Melchior Wańkowicz (10 January 1892 – 10 September 1974) was a Polish writer, journalist and publisher. He is most famous for his reporting for the Polish Armed Forces in the West during World War II and writing a book about the battle of Monte Cassino.
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Melchior Wańkowicz was born on 10 January 1892 in Kalużyce near Minsk. He attended school in Warsaw, then the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, which he graduated from in 1922. An activist in the Polish independence movement, he was an officer in the Riflemen Union (Związek Strzelecki). During the First World War he fought in the Polish I Corps in Russia under General Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki.
After the war he worked as a journalist, for a time working as a chief of the press department in the Polish Ministry of Internal Affairs. In 1926 he founded a publishing agency, "Rój". He also worked in the advertising business, coining a popular slogan for the advertisement of sugar - "cukier krzepi" (sugar strengthens). He wrote three books during the interwar period, all of them gaining him increasing fame and popularity. A few decades later he coined another famous slogan - "LOTem bliżej" ("closer with LOT"), advertising the Polish LOT airlines.
After the German invasion of Poland he lived for a while in Romania, where he wrote about the events of the Polish September. Later, from 1943 to 1946 he undertook what would be perhaps his most famous endeavour - he become a war correspondent for the Polish Armed Forces in the West. Later he wrote an account of the battle of Monte Cassino, his most famous book. One of his daughters, Krystyna, died as a member of Polish resistance Armia Krajowa during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.
From 1949 to 1958 he lived in the United States, afterwards returning to communist Poland. He opposed the communist regime, writing and lecturing about the Polish Forces in the West (whose participation was minimized by the government, which tried to emphasize the role of the Soviet-aligned Berling Army). His most known work is a three tome book about the battle of Monte Cassino, a tribute to the soldiers of the Anders Army - a book that was published in Poland only in a shortened, censored form (until the fall of communism in 1990).
After he cosigned the letter of 34 in 1964, protesting against the censorship, he was repressed by the government - the publication of his works was prohibited, and he was himself arrested, charged with slander of Poland[1] and "spreading anti-Polish propaganda abroad" (partially due to the publication of some of his works by Radio Free Europe,[2] but the chief evidence was a private letter to his daughter living in the USA[1]) and sentenced to three years of imprisonment. However the sentence was never executed, and he was rehabilitated in 1990, after the fall of communism in Poland.[2]
Wańkowicz died on 10 September 1974.
Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm has written introductions, footnotes, etc., to:
A private journalism school on ulica Nowy Świat in Warsaw, the Higher School of Journalism, founded in 1995, is named after Wańkowicz.[1]