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Jane Rogoyska is a writer whose work explores themes of conflict, exile, memory and politics in 20th-century Europe. She has a particular interest in the turbulent period between the 1930s and the beginning of the Cold War. Her books include the prize-winning ‘Surviving Katyń’, about the 1940 massacre of 22,000 Polish prisoners-of-war by the Soviet secret police, and ‘Gerda Taro: Inventing Robert Capa’, the first English-language biography of the photojournalist Gerda Taro. She has also written a novel, ‘Kozłowski’, and collaborated on a variety of projects in radio, film, theatre and photography.
Jane studied Modern Languages at Christ’s College, Cambridge University, then went on to study film at the NSFTV in Leeds and the Polish National Film School in Łódź, working extensively as a filmmaker before deciding to focus on her own research and writing.
Writing about Katyń
My grandfather was a Polish economist and civil servant. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was Deputy Director of the Bank of Poland. In his youth, he had been a member of the Polish intelligence services and fought for Polish independence with Marshal Piłsudski.
My father’s early memories of fleeing Warsaw with his parents on a specially commissioned government train (along with government gold hidden under the floorboards) has always exerted a powerful fascination over me. That journey marks a transition: not just the moment when my father’s destiny changed irrevocably but the point at which the sophisticated, cosmopolitan, multicultural Poland of the 1930s, to which my grandfather and the protagonists of Surviving Katyń and Kozłowski belonged, came to an abrupt end.
Growing up in London I had little contact with Polish culture: my mother was British, my father came to the UK as a child. I travelled to Poland for the first time as a student in 1990 just as the brutal legacy of the Second World War, including the Katyń Massacre, was being discussed openly for the first time. My fascination with war, politics, exile and memory has its roots in my family background and in that first encounter with a freshly post-communist country, grappling with its past.
During my research into the Katyń Massacre I discovered quite by chance that my great-uncle, Ludwik Rynkowski, was one of the victims.