Władysław Moes

He was the second son of the six children of Aleksander Juliusz Moes (1856–1928), a large landowner, factory owner and philanthropist, and his wife noblewoman Janina Miączyńska (1869–1946), whose family used the Suchekomnaty coat of arms.

There, he allegedly attracted the attention of the German writer Thomas Mann, who used him as the inspiration for Tadzio – a character of his novella Death in Venice, published in 1912.

In the dining-room, on the very first day, we saw the Polish family, which looked exactly the way my husband described them: the girls were dressed rather stiffly and severely, and the very charming, beautiful boy of about 13 was wearing a sailor suit with an open collar and very pretty lacings.

[1] In 1964, Moes gave an interview to Andrzej Dołegowski, the Polish translator of Mann’s works, which was published in August 1965 in the German magazine Twen, revealing that he had been the inspiration for the writer’s character Tadzio in Death in Venice: I am that boy!

The writer must have been highly impressed by my unconventional clothes and he described them without missing a detail: a striped linen suit and a red bow-tie as well as my favorite blue jacket with gold buttons.

[5]However, serious doubts about this identification were raised in an article in Der Spiegel in 2002, mainly because of the significant differences in age and physical appearance between the Tadzio figure of the novella and Moes.