Józef Czapski (1896–1993)

Józef Czapski was born in Prague, Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to an aristocratic family. He spent most of his childhood on his family's estate near Minsk. In 1915, he graduated from gymnasium in St. Petersburg and was studying law at the Imperial University at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. Although he was a pacifist, he served briefly as a cavalry officer in World War I and was decorated for bravery in the Polish-Soviet War of 1920-1921. Czapski attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and Kraków and then moved to Paris to paint. A few years later, in 1931, he returned to Warsaw, and began exhibiting his paintings. He was active in the city's artistic life and began writing art criticism. In 1939, when Germany invaded Poland at the start of World War II, Czapski again did military duty, and was captured by the Germans, who handed him over to the Soviets as a prisoner of war. He gave lectures to other prisoners and later wrote a book about his experiences, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, he was among the tens of thousands of starving Poles released from Soviet prison camps; the men were allowed to join the Polish army of General Władysław Anders being formed to fight alongside the Red Army. Gen. Anders gave Czapski the task of investigating the fate of 22,000 missing Polish military officers. Blocked at every level by the Soviet authorities, Czapski was unaware that in April 1940, all the officers had been shot and killed in Katyn Forest and elsewhere. He was one of the few to survive, for reasons that remain unknown. Czapski described his experiences in two books, Memories of Starobielsk (1945) and Inhuman Land: Searching for the Truth in Soviet Russia, 1941-1942 (1949). Czapski traveled with Gen. Anders' army on a trek through Central Asia to the Middle East, finally arriving in Baghdad, where he began publishing articles in newly-created Polish newspapers. After the war, unwilling to live in Communist Poland, he moved to Rome and then back to France. He helped found the the Polish émigré publishing community at the Instytut Literacki (Literary Institute) in Maisons-Laffitte, a suburb of Paris. He published political commentary in Kultura, its intellectual journal, as well as essays about art.