police/intelligence.
He quickly agreed — he had been absolutely fascinated by the great Russian spy Richard Sorge, his life and exploits, and dreamed of a fate.
Many months after that, he secretly taught everything I needed to know and be able to the spy.
He was promoted to Lieutenant and settled in a luxurious apartment in the centre of Prague.
By the end of the training, he also learned that he had become a completely different person.
Officially it was presented so that Vaclav Elinika sent to Russia to serve their military service, and the truth was known only to a few and none of them were even his own parents.
Vaclav Jelinek just disappeared off the face of the Earth.
He received a new name and a new identity: Erwin van Haarlem.
Secret police documents found a Dutch boy, who 22 years ago was abandoned by his mother miserable in an orphanage in Prague.
They suggested that since the boy is either dead already or he was adopted and he lives a completely different name, not knowing anything about his true origins.
In subsequent years, a new identity was carefully increased. There was so much detail that everything looks just perfect. Was even invented a foster family. All this was done on the basis of what Jelinek does not have to know about van Haarlem, he should be the Erwin van Haarlem is real.
And he was named to the bone.
Creating a perfect cover, in 1975 Elinika as Erwin van Haarlem was sent to London for spying against England. Prior to that, he and his counterfeit documents applied for and received Dutch citizenship and passport. At that time his leg had never set foot on Dutch soil.
He very successfully performed his task as a spy, working against England and the United States, and ensured the flow of information in Czechoslovakia, and then in the Soviet Union. The data concerned including missile defence of the two countries, and he entered the circle of Russian Jews who fled to the West.
To hide his true mission in London, he first worked in the hospitality sector, but subsequently settled as a seller of art and Antiques.
Everyone was happy — everything went like clockwork.
No one suspected any cheat.
Famous and successful women tape — this role also provided the perfect cover.
Until the day in 1977 when Johanna van Haarlem decided through the Red cross to find his son and eventually found him in London.
For ten years Jelinek coolly and carefully looped it around his finger and all ways imaginable played the role of that son, whom she left in an orphanage in 1944.
The deception probably would have continued if Elinika in 1988 was not taken at the crime scene members of the British intelligence agencies MI5, which was exposed in this Eastern European spy.
In 1988, MI5 received a tip-off and stormed the apartment Elinika in that moment, when he communicated with the secret police of their homeland. During the search of his apartment MI5 found a lot of evidence of his guilt.
The fact that her son caught the spy plunged Johanna van Haarlem in terrible shock, but devastated woman waited for news worse.
In conversations with her son stubbornly denied that he was a spy, and claimed that she really is his biological mother.
But then they both took blood tests and they showed that the man who imprisoned and accused of extensive espionage, could not be her son.
Johanna van Haarlem was heartbroken and deeply shaken by this discovery.
She desperately tried to get some explanation from cold-blooded Elinika, but to no avail.
Immediately after the exposure, the Czech began to call her “Mrs. van Haarlem”, but before it was “my dear mother” and the like.
During the trial, and in subsequent years, Jelinek claimed that his name is Erwin van Haarlem.
In March 1989, in the Central criminal court old Bailey in London he was sentenced to ten years in prison for espionage.
Announcing the judgment, Mr justice Simon brown (Simon Brown) said the following:
“I appeal to you under the name van Haarlem, although I am convinced that at birth you were given another name.”
After four years in prison “Parkhurst” on the Isle of Wight, “a Spy without a name” as it is often called, April 5, 1993 and released on the same day, was deported to the Czech Republic.
As soon as he stepped on the Czech ground, he regained his true identity — Vaclav Jelinek, under this name the former spy and stayed in Prague.
On this colorful spy story would end, but she had another small extension.
What Jelinek for 10 years posed as the son of Johanna van Haarlem, widely discussed in the press and two journalists from the British newspaper the Daily News decided to find out what really happened to that six week old boy whose mother left the orphanage in 1944.
It was a very long and difficult job, but in the end the two journalists managed to trace the biological son of Johanna van Haarlem, who once adopted and who now lives under another name, knowing nothing about what his personality was used in evil Linecom and secret police.
26 Feb 1992 Johanna van Haarlem finally reunited with her real son, who lived in Brno, Southeast of Prague.
Vaclav Eliniko now 72 years old. Since his return to the Czech Republic on 5 April 1993 he was very little disposed to talk about their years as Erwin van Haarlem.
But after several attempts in early 2016 journalist Jeff Machu managed to meet him at the restaurant in the centre of Prague.
The fact that the meeting took place, has occurred including thanks to the help of Czech journalist Jaroslav Kmenta (Jaroslav Kmenta), who in 2004 acted as writer Elinika, recording his memories, and then one book was published in Czech.
When Jeff Mays spring day in 2016, met with Linecom, he had a lot of questions, one more interesting another.
Among them were, for example, the question of how he managed to fool Johanna van Haarlem for more than ten years.
“I’m absolutely not sympathetic” — he said and added that it actually was a very dominant personality, and often he wanted to get rid of it.
“But I had to get along with her, although was often fed up by the throat”.
Then it went on a rather interesting theory: was Johanna van Haarlem’s actually hired by the intelligence MI5 to expose him?
Suspicions Elinika based on what she has said on several occasions that took up his quest on his own. It was only her idea from the beginning to the end.
“Well, of course, whose else could it be?” asked Jelinek journalist.
His attention was also attracted by the fact that she started looking for him immediately after he falsified documents requested — and received Dutch citizenship. Eliniko also wonder why she so thoroughly examined his past in Prague and suddenly without warning came to his home in London on 1 January 1978.
In addition, he told reporters that the Czech secret police was all the time convinced that she worked for MI5.
So the truth, is likely to disappear in the archives of the British and Czech intelligence services.
Ask Johanna van Haarlem is impossible: she died in 2004.
This means that not put the final point in this exciting drama about perfectly organized espionage, and mother, painfully injured, leaving his son, and then became the victim of a cruel hoax.
This drama tells about a son who left his parents and undercover services in Russia disappeared from the face of the Earth almost 15 years, leaving families in the dark and living under the name of Erwin van Haarlem.
On arrival back to Prague in 1993, Jelinek was reunited with his parents.
Until poor old men lived under the weight of the idea that their son apparently died during military service in Russia.
