To the staff at the rubber factory in Dumfries, he was a friendly and efficient foreman; to his fellow anglers on the banks of the River Nith, he was a keen sportsman, never happier than when landing a good-sized trout.
Unbeknown to them all, however, the unassuming middle-aged man they knew as Lucien had, just a few years earlier, played a vital role in the Second World War’s most audacious – and secretive – raid.
As part of an elite band of SAS warriors, he had helped to pull off a rescue mission that, even 80 years later, still sounds almost too far-fetched to be true.
In the Allies’ first ever encounter with a concentration camp, the group heard reports of hundreds of civilian inmates locked up in appalling conditions by the Fascists in southern Italy.
Realising that even if they stormed the camp it would be nigh-on impossible to transport so many liberated prisoners to safety, they hatched a plan of breathtaking boldness: to hijack an entire train.
In plain sight, Lucien and his comrades drove the stolen train through 75 miles of enemy territory, before attacking the heavily fortified camp in the dead of night.
After subduing the guards, they freed scores of badly injured and malnourished prisoners and loaded them onto the waiting train before speeding back along the tracks to the safety of Allied-held territory.
The astonishing wartime escapade – and the vital role played by the modest hero who later married a Scots woman and made his home in Dumfries – is revealed in a new book by the historian and filmmaker Damien Lewis.
The Tremoli train was commandeered by SAS officers
Wladislas Cieslak’s endeavours are the subject of a new book by author Damien Lewis
Former SAS soldier Wladislas ‘Lucien’ Cieslak in the 1990s
The bestselling author said: ‘There was no other mission like it. It was absolutely unprecedented.
‘The idea you could hijack a train and steam it through enemy lines to liberate a concentration camp, if you wrote it as the outline of a Hollywood movie, people would scoff and say it could never happen. But it did.
‘And although the people who knew him when he settled in Scotland after the war may not have known it, Lucien played a crucial role.’
Born in Poland, Wladislas Cieslak ran away from home aged 18 to join the French Foreign Legion.
Five foot seven inches tall but broad and strong, he adopted the French name of ‘Lucien’, which he used for the rest of his life. Early in the war, he earned the Croix de Guerre medal for destroying German tanks advancing towards a French village.
Despite being captured and held in appalling conditions at a POW camp in Dusseldorf, the young soldier escaped, then embarked on an epic journey across Nazi Germany which involved hiding in graveyards, swimming across the River Rhine in winter and clinging to the underside of a train.
Evading capture, he finally crossed to North Africa to rejoin the Legion.
Dismayed by the lack of action – he later described it as ‘playing at soldiers… a waste of time’ – he volunteered for the SAS, the legendary British special forces unit which had been set up in 1941 to operate behind enemy lines.
Italian concentration camp Pisticci
Training, he recalled, involved being ‘thrown off moving lorries like a sack of potatoes, pitched from cliffs into sandpits and dropped from balloons’.
By autumn 1943, the Allied leaders – Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D Roosevelt – had decided to target Italy as a first step towards liberating Europe.
Allied forces, including the SAS, landed at Taranto, a coastal city on the ‘heel’ of Italy.
Soon afterwards, a Yugoslavian soldier arrived, reporting that he’d escaped from a brutal internment camp in Pisticci, 75 miles to the west.
Established in 1939 by Italy’s leader Benito Mussolini, the camp – with its rows of huts, watchtowers and barbed wire – was used to imprison Jews, partisans, resistance fighters from Yugoslavia, Poland, France and elsewhere, plus artists, writers or priests who dared to defy Fascism.
It was the first time the Allies had come across a concentration camp, where civilians were held without any respect for decency or rights.
Worryingly, the escapee reported, the inmates were soon to be transferred north to Nazi Germany – effectively condemning them to death. In a matter of days, Operation Loco was born. On September 14, Lucien and his comrades seized Chiatona railway station, west of Taranto, then stole what they nicknamed their ‘Pirate Train’.
A breakaway unit was charged with seizing control of a key junction along the route to ensure the points were switched and the train could carry on in the right direction. Under cover of darkness, the SAS arrived at their destination, a deserted railway station seven miles from Pisticci.
Damien Lewis’s new book details the exciting mission
After marching to the camp, Lucien and the others launched a surprise attack, and after a ferocious firefight, despite being heavily outnumbered, forced the surrender of 200 guards.
Around 180 of the weakest and most badly injured internees were crammed onto whatever trucks, vans, cars, motorbikes and bicycles could be found at the camp and ferried back to the waiting train.
In an act of flamboyant defiance, the SAS also liberated 100,000 lira from the camp – the guards’ pay – plus more than 200 bottles of brandy and liqueur.
The remainder of the inmates were handed weapons seized from the guards and told to head into the mountains to await the arrival of Allied troops.
Meanwhile, with its carriages packed, the stolen train raced back through hostile territory, until, just before dawn on September 15, it arrived back at Chiatona station, crashing into the buffers.
Mr Lewis said: ‘Lucien played a key role, disarming the guards and handing over the weaponry to the liberated prisoners.
‘He helped ferry the sick and lame back to the train and then stood guard as the train powered back to safety.’
After Operation Loco, Lucien continued his service with the SAS. During further training in Scotland, he fell for a local woman called Agnes, whom he married in 1946, settling in Dumfries, where he worked as foreman at the Dunlop rubber factory.
In 1966, he became a naturalised British citizen, before eventually dying of a heart attack in 1999 aged 81. Last night, Lucien’s adoptive grandson, Colin Barr, 60, from Moffat, Dumfriesshire, recalled him as ‘an amazing character’.
He said: ‘He never spoke much about his wartime service and never mentioned Operation Loco at all.
‘When we asked, he just said he’d done what needed to be done. When we were kids, he did say that if we ever became soldiers, there were two golden rules: never volunteer for anything – which is ironic given that he’d volunteered for the SAS – and always shoot first.’
Mr Barr added: ‘In the 1970s my brother and I had air rifles. Lucien would stand a 50p on a fence and tell us we could have it if we could shoot it.
‘We never could of course – but he would hit it every time.’
Mr Lewis said: ‘It’s important to tell these stories because we are living in an extremely dangerous world.
‘We need to remind ourselves that freedom has to be fought for.’
■ SAS The Great Train Raid by Damien Lewis is published by Quercus at £25 and available to buy online and in all good bookshops.