Name Roman Umiastowski | ||
Died December 29, 1982, London, United Kingdom | ||
Roman Umiastowski, who was born on January 29, 1893 in Warsaw and died on December 29, 1982 in London, has been a colonel in the Polish Army, a patriot and a bibliophile.
World War II
When the Germans invaded Poland, Umiastowski was the head of propaganda department in the Polish High Staff. On the night of 6/7 September 1939 he aired a message on the radio, urging all able men of Warsaw to go to the front; the idea was to man a defence line east of the Vistula. The result is said to have been one of the most legendary traffic jams in history.
After the war Colonel Umiastowski emigrated to Great Britain, where he pursued his hobby, bibliophily. He had a remarkable collection, among which an important copy of Copernicus's De revolutionibus, which he eventually donated to a Polish library.
In the 1970s, he published two science fiction novels, under the pen name of Boleslaw Zarnowiecki.