Dad Was a Female Impersonator During the War

I grew up believing my father was an ordinary man shaped by extraordinary times. He was quiet, precise in his habits, and careful with words. He ironed his shirts meticulously, polished his shoes even when no one would notice, and corrected my posture at the dinner table with a gentle tap on the shoulder. I assumed these were remnants of military discipline. I was only half right.

It wasn’t until after his death that I learned the fuller truth, one he had carried as carefully as he carried everything else.

During the war, my father had not carried a rifle. He had carried a mirror.

He was stationed far from the front lines, assigned to a morale and intelligence unit that traveled between bases and occupied cities. Officially, he was a clerk. Unofficially, he performed. The unit staged revues, musical evenings, and cabaret-style shows meant to soften fear, distract boredom, and, occasionally, gather information. Women were scarce. So my father became one.

He learned quickly. How to pad the hips just enough to suggest softness without parody. How to move with economy, letting suggestion do the work. How to lower his voice without forcing it, how to let silence linger after a joke. He performed under a name that was not his own, one that never appeared in any record I’ve been able to find.

There is a photograph I discovered in an envelope tucked inside a book of war medals. In it, a young woman smiles faintly at the camera. Her hair is waved, her lipstick carefully applied. She looks self-possessed, almost serene. It took me a long time to see my father in her eyes. Once I did, I couldn’t unsee it.

He never spoke about those years directly. But suddenly, things I had dismissed as quirks took on new meaning. His comfort in women’s spaces. His fluency in unspoken rules. His insistence that strength and hardness were not the same thing. When I cried as a child, he never told me to stop. He sat with me until the feeling passed, as if he had learned long ago that emotions, like performances, must be allowed to finish.

I imagine him backstage during those wartime nights, adjusting a stocking, steadying his breath, listening for the cue. I imagine the audience, soldiers hungry for distraction, for beauty, for something unreal enough to make the war briefly disappear. I imagine how dangerous it must have been to walk back to his bunk afterward, still carrying traces of that other self.

After the war, he came home and put on a different costume: husband, father, provider. He wore it well. But I think he understood better than most that identity is not a single uniform you are issued once and keep forever. It is something you learn to assemble, piece by piece, depending on what survival requires.

He did not pass this story down to me in words. He passed it down in attitude, in tolerance, in the quiet permission to be more than one thing. Only now do I understand that his greatest act of courage may not have been what he did during the war, but how completely he returned and how much of himself he chose to keep hidden, yet alive.

My father was a female impersonator during the war.

And because of that, he taught me that masculinity was never as rigid as the world pretended it was.

Nota Bene: This is a work of fiction.

Wearing Lafayette 148

Artur Chamski femulating Malgorzata Walewska on Polish television's Twoja Twarz Brzmi Znajomo. Click here to view this femulation on YouTube.