A long losing run

This is indeed a story of war, passion and loss. But those looking for a bittersweet tale of romantic Polish aristocrats stoically facing their doom at the hands of the Nazis and Soviets will get a great deal more than they bargained for. This is Gone with the Wind scripted for the Addams family.

The sorry tale opens in 1914 with the author’s grandfather running out of the bedroom on his wedding night and shooting himself with a revolver. He survived, and whatever his problem may have been, it was eventually resolved: he produced a brace of children, to which his wife added an extramarital supernumerary. It might have been better if they had remained childless. Hushed-up adulterous affairs between close cousins had led to his marrying his aunt. His daughter would marry her half-brother, believing him to be a first cousin once removed.

Serial inbreeding, combined with an element of delusion as to their role in life and some remarkably violent psychiatric symptoms, produced a family for which the currently fashionable term ‘dysfunctional’ is utterly inadequate. The fact that they were physically attractive and charming meant that the damage they inflicted was not restricted to their own. Their two most obvious victims were the author’s mother and her sister, both driven to suicide, but there were many others along the way.

Like other aristocratic Polish families, they had had their fortunes dented and their morale sapped by over a century of foreign oppression, and their homes ravaged by the fighting of the Great War. When Poland recovered her independence in 1918 they had to fight to preserve it against the Bolsheviks, and then rebuild their houses from scratch. They lived in a curious world of suspended belief. They carried on as though they were wealthy magnates, indulging in all the old rituals of their caste, putting on a show of magnificence at weddings, balls and boar-hunts.