He traveled to then Soviet occupied Grodno and in March 1940 was arrested by the NKVD for attempting to cross the Soviet-Lithuanian border[4] and routinely sentenced to five years of hard labour on "espionage" charges[5] like all Polish intellectuals.

He joined Gen. Władysław Anders' Army (Polish II Corps) and later fought in North Africa and in Italy, taking part in the battle of Monte Cassino.

It was translated into English by Joseph Marek (pen-name of Andrzej Ciołkosz) and published with an introduction by Bertrand Russell in 1951 (the 2005 edition was introduced by Anne Applebaum).

A hero in his native Poland and a well-known if occasionally controversial figure in his adoptive Italy, Herling was for decades the object of quiet but intense admiration among readers and writers throughout Europe.

Although a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize, it wasn't until the recent and widely acclaimed republication of several of his books in the U.S. that he was brought to the attention of a broader American readership.