Matthew Zajac: ‘I set out to write about my father’s life but discovered his war stories were all lies’ | Second world war

IA few years after my father died, I discovered he was a liar. I loved him very much. But he was a liar. I grew up in Inverness where my father Mateusz was a well-liked tailor. He was also a refugee with an Eastern European accent who had fled his village in southeastern Poland during World War II.

Dad was always a little vague about his past, but I figured that like many of his generation, he didn’t like to talk about the war. It was only when I went to his native village in 2003, now in Western Ukraine, that I discovered that the stories my father told us about his early years were just stories. He told lies about his religion, his family and what he did during the war: they just came out one after the other.

Fifteen years earlier, in the spring of 1988, I sat down with Dad and a tape recorder in the workshop he had set up in my old bedroom. He was 69 and semi-retired. I was 29 and coming from London where I was making my way as an actor. Dad had sold his shop in Inverness a few years earlier and my parents had bought their council house in Dalney, the 1950s estate where I grew up.

I had an idea that I might want to write about Dad in the future, although I didn’t know what form it might take. Twenty years later I gave the first performance of my one-man show, The Tailor of Invernesstelling the story of how I found out who my father really was and the secrets he kept from his Scottish family for decades.

Although he hardly talked about the war, Dad talked even less about his youth in the Southeast Polandor Western Ukraine as it has been since 1945. As a boy in the 1960s, I would occasionally get an inkling when a certain sequence in the documentary series, All of us yesterday, will reach into his memory. He didn’t say anything as we sat on the couch watching TV, but the look in his eyes revealed something else. But what was it? He was usually forward-looking, energetically living in the present. He was an optimistic, bubbly man who adapted successfully as a master tailor and popular small businessman in the Highlands.

Dad died suddenly, four years after our taped conversations, in 1992. A few months earlier, his social integration had been crowned when he became Master of his Masonic Lodge in Inverness. My wife Virginia and I had taken him and his mother to Poland in 1990 to visit his brother Adam in Silesia. The Soviet Union collapsed the following year and Ukraine gained its independence. I was thinking of taking him to his birthplace. Now that thought was superfluous. I was devastated. He was a great father.

Six years later I decided to do something with the tapes. He was in the room again and I was blown away. I transcribed, and as I listened, my curiosity was piqued by several moments of uncertainty, lack of clarity about date or place. His childhood and adolescent memories tell a vivid story of rural life in Galicia. The problems connected with his military journey. He told me how as a young Polish soldier he was captured by the Soviets in September 1939 as they were crushing Poland in alliance with the Nazis. He was transported to do forced labor on a collective farm in Uzbekistan, but managed to escape in 1941.

In an epic overland journey through the Middle East, he reached Egypt and with other Polish soldiers joined Montgomery’s 8th Army. They fought in North Africa and took part in the invasion of Sicily in 1943 before progressing up the Italian boot. They distinguished themselves at Monte Cassino, the greatest Polish victory of the war, 1,000 miles from home. When Germany capitulated, Dad was in Ancona on the Adriatic coast.

He ended up in a Polish unit of the British Army in Italy a month after the end of the war. Given the choice of returning to Poland or moving to the UK, he chose the latter, like most Poles in his position. When the communist takeover becomes clear, he knows that returning will result in imprisonment in the Gulag or worse. He chose survival.

Through a cousin in New York, he discovered that his older brother Kazik was inside Scotland. Dad joined him in Glasgow, where he met my mother and resumed the tailoring he had learned in Galicia. They moved to Inverness in 1957. At least that’s what he told me. And this is typical of the journey of many thousands of Poles. But not him.

In 2003 I decided to visit Dad’s birthplace in Ukraine, something he had never been able to do. The Soviets repeatedly refused him a visa, so he was never reunited with his mother, who died in 1971. Before the war, Pidhaitsi was a predominantly Jewish town, where my father went to tailoring school: 90% of the tailors in Galicia then were Jews. Like all small towns in Galicia, Pidhaitsi had its own ghetto. All the people in it were killed by the Nazis in 1943. Their mass graves are just outside the city. Just a few kilometers further is Hnilowody, my father’s village.

During this trip, I discovered that the grandmother I had never met was Ukrainian, not Polish; that as the borders fluctuated during the war, my father was drafted into different armies, fighting for both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. The one he never joined was the Polish army.

For our family, the most stunning revelation was that he had married in 1940 and had a daughter, Irena, my half-sister. I followed her. It is difficult to describe how strong, strange and exciting the meeting between Irena and her mother was.

After getting over the shock that my father spent his life in Scotland claiming a history that was not his, it dawned on me that I had uncovered a deeper truth about the traumatic impact of war and migration. My father chose this story because he wanted to fit in with his adopted homeland. It was more palatable than the messy reality of shifting front lines, brutal ideological rivalry and abandoned family. I hope that when people see my play, they will look at the asylum seekers who arrive on our shores from war-torn places like Syria and Afghanistan with a little more compassion because most have a similar story to tell.