Background
He was born as Wladimir January Pavel Malacki in Warsaw in 1908 of a non-religious Polish family of Jewish descent.
He was born as Wladimir January Pavel Malacki in Warsaw in 1908 of a non-religious Polish family of Jewish descent.
In 1926, he left Poland, traveling in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He wrote: "I had the feeling that the end of the world was approaching in Poland, so I wanted to discover the life of other lands before it disappeared entirely. At the beginning of World World War II, he was conscripted into the French army, though not a French citizen.
He was captured by the Germans, but managed to escape, and fled to southern France.
He returned to France in 1947, but left again for the United States in 1948.
He was associated with, though not formally a member of, several French leftist organizations, including the Trotskyist Communist League, and during the Spanish Civil War he joined the Republican forces as a member of the militia columns of the left Workers" Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). (Beginning in 1942 and continuing after the war, he was a member of the Left Communist group Gauche communiste de France. In the United States, he was loosely affiliated with a number of non-Communist left groups) His most famous work, about an international group of exiles in Vichy France, was Planète sans visa (1947), which has been translated into many languages.