“Tell People How Old Steklov Died!”

“Tell People How Old Steklov Died!”

Aleksander Wat was born in Warsaw in 1900 to a family of Polish Jewish intelligentsia. As a young man he was a founder of the Polish futurist literary movement; in 1929 he became editor of the communist magazine The Literary Monthly. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Wat and his family fled from Warsaw and, once the family was separated, he ended up in Lwow. Wat was arrested in January 1940 by the Soviet authorities and sent to Lubyanka prison in Moscow. After Hitler’s inva...