Ghosts of a wartime past

MISHA GLENNY

ARRIVING in Glasgow as an immigrant in 1947, the Polish tailor Mateusz Zajac wasn’t quite sure where he was. “I never know such a thing as Scotland,” he said decades later in his idiosyncratic English. “It was all England and that was that.” Geographical peripheries are often mysterious, hidden or unknown to the outsider, especially ones with larger neighbours. Zajac had to learn quickly about the cultural specifics of the British Isles.

Just as Mateusz knew nothing about Scotland, however, his new home knew

nothing about the young tailor. Save what he chose to tell. In the BBC documentary, Circling a Fox, his son, the actor Matthew Zajac tells a quite astonishing story of how over two decades he uncovered the artfully constructed duplicity of his father. The revelations have at first devastating consequences on Matthew and his family and then deeply moving ones.

THE film makes riveting viewing for anybody interested in identity, emotional deception and how great upheaval wreaks havoc on the fate of countless individuals. Unsuspecting to begin with, it also becomes a remarkable journey of selfdiscovery for Matthew. In response to this family education, the actor wrote a play, The Tailor of Inverness, which started winning awards at the Edinburgh Festival as soon as it opened in 2008. Since then Matthew has toured his two-person show (he is accompanied by a gifted violinist) to acclaim around the world.

When young Mateusz first realised Scotland and England were not the same country in 1947, he would have understood the sensibilities immediately. His own origins were from a region, Galicia, which also lies on the periphery of several larger neighbours and has been tossed from one empire to the next. Russian, German, Austrian, Polish and Ukrainian boots have all trampled on the farmlands around

Zajac senior’s home at some point in the previous 200 years.

Indeed violent political turmoil was such a regular characteristic of Mateusz’s home village that noted historian Timothy Snyder gave his book about the region a simple title: Bloodlands. The village’s name, Gniłowoda, seems to reflect this grim historical reality. It means Rotten

Water.

Mateusz’s story, as he told it, began with him being drafted into the creaking Polish Army three weeks before Hitler ordered his troops to cross Germany’s border with Poland. At the same time, Stalin’s Red Army invaded from the East. He recalled how as a young recruit the Soviet military quickly captured his platoon by squeezing the Poles into an ever smaller space using a tactic called ‘circling a fox.’

From there the Russians launched Zajac on an extended, grim odyssey ending in the harsh landscape of the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan in central Asia. A series of increasingly far-fetched Boys’ Own adventure stories took him across the Caspian Sea to Tehran before he finally made it to Cairo.

As he told Matthew in a series of interviews taped in 1988, Mateusz finally joined the British (English?) Army in Cairo to make his own contribution to the allied war effort. So far, so heroic.