Melchior Wańkowicz

Melchior Wańkowicz (10 January 1892 – 10 September 1974) was a Polish army officer, popular writer, political 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.

Biography

Melchior Wańkowicz was born on 10 January 1892 in Kalużyce in the Minsk Governorate of the Russian Empire, now Kolyuzhitsa, Byerazino Raion, Minsk Region, Belarus. 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 product advertisement of sugar – "cukier krzepi" (Sugar Invigorates). 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 became 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 Wańkowicz, died as a member of Polish resistance Armia Krajowa during the Warsaw uprising in 1944.