The Last Mazurka

The Last Mazurka: A Tale of War, Passion and Loss, by Andrew Tarnowski

For the English reader, memoirs or novels that relate to Cracow are few and far between, and whilst this book is by no means set solely within the confines of the old Royal Capital, it offers a portrait of a family with longstanding ties to the city. The Tarnowskis are one of Poland's most ancient aristocratic clans, and the author, Andrew Tarnowski, would have inherited a palace here had history dealt a different set of cards. However, whilst the title and dust-jacket of this book evoke heady romance, this is no rose-tinted record. Far from it. Aside from a few snowy sketches of the forest and an amusing tale about a domesticated wild boar, this is very much a warts and all portrait - even the boar comes to a sticky end. Indeed, the frankness of the book is such that one imagines that the author may well have alienated a good many family members with the end result.

Most of the drama in this book - and there is a lot of drama - focuses on the author's father, Stanislaw Tarnowski, who was born in 1918. A dashing young man with something of an untamed streak, Tarnowski had a distinctive sense of honour and valour, but this was often blighted by his searing temper. Like so many of his generation he distinguished himself in the fight against the Nazis, but his personal life was a terrible mess, exacerbated by the loss of Poland to Stalin's cronies in 1945.

(Above) German soldiers dismantle a Polish border post in September 1939.

'The Last Mazurka' is a calmly and lucidly written book, but the drama and colour of the events described should have most readers hooked once the attention moves to the 1930's and beyond. There are fascinating portraits of the flight from Poland, Bucharest, and above all the stay in Cairo, where the author's young mother and aunt spent much of the war. British Cairo, which film-lovers will recognise from 'The English Patient', was a spicy place in those times, overflowing with officers and secret agents. The fact that one English lady described the Tarnowski girls as 'undoubtedly the belles of Cairo Society' (see M. Musson's: Chistine: Churchill's Favourite Spy), compliments the author's own insights into his family's lively Egyptian adventure.

Another fascinating yet wretched aspect of the odyssey is the account of life in post-war England. In such a multi-cultural country as England, where communities could pass relatively unnoticed by much of the nation, the plight of the Poles was often forgotten (it is a little known fact that the Polish Government in Exile continued to meet once a week in London's Chelsea district right up until 1989). The sheer humiliation of their situation has not often made it onto the pages of books - war heros had to scrape a living cleaning cutlery, stars of the stage and screen were forced into obscurity and penury. Of course, many did make careers in the end, but they could never get over the loss of their country. That said, whilst several of the author's close family decided to stay on in the British Isles, his father, Stanislaw Tarnowski, did return to Poland in 1957. But it was to a crippled stump of what he had known before the war.

This book says a lot about Poland's twentieth century experience, and it does so in a way that is both accessible and captivating. Some will say that it was not really the done thing to publish such a memoir whilst certain family members were still alive. And the idea that his father had not imbued his other children with 'the self-reliance and enterprise needed to grasp the opportunities of modern life' seems a little unfair given that free enterprise was really a non-existent quality in Communist Poland. A smaller cavil relates to the earlier material on Cracow, as there might have been a paragraph or two on the heady world of the fin-de-siecle, as the author's great-grandfather - who features regularly in this memoir - was a celebrated target of the mischievous 'Green Balloon Cabaret'. Nevertheless, the 'bare all' nature of the book does provide a fascinating insight into the lives of those caught up in the storm, and as such it is one of the most memorable personal histories of Poland in recent times - future historians with have much to glean from its pages.