White Eagle over Wimbledon: How Poland’s war affected a London childhood

Fear and resentment of Polish immigrant workers may have led many Britons to vote for Brexit. But the exiled Poles who fought the Nazis were welcomed to the UK in the 1940s.

Journalist and historian John Phillips tells how his father, Ireneusz Filipowicz, fought in the Polish Resistance as a teenager and became the first recorded Cold War defector from Poland in a daring escape from the Russian secret police before arriving in Britain.

Ireneusz married a beautiful English girl, had a meteoric business career and created a loving, hospitable Wimbledon home for their children. Yet some exiles such as hard-drinking uncle Jan failed to integrate into Britain, which Jan believed ‘betrayed’ Poland in 1939.

In a memoir of his family odyssey and his quest to exorcise its demons as a foreign correspondent covering wars from Lebanon to Bosnia, Phillips unravels the complex love-hate relationship between the Poles and the British in the hope that love may prevail.

Fantastic, gripping and deeply human… Jacek Palasinski, TVN