Jozef Czapski,21.01.1943. Matson photograph collection, Library of Congress

Józef Czapski was born on 3 April 1896 in Prague, Czech Republic, to an aristocratic family. In 1917, as a volunteer, he briefly joined the 1st Krechowce Uhlan Regiment. In independent Poland, he enrolled to study at the Warsaw School of Fine Arts, but he never studied there due to the outbreak of the Polish-Bolshevik War. For his participation in the battles, he was awarded the War Order of Virtuti Militari. After the war, he resumed his art studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow.
In September 1939, he was mobilised into the army. He was taken prisoner by the Soviets and held in the Starobelsk camp. Thanks to his aristocratic connections and support from Germany, he was among a small group of Starobelsk prisoners of war who avoided being shot by the Soviets. Most of those held in the camp (about 3,800 people) were murdered by a shot to the back of the head in Kharkov, as part of the Katyn Massacre. From Starobelsk, he was transported to the Pavlishchev Bor camp and then to Gryazovets.
He regained his freedom in 1941 under the so-called Sikorski-Mayski Agreement and joined the Polish Army,which was being formed under the command of General Władysław Anders. He was given the task of finding his fellow Soviet prisoners: several thousand Polish officers – prisoners of war about whom the only thing known at the time was that they had been lost without trace. He suspected that they had been shot in the spring of 1940, although the truth did not come out until April 1943, when the Germans announced that there were mass graves of Polish officers in the forest near Katyn.
Acting as head of the Propaganda and Information Department of the Polish Armed Forces in the East, he travelled the entire combat route of the Polish II Corps, ending up in the battles on the Italian front. In 1946, he settled in France and co-founded the Literary Institute in Maisons-Laffitte. He died on 12 April 1993 and was buried in La Mesnil-le-Roi.
He described his memories from the period of Soviet captivity and the search for Polish officers in the books Wspomnienia starobielskie (Memoirs of Starobielsk) and Na nieludzkiej ziemi (The Inhuman Land).