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| Wittlin in Anders' Army, 1942 |
Tadeusz Wittlin (1909-1998) is probably one of the least known Polish writers who have had an outstanding career
in the United States. Born in 1909, he attended the University
of Warsaw earning separate masters degrees in law (1932) and
the arts(1933). Soon he gave up the practice of law in favor of a
position as an editor on the staff of a satirical magazine, Cyrulik
Warszawski (Warsaw Barber). By then he had already published volume of poetry
and a novel. When World War II began in 1939 he joined the Polish
armed forces and soon found himself in Russian captivity.
Freed
under an agreement worked out by Gen. Sikorski when Germany turned on
its former Soviet ally, Wittlin travelled across Russia to join the
Polish Army being formed at Buzuluk in the Southern Ural Mountains.He
served as a Public Relations Officer and an editor of Parada, a
news magazine published for the Polish Armed Forces. After the war he
briefly worked in Paris before emigrating to the United States where initially
he was a translator and writer for Radio Free Europe and Voice of America.
In 1959, he became editor at the United States Information
agency’s Polish language publication Ameryka which enjoyed a large
circulation in Poland. In 1961 he brought Genia Galewska, his pre-war
fiancée,to the United States from Poland an they were married
in Washington, DC.
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| Wittlin and wife in Washington, D.C., 1958 |
Wittlin published
16 books that include Time Stopped at 6:30 (about Katyn), Commissar: The Life and
Death of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, and a set of sketches about his time in
Russia, entitled A Reluctant Traveler in Russia.
His last book was Szabla i Kon
(The Saber and the Horse), a biography of Gen.
Boleslaw Wieniawa-Dlugoszowski in which he included some of
his own experiences from the inter-war period in Poland. He died
in 1998,followed by his wife Genia in 2012.During their time in
Washington, D.C., they kept an open house for Polish writers, artists and
intellectuals.
Among photographs and papers that were left as a part of his
archive is a fascinating study of the passing of the Beat Generation in the
early 1960s. This book was at first entitled Tales from the White Horse Tavern
and later renamed Left Bank, New York. It still awaits publication.
Additional
information about Tadeusz Wittlin may be found at: www.poles.org/DB/W_names/Wittlin_T/Wittlin_T.html
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Reprinted from PAHA Newsletter, vol. 69, no. 1 (Spring 2012)
