An intimate story of a Polish family torn apart by war: of heartbreak,
loss, and survival against the odds.
Julian Czerkawski was born in 1926 near Lwow, in Polish Galicia, on a
farm with fertile grain fields and orchards. He was the son of a Polish
lancer--one of the famous cavalrymen who carried forward the legacy of
the hussar knights.
But there would be no idyllic childhood for young Julian. Soviet
annexation and then, in 1941, the German occupation of Lwow changed
everything. At the age of 18, he was sent to a labour camp. Fortunate to
escape after the war with his life, eventually he made his way to the
UK, where he married and started a family. But an ache remained for the
people and places of his childhood memories, even if he spoke of them
only rarely.
In 2022, Putin's war in Ukraine and the sight of refugees passing
through Lviv--the former Polish city of Lwow--added urgency to his
writer daughter Catherine's project of a lifetime, to try to uncover for
herself everything that had been lost a generation before.
The Last Lancer pieces together glimpses of how the Czerkawski family
lived and died in a region with a proud but turbulent history. It sheds
light on their trauma, at the same time offering a deep and very
personal understanding of a troubled place.
