Matthew Zajac: I set out to write about my father's life but discovered his war stories were all lies'

It was only when I went to his home village in 2003, now in western Ukraine, that I discovered the stories my father told us about his early years were just that, stories.

Twenty years later, I gave the first performance of my one-man show, The Tailor of Inverness, telling the story of how I found out who my father really was and the secrets that he had kept from his Scottish family for decades.

Although he hardly spoke of the war, dad talked even less of his youth in south-east Poland, or western Ukraine as it's been since 1945.

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