From Petersburg to Katyń

Prose writer, publicist, journalist. One of the most outstanding Polish writers of the 20th century, nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1975 by the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Kansas. Józef Mackiewicz.

Born in 1902 in Saint Petersburg as the younger brother of the later lawyer, publisher and writer – Stanisław Cata-Mackiewicz. He had a bourgeois upbringing, and after moving to Vilnius, took part in the Polish-Bolshevik war. He went on to study at the University of Warsaw, but his academic career failed to take off. Instead, he began working as a journalist in the early 1920s, and with the written word that came to be associated with his entire life. During the German occupation of Vilnius, he also wrote for the concessionary Polish-language newspaper “Goniec Codzienny”. This led to the passing of a death sentence on him from the Home Army, which was not carried out because the appointed enforcer, Sergiusz Piasecki, refused to believe in Mackiewicz’s guilt. Not long after, the commander of the Vilnius District of the Home Army, Colonel Aleksander Krzyżanowski, overturned the sentence. When, in 1943, the mass graves of Polish officers murdered by the NKVD (Katyn Massacre) were discovered, Mackiewicz, with the agreement of the Home Army District Command, together with Ferdynand Goetel and Father Stanisław Jasiński, participated in the work of the International Medical Commission appointed to carry out the exhumation of victims of this Soviet war crime. He said the following about this: “[…] it smells neither of damp moss nor of needles there. One is overwhelmed by the hideously stinking, sweetish, sticky stench of corpses. In spite of the cold and the wind, the stench was so overwhelming that I took a reflexive step back and it was then that I stepped on an object that had bent under my foot. It was a Polish officer’s cap with the dark green brim of our artillery. I picked it up then laid it down on the rug of immortals blossoming there. Perhaps it is slightly bordering on pathos that I turned my attention to the growing flowers…’.

From Katyn to Munich

At the end of the war, he managed to make his way illegally to the West. A few years later, he produced a comprehensive report entitled ‘The Katyn Massacre in the Light of Documents’, followed by the book “Katyn”, which was published in England in 1951 and was the first book in English devoted to this crime. Mackiewicz – an “uncompromising anti-communist” – remained an émigré throughout his life, struggling with recurring suspicions of wartime collaboration with the Germans and Lithuanians. He continued his career as a writer and journalist in the pages of, among other publications, London ‘News’ and Paris ‘Culture’. He wrote according to his motto, which he repeatedly stated as: ‘only the truth is interesting’. He died in Munich on 31 January 1985.