Douglas Jackson’s Polish uncle was a bit of a family legend. But it was only while researching his Warsaw Quartet series that Doug discovered that Uncle Kazimierz was a war hero, a secret that he’d kept after the Second World War.
The perennial question that eventually faces every writer is: Where do I go next?
I’ve been in that position several times, but never was I more in need of a big idea than when my then publisher decided my embryonic career as the thriller writer James Douglas had come to a natural end. I needed to write two books a year to maintain the unchanged lifestyle I’d optimistically promised my wife when I gave up the day job.
Every book begins with a moment of inspiration; a germ of an idea that develops and grows and, just occasionally, ignites an all-consuming passion. As a fledgling author I’d dabbled in crime and quite enjoyed it. Clearly, there was a huge market for crime fiction, but to make a mark in the genre I had to come up with something special.
One of my uncles, sadly passed away by then, was a Pole, Kazimierz Gardziel, a former soldier and something of a legend in the family.
After some thought I decided to set my book in Poland, specifically in Warsaw, and dedicate it to a man whose infectious spirit of adventure had brightened up my early life. There’d be four novels – The Warsaw Quartet – and the first would be called Blood Roses.
That was 10 years ago. I loved the idea, the character and the era, wrote the book, then sadly discovered that publishers were less in love with Blood Roses than I was.
But my character, Warsaw detective Jan Kalisz, was never far from my mind, and when I had a little time on my hands recently I put my belief in the story on the line and wrote a sequel, this time set in the wilds of western Scotland at Arisaig, the training ground of the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
By the time I’d finished writing the book, then called Swordlands after a remote lodge used by the SOE, my agent was in touch with an innovative new publisher called Canelo. Within a few weeks I had a contract to write The Warsaw Quartet – Blood Roses, Blood Sacrifice, Blood Vengeance and Blood Enemy – with two first drafts in the bank and the other two books firmly placed in my head.
My novels are based on a simple premise. I put the main character in a place and a time of extreme peril and challenge them to get out of it. In one of my early books I’d explored the theme of collaboration, and the compromises a conquered people have to make to survive. From what I knew of Warsaw’s history, it was plain that its citizens would have faced such life or death decisions on a daily basis.
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I decided my detective, the son of a Polish miner and a German housewife, would be forced to lead a dangerous double life, operating as a resistance agent while apparently collaborating with the Nazis. Not even his family would be allowed to know the truth.
When the niece of a Nazi general is found murdered in macabre circumstances, Kalisz’s father-in-law is among the hostages chosen to be shot unless her murderer comes forward. Kalisz’s colleagues are certain the killer is a Pole, but gradually Kalisz realises the murder is linked to other killings of less interest to his new masters, and that the man he’s looking for may be one of the conquerors. Soon he is hunting a serial killer dubbed The Artist.
I had no idea when I chose Warsaw of the challenges I’d face in recreating a city that had been almost literally wiped off the map on the orders of Hitler, or researching the lives of its citizens when the primary sources were almost all in Polish, a language of which I couldn’t speak a word.
Nor did I realise that in telling the story of Warsaw’s ordeal during five years of brutal Nazi rule, I’d also uncover the truth about Uncle Kazimierz’s astonishing heroism.
Warsaw now is not the Warsaw of September 1939. In October 1944 every building of any consequence was blown up or burned after the bloody, abortive uprising by the Home Army. How, then, to ensure that the streets my fictional Jan Kalisz walks were the ones that existed at the time the book is set?
Luckily, I stumbled upon an obscure interactive website that contained a map of most of Warsaw’s 1939 streets, complete with photographs and detailed histories of the individual buildings. The site was entirely in Polish, so I had to develop a system of cutting and pasting information to Google Translate, then copying the translation into a file for each street.
I then discovered I could input the addresses into another site – again in Polish – that gave me the actual names of the families who lived there in 1939, and all too often their unfortunate fate.
In one, a Polish surgeon had crossed into the ghetto to carry out an operation on a Jewish woman. Midway through the operation, the SS burst in, shot the patient where she lay, and hustled the doctor into the courtyard where he was massacred with the block’s other residents.
I’d always known Blood Roses and its sequels would be dark books, but scenes like this, and much worse, quickly confirmed that researching and writing them would become a test of my mental fortitude as well as my literary skills.
Yet all was not darkness. At one point in my research I posted a question about pre-war Polish life on a Facebook page recording the history of the First Polish Armoured Division. At about this time Kazimierz’s daughter in Australia sent me some old pictures she had of her dad.
One of them was of a very young Kazimierz in uniform and looking very annoyed at being photographed, and he was wearing a medal. Here was the first confirmation that the family legend might have some substance.
When I put the picture on the website someone very quickly identified the medal as the Silver Cross of the Virtuti Militari, the Polish equivalent of the Victoria Cross. This discovery started a wave of information from the enthusiasts on the site. Kazimierz was identified as a reconnaissance motorcyclist in the Tenth Dragoons, a tank regiment which had landed in France a month after D-Day and fought its way across Europe.
He’d been wounded on October 6 1944 near the Dutch-Belgian border when a platoon of the battalion’s Sherman tanks were ambushed by panzers. Without any thought for his own safety Kazimierz had driven into the heart of the fighting on his motorcycle to help the trapped and injured tankers. Despite being badly wounded in the hip he’d then led 18 of his comrades to the safety of the Allied lines. My Polish uncle was a true hero.
Prior to D-Day Kazimierz had been stationed in the Borders town of Jedburgh. He met my aunt Margaret at a local dance and they’d married not long after. By the time he fully recovered, the war was over. He and Margaret set up home in Rugby and he worked on a car production line in Coventry.
Over the years he was a frequent visitor to his old stamping grounds and he’d lead 10-year-old me on route marches across the moors to remote hill lochs to fish. On warm summers’ days we’d don trunks and he’d teach me to guddle trout up the Bowmont Valley. If fish wasn’t on the menu, he’d appear with a hare or a pheasant that had miraculously leapt into his arms.
He never talked about the war.
If Kazimierz had lived to see the dedication to him in Blood Roses, he’d have puffed out his cheeks, rolled his eyes and called it nonsense. But, secretly, I’m pretty certain he’d have been proud.
Blood Roses by Douglas Jackson was published on 7 March, 2024.
See more about this book.
Douglas Jackson is the author of 18 novels across three genres and has been published in 12 languages. He lives in Stirling.
Other Historia featured related to this:
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by Elisabeth Gifford
Fifty years of fake news; the cover-up of the Katyn Massacre by Carolyn Kirby
Language and the Nazi propaganda machine by Catherine Hokin
Historia interviews: Clare Mulley and Carolyn Kirby
Don’t mention the war! by Keith Lowe
Images:
- Kazimierz Gardziel: family photo supplied by Douglas Jackson
- Swordland by Loch Morar in Arisaig: James Doyle for Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
- Old Town Market Place, Warsaw, 1945, from Marek Tuszyński’s collection of WWII prints: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Kazimierz Gardziel during the Virtuti Militari medal ceremony: see 1
- Silver Cross of the Military Order of Virtuti Militari: National Museum in Krakov via Look and Learn
