Polish · 1919–2000
Herling-Grudziński was arrested by the NKVD in 1940 trying to cross into Lithuania — the charge was that his surname resembled Göring's — and spent two years in a labour camp at Yertsevo near Arkhangelsk, getting out only after a hunger strike and the amnesty for Poles that followed the German invasion of the USSR. He joined Anders' Army, fought at Monte Cassino and won the Virtuti Militari, and never returned to Poland. He settled in Naples, married Benedetto Croce's daughter, co-founded the Paris émigré journal Kultura, and wrote for it for fifty years. A World Apart appeared in English in 1951 with a preface by Bertrand Russell, six years before Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Denisovich, and no French publisher would touch it. His Journal Written at Night runs to several thousand pages and is one of the great European diaries.