It didn't occur to me to ask my father as I grew up why he had nothing from his past before the war - no pictures of himself when young, no family photographs, no mementos of any kind. He was a man without a past, and I failed to notice.' Annette Kobak's father, born in Czechoslovakia, escaped as a nineteen-year-old from German-occupied Poland in the spring of 1940 and joined the Polish army in France, ending up intercepting morse code in a top secret unit in London. This, and very much more, she discovered only half a century later when she started, with his help, unravelling his past after the collapse of the Soviet Union.