Proust

The life story of the painter and writer Joseph Czapski (1896-1993) would, as his friend Manès Sperber wrote, "constitute a highly revealing chapter in a European testament." Born in Prague to an Austrian-Polish family and raised multilingual near Minsk, he studied painting in St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Krakow, and Paris. He became a committed witness to three wars - World War I, World War II, and the Polish-Soviet War of 1920 - serving partly as a soldier and partly tasked with searching for missing Polish prisoners of war. He reported on his investigations - and their results, which he struggled to believe for a long time: the abduction and murder of about 15,000 soldiers who had been killed in the forests of Katyn and in the farthest corners of Siberia - in the book "Inhuman Earth." After the war, he returned.