WAŃKOWICZ Melchior
THE ROAD TO OFFICIALDOM
New York 1955; Roy Publishers. 8, pp. 507, [4], format 14.5x21 cm
First, emigrant edition!
After the outbreak of war, Wańkowicz was assigned to General Stefan Rowecki's Warsaw Armored-Motor Brigade; however, his attempts to find his unit, which he searched for in bombarded Kurow and Lublin, were unsuccessful. In Lublin, the writer heard a threat from a German radio station broadcasting in Polish from Breslau: "Wańkowicz is in Lublin, but we will catch him with the tracks of Smetka"]. It was an allusion to his anti-German book published before the war. Finally, after the German and Soviet armies occupied most of Poland, on the night of September 24-25, 1939, Melchior Wańkowicz, with his typewriter in his hands, having crossed the Dniester River under fire, crossed the Polish-Romanian border. Thus began his wartime wandering - the writer's emigration was to last until 1958. Until September 1940 he stayed in Romania, first mainly in Bucharest, where his daughter Marta joined him on March 24, 1940 (his older daughter Krystyna remained in occupied Warsaw with her mother), on June 12 he moved to Carmen Silva near Eforie on the Black Sea coast. All the while he continued his work as a writer and journalist. He managed to meet, among others, with Marshal Edward Smigly-Rydz and former Foreign Minister Jozef Beck, who were both interned in Romania. During these meetings, he interviewed them, later published (1955) in print in the book The Road to Urzędów.
PUBLISHER'S SOFTCOVER
Condition DB+/ minor cover tears, stamps
