Between 1933 and the outbreak of World War II in 1939 he was also the literary director of Gebethner & Wolff,[5] the biggest and the most renowned Polish printing house of the time.

One of his discussed faults, however, was his friendhip with Andrzej Stawar, one of the authors for Miesięcznik literacki and the former member of the Communist Party of Poland who ran anti-Stalinist newspapers in the 1930s.

[1] Freed from prison in November 1941 under the terms of the general amnesty for Poles prompted by the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union,[7] he was exiled to Kazakhstan, with his wife Paulina, also known as Ola Watowa (26 April 1903 – 9 February 1991), and their 9-year-old son, Andrzej.

[1] In 1953 Wat suffered a stroke, marking the beginning of an incurable psychosomatic condition, which from then on caused him acute physical pain and a state of oppressive anxiety.

There he recorded a series of discussions with Czesław Miłosz about his life, which he considered a kind of "spoken diary", published posthumously under the title "My Century".

[1][4] During his youth Wat had long considered ending his life before reaching the age of twenty-five, which he saw as the last moment before the onset of inevitable mental ossification.

[10] Wat had a deeply conflicted religious identity: the son of a Jewish scholar, he developed an atheistic worldview as a young boy due to his extensive reading, but converted to Catholicism during his time in Soviet prisons.

[2][3][4][7] Portions of Wat's literary archive, including the audio recordings of interviews with Czesław Miłosz that were edited into Moj Wiek (translated into English by Richard Lourie as My Century), are held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.