Polish army officer, writer, political journalist and publisher
You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Polish. (December 2021) Click [show] for important translation instructions.
View a machine-translated version of the Polish article.
Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Polish Wikipedia article at [[:pl:Melchior Wańkowicz]]; see its history for attribution.
You may also add the template {{Translated|pl|Melchior Wańkowicz}} to the talk page.
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.
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.
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]
Korespondencja Krystyny i Melchiora Wankowiczow (Correspondence between Krystyna and Melchior Wankowicz), Warsaw, 1992, ISBN83-85443-21-5
Jerzy Giedroyc and Melchior Wankowicz, Listy 1945–1963 (Series: Archiwum Kultury; correspondence between Jerzy Giedroyc and Melchior Wankowicz), Warsaw, 2000, ISBN83-07-02779-9
King i Krolik. Korespondencja Zofii i Melchiora Wankowiczow (correspondence between Zofia and Melchior Wankowicz), Warsaw, 2004, 2 Volumes, ISBN83-7163-496-X; ISBN83-7163-497-8.
Series: Dziela Wszystkie Melchiora Wankowicza, 16 volumes, Warsaw, 2009–2011
Legacy
A private journalism school on ulica Nowy Świat in Warsaw, the Higher School of Journalism, founded in 1995, is named after Wańkowicz.[1]
^ abMelchior WańkowiczArchived 27 April 2008 at the Wayback Machine, biography in "Tworzywo", an online monthly of Wyższa Szkoła Dziennikarska im. Melchiora Wańkowicza (in Polish)
References
Mieczyslaw Kurzyna, O Wańkowiczu nie wszystko, Warsaw, 1975 OCLC2390994
Krzysztof Kakolewski, Wańkowicz krzepi, Warsaw, 1977 OCLC13615690
