THE LAST MAZURKA: A Tale of War, Passion and Loss by Andrew Tarnowski

Only now that the 20th century is receding can later, more fortunate generations begin to grasp what war meant to the nations of Europe. None lost more than Poland, and the Poles who had most to lose were the great aristocratic clans. The Last Mazurka chronicles one of these dynasties, and in doing so confirms Tolstoy’s dictum that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

The author was born in 1940, soon after Hitler and Stalin partitioned Poland. He never knew the semi-feudal life of a prewar Polish nobleman, and his quest was to find out from his relations what the world he might have grown up in had really been like. For the older Tarnowskis, living under Habsburg rule, life seems to have been largely a matter of keeping up appearances.

Andrew’s grandparents, Hieronim Tarnowski and Wanda Zamoyska, were actually too closely related to marry, and on their wedding night some unmentionable discovery caused him to shoot himself, but he survived and it was all hushed up. Wanda endured two world wars, three invasions and any number of ordeals. Two of their children provide the main witnesses: the author’s aunt Sophie and his father Stas. This glamorous pair were typical products of an unhappy marriage, getting into scrapes, seducing servants and running away from school.

The saga really takes off with the second world war. No longer playboys but refugees, the younger Tarnowskis trek from Romania to France, Switzerland, Yugoslavia and Greece, winding up in British-occupied Palestine. They would never have made it (nor would the author, born in transit), without the kindness of friends, relations and compatriots on the way.

Stas marries the beautiful but flighty Chouquette, who has already given birth to the author, but neither this marriage nor Sophie’s survive the war. Chouquette has an affair with Sophie’s husband to escape Stas’s drunkenness, violence and adultery. But there is romance, too. Fighting Rommel in the desert, Stas proves to be an exceptionally brave soldier, but too insubordinate to rise through the ranks. Sophie, no less indomitable, is asked to set up the Polish Red Cross by General Sikorski.

Life in wartime Egypt is made easier for the Tarnowskis by Prince Youssef, uncle of the king, who lends them a luxurious villa.

At the end of the war, however, there is nothing to go back to in Poland, where the Tarnowski patrimony has been ravaged by the Nazis and the communists. The country house at Rudnik becomes a prison for the Stalinist secret police, while the magnificent townhouse in Krakow, having been the headquarters of the Hitler Youth, is left to burn by the Russians.

So Stas, Chouquette and Sophie settle in drab post-war Britain. Both women marry British war heroes, but these marriages fail, too, and this time Chouquette kills herself. Ever the rebel, Stas decides to make his peace with the Polish communists. To the disgust of the émigré community, he returns the most precious Tarnowski heirloom to survive the war, the captured standard of a Swedish king.

Even in London, the Tarnowskis could never escape their past: it still mattered enormously that at the Polish Hearth Club in South Kensington nobody would speak to Stas. So, after years as a house decorator in Ealing, he went home to Poland. The book ends with a family reunion at the desolate estate of Rudnik.

Many of the forests on the land have gone, but the house is slowly being restored by the younger Tarnowskis. The Krakow mansion, the Szlak, is derelict. Without the family wealth that once supported them, the stately homes of Poland face an uncertain future.

The three generations of Tarnowskis squabble about what to do with the property that has now been returned by the post-communist government — an unhappy family, then, but certainly not a dull one.

This is a sensitive memoir by a writer who does not glorify the good old days before the war when most Poles lived in dire poverty. Nor does he deny that many Poles shared the Nazis’ anti-semitism. However, he is proud that the Tarnowskis were decent to their retainers and to the local Jews. When Sophie arrived in Tel Aviv, penniless and alone, a rich Jewish lady looked after her out of gratitude to her family. Nor does the author’s splendid portrait disguise his exasperation with his relations.

He became a Reuters correspondent, covering the fall of communism from Warsaw. Having tried to live up to the Tarnowski name, he realises that he can’t take his family, yet nor can he leave it. The Last Mazurka, therefore, is no exercise in ancestor worship. But it is inspired by a very Polish idea: Solidarnosc (solidarity). In a land obsessed with class and religion, solidarity takes no account of either. This book is one man’s act of solidarity with his people: past, present and to come.

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Andrew Tarnowski was born in 1940 in Geneva. In 1939 Andrew's parents fled the Nazi and Soviet invasions of Poland, and sneaked by night through the mountains into Switzerland after the fall of France. It was here that Andrew was born.

He and his parents reached England as refugees nearly three years later after travelling across wartime Europe to Belgrade and then on to Istanbul, Palestine and Egypt, where they lived in a villa lent to them by an uncle of King Farouk. From there they sailed in early 1943 to England, where his father was to train as a parachute commando with the free Polish forces.

After Oxford and a brief period as an accountant, Andrew worked with Reuters News Agency for 30 years, in Poland, Spain, Italy, the Argentine, India, Poland and the Lebanon.

The Last Mazurka is his first book. It goes back to the pre-war world of the Polish aristocracy and the origins of his family.

Andrew works now in Dubai as a journalism coach on the Gulf News. His Lebanese wife Wafa also works in Dubai. his four children include Daisy (A2005, now at Oxford) and Stefan (C06).