Robert Gawłowski properly drew attention to the cracking of the Enigma code by Marian Rejewski and other Polish mathematicians from the University of Poznań (Letters, 20 December); and Michael Saunders (Letters, 28 December) pointed out that there is a memorial to the Polish contribution at Bletchley Park. The two other members of Rejewski’s team also deserve a mention: my uncle, Henryk Zygalski, and Jerzy Różycki. Rejewski, Zygalski and Różycki left Poland in September 1939 to continue their codebreaking in France and north Africa, then travelled via Spain and Gibraltar to Britain in 1943.
Różycki sadly died at sea on the way to the UK, so with Rejewski’s return to Poland, my uncle became the only one of the team to remain in Britain. He was billeted to my aunt, Bertha Blofield. After she was widowed in 1948, he became her lifelong partner. Henryk became a British citizen, and taught mathematics and statistics at Battersea Polytechnic (later the University of Surrey). He never returned to Poland, but kept in touch with Rejewski by phone. Henryk died in 1978 but, prior to the Rejewski revelations, he had never breathed a word of his wartime adventures to his family.
A memorial stone was laid at Chichester crematorium in 2018, on the 40th anniversary of my uncle’s death, after a campaign by my brother Jeremy Russell, John Gallehawk (a former archivist at Bletchley Park), Anya Zygalska-Cannon (Henryk’s cousin), and Dermot Turing, who has written an account of the codebreaking in XY&Z: The Real Story of How Enigma Was Broken. The 90th anniversary of the first Enigma codebreaking was celebrated by a service beside the memorial in December.
Georgina Donaldson
Lympne, Kent
