Matthew’s father Tadeusz with his fiancée Ella, 1939 – shortly before they were torn apart by war
When grieving son Matthew discovered a yellowed letter in his late father’s wallet, he found himself gripped by a tragic wartime romance…
Leafing through a large leather wallet full of his late father’s most important documents, Matthew Lutostanski noticed a piece of paper tucked away at the back, as if hidden from view. His father Tadeusz had recently died and Matthew had volunteered to clear out his possessions to spare his mother – now a grieving widow after 40 happy years of marriage – the agony.
But as he went through the papers in that ancient folder, he had no idea he was about to discover a secret that Tadeusz – a Polish refugee who’d fled to Britain after the Second World War – had taken to his grave. It was a secret that would shock his only child to the core.
For that yellowing piece of paper folded into eight and tucked so carefully away at the back of the wallet was a letter sent to his father 11 years before – by a woman Matthew knew nothing about. ‘My darling Tadeusz,’ she had written in their native Polish. ‘At last I have found you. I thought you were dead… Oh, how many times I tried to recapture those moments we shared together. We were only weeks from our wedding. How is it possible to have it all stolen in just one night?’
Matthew aged eight with his parents.
Matthew stared dumbfounded at the fading lettering. Clearly this woman – Ella – had been engaged to his father before the war. And he’d never known. A million questions raced through his mind: what had ripped them apart? Had his father responded to this letter? And did his mother know?
It was a quest for answers that would eventually send Matthew on an odyssey across Europe to discover his father’s incredible past – and ultimately meet the woman he’d once loved…
In the summer of 1939 the Lutostanski family were an established part of Polish high society, respected members of the nobility with wealth and land to their name. Marian (Matthew’s grandfather) had been Poland’s first consul to Moscow before the Russian Revolution of 1917 and his sons Tadeusz and Henryk could look forward to equally bright futures.
Tadeusz, in particular, was excited. A practising lawyer, he’d met Ella, the love of his life, at university and was due to marry her in just a few months. But then, in September 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland. Even worse, they signed a non-aggression pact with Communist Russia, agreeing to carve up the country between them. Rumours began to swirl around Warsaw that the Communists were planning to round up the country’s intelligentsia and put them to death.
‘Warsaw was being bombed and everyone was terrified and thought they were going to die,’ says Matthew of his family’s plight. ‘Then one night there was a knock at the door – the Russians had come for my father.’
Maria with Matthew as a baby, 1945
Tadeusz, then 23, was bundled into a lorry with no chance to say goodbye to anyone, let alone Ella, and driven to a concentration camp in Siberia. Death and starvation were the norm.
‘They said you lasted up to 12 months before you died and the next lot of prisoners came in,’ says Matthew. ‘But somehow my father lasted a couple of years – he was reluctant to ever talk to me about it, but said it was horrendous and he doesn’t know how he survived.’
In 1941, the Germans invaded Russia, and Russia changed sides. Suddenly all the Poles in concentration camps were released and told to go and fight Hitler. ‘There were huge convoys driving to Iran – where all the soldiers from his concentration camp had decided to go – and my father begged, borrowed and stole to join them. It was a gruelling journey, lasting weeks; every day they’d stop to turf the bodies of men who hadn’t made it out of the truck.’
Eventually they made it to Tehran, Iran, where they met up with other Polish soldiers. ‘Then, in a nightclub one evening where the Shah of Iran was a guest, he met my mother,’ says Matthew. ‘Dad said he was captivated immediately and they had a whirlwind romance.
Tadeusz’s brother Henryk, who died in Auschwitz
‘He didn’t mention Ella – he didn’t know what had happened to her and thought he’d never see her again. In fact, like all the other soldiers, he expected to die before the war was over.’
The woman Tadeusz had met was Maria, the beautiful 20-year-old daughter of a Polish judge. When the call went out for people to help the war effort, she’d immediately volunteered to drive using the skills she had picked up on the family estate. It was during her time driving huge lorries packed with soldiers that she met Tadeusz – and fell in love immediately.
But as soon as their fledgling romance began, it was over: Tadeusz had orders to go to Italy and fight at Monte Cassino. ‘Everyone said goodbye and Dad didn’t think he’d meet my mum again,’ says Matthew. ‘He hadn’t made any promises or declared his undying love – they’d just danced the night away.’
The crucial battle for Monte Cassino, a hilltop monastery near Rome, began in 1943 and, by the end in early 1944, 55,000 Allies had suffered casualties and fatalities. Astonishingly, Tadeusz survived. And, with some time off owing, he made his way to Cairo for a short holiday.
Matthew has now written a novel inspired by his father’s story
‘Quite by chance he bumped into my mother again,’ says Matthew. ‘And they discovered that by accident they’d produced me. They got married in March 1944, then, like many pregnant women, my mother was sent to the nearest neutral country, in this case Palestine, to give birth. By the end of the war my father had a wife and child but no country to go back to because Stalin had taken over.’
Both Tadeusz’s parents had died in Warsaw – he never found out how – while his brother Henryk, like so many Poles, had lost his life in Auschwitz.
So, when Matthew was just two, his family came to England by boat and settled in Kensington – then a rough, bomb-crater-strewn area of London. Tadeusz was forced to take a job as a dishwasher in a local restaurant because his Polish legal skills were of no use in the UK.
‘He was a bright man,’ says his son, ‘and he learned how to make pastries from the chef. Eventually he bought a restaurant and ran it for 15 years. Every month Princess Margaret would send her chauffeur to pick up some of his cakes.’
Tadeusz, aged 22, walking his dog Aras in Warsaw, 1938
After selling up when Matthew was around 20, his parents bought a small hotel in Bournemouth, decorating it in the style of the homeland they missed so much, all dark wood and plates hung on walls. There they lived happily and devotedly until Tadeusz’s death from cancer in 1986.
And it was while clearing out his effects a few weeks later that Matthew, who ran his
own marketing company, found the letter that Ella had written to his father after a chance encounter with someone who knew Tadeusz had survived.
‘I was absolutely dumbfounded. It was spectacularly romantic, all about his relationship with her, but she clearly didn’t expect anything from him, she just wanted to say, “I hear you’re alive, I love you.” The letter implied they’d never slept together or had an argument – there was nothing between them but pure, undiluted love.
‘I rocked back in my chair and thought about it and, funnily enough, I wasn’t in any way upset. She was there before my mother and Dad hadn’t done anything wrong. This wasn’t an ex-lover, this was someone he’d promised his life to. I felt she had a legitimate reason to write to him when she discovered he’d survived.’
Ella spoke movingly of her devastation on hearing her fiancé had been ripped away from her in the night. She’d eventually met someone else and was now happily married with five children. Even though this was a part of his father’s life Matthew knew nothing about, it never crossed his mind to find out more. ‘Yes, I was shocked and intrigued, but I didn’t know who she was and I wasn’t interested. It was history.’
Maria in her uniform, aged 19. ‘Dad said he was captivated immediately and they had a whirlwind romance,’ says Matthew
He also decided not to tell his mother. ‘I know she knew Tadeusz had been engaged before the war, but I don’t know if he told her about this letter. I suspect not. I didn’t mention it because I didn’t think it was necessary.’
Over the next few years, divorcé Matthew put the letter to the back of his mind, until one day in 2003 when one of his own four children was looking for a family tale to include in a university dissertation.
He told her the story which got him thinking about it again. And then he picked up a pen. ‘Right from the first time I read that letter, I thought I’d like to meet this woman, but I was raw from losing Dad,’ says Matthew.
‘The letter was in my desk and it used to wink at me. I always wondered what Dad had been like before the war. But while my mother was alive – she died four years after Dad – I’d never done anything about it.’
But in 2003 the time was right and he sent a letter to Ella in Poland. She wrote straight back. ‘She told me they’d written ten or 20 letters between them after that first one,’ says Matthew. ‘I don’t know what happened to the other ones she sent him – he didn’t keep them.
‘So I wrote back saying, “I’d like to speak to you.” I wanted to know more. Ella sent me her number and I phoned her. She knew all about me from Dad and told me, “He was so proud of you.” He was quite a stern man, but he’d waxed lyrical to Ella in his letters.
‘I asked to meet her but she didn’t want to until I told her I only wanted to meet because I wanted to know more about Dad as a young man. That moved her.’
And so, later that year, he found himself getting on a plane to Warsaw. ‘I was excited and quite emotional about meeting the woman Dad would have married had war not broken out.’
That night, in a restaurant in the Old Town of Warsaw over pierogi and duck, he heard the story of his father’s younger life. ‘She was wonderful and made me laugh a lot,’ says Matthew. ‘She was quite eccentric – when she laughed her wig would fall off and she’d pop it back on without saying anything.’
By now Ella was about 84 and a senior judge in her country. ‘She talked about Dad in the most extraordinary terms, about how amazing he was and how deeply in love with him she was.
‘I learned so much about him – she only told me the good, like his ability to organise things. I got the whole story.
‘The only thing she wouldn’t tell me was the content of his letters – she wouldn’t let me see them. I was disappointed but also slightly relieved. I’m not sure I’d want to read my dad saying loving things to another woman.’
Maria and Tadeusz in their Bournemouth hotel, 1975, where they lived happily until his death in 1986.
After a six-hour supper, they said their goodbyes. ‘As I left I knew I wouldn’t see her again,’ says Matthew. ‘The reason I’d gone was to find out about Dad and I had done. I didn’t have any other need to have a relationship with her – I’d have felt like I’d betrayed my mother.’
A few years ago, he heard that Ella had died. But that single meeting stayed with him until earlier this year when Britain went into lockdown and Matthew decided to write a fictionalised account of their romance. ‘I’d always thought my father’s story would make an amazing book,’ he says, ‘and suddenly I had time to write it.’
The result is titled Loving Two Women: A Gripping Story of Love, Duty, Sacrifice and Determination, a novel based on his father’s heartbreaking experience.
The pair together in London, 1962
‘When I met Ella I could see why my father had fallen in love with her,’ says Matthew. ‘But he was an exemplary and loving father and husband, and nothing has changed the way I feel about him.’
Matthew’s book Loving Two Women: A Gripping Story of Love, Duty, Sacrifice and Determination is available in paperback at amazon.co.uk, price £5.99, and on Kindle