Karol Kuryluk
Kuryluk was born on 27 October 1910 in Zbaraż (Zbarazh), a small town in Galicia, the eastern province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (after World War I part of Poland, today in Ukraine), and died in Budapest.
In 1930, after finishing high school in his native town, Kuryluk received a small scholarship to study Polish language at the University of Lviv in the former capital of the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia and a multicultural metropolis (Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Armenians, Belarusians, Germans and Tatars).
In 1931, Kuryluk met the writer and philanthropist Halina Górska and became involved in her social care project Akcja Błękitnych (Action of the Blue Knights), distributing food and clothing to slum children and helping to run shelters for homeless boys.
At the University, he protested against the "bench ghetto", set up by the nationalists to separate Poles and Jews in the lecture halls, and he sided with Jewish and Ukrainian students who were harassed and beaten up by the Endecja gangs.
He called upon the young literary talent in the city (Erwin Axer, Stanisław Jerzy Lec, Czesław Miłosz, Mirosław Żuławski), won over established writers from all over the country (Maria Dąbrowska, Bruno Schulz, Leopold Staff, Andrzej Strug, Julian Tuwim), and published translations of writings by foreign authors (Appolinaire, Henri Barbusse, André Malraux, Carl von Ossietzky, Bertrand Russell, Upton Sinclair, Paul Valéry).
Signals promoted the work of contemporary Polish artists (Henryk Gotlib, Bruno Schulz, Zygmunt Waliszewski) and avant-garde photographers (Otto Hahn, Mieczysław Szczuka), and popularized modern European art (van Gogh, Gauguin, Archipenko, Max Ernst).
A group of gifted graphic artists and caricaturists (K. Baraniecki, F. Kleinmann, Eryk Lipiński, Franciszek Parecki) collaborated with the magazine, which was renowned for its biting humor and merciless derision of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and the Polish anti-Semites, but also of Stalin.
The Party's nationalist faction insinuated that they were all Jews, accused them of "historical treachery that would rob the Polish people of their justified war suffering," and organized street demonstrations to protest "the Zionist plot."
The magazine was intended as a revival of "Signals" and the first issue commemorated writers and artists killed by the Nazis, publishing a long list of victims, including Bruno Schulz, whom the underground tried to save.
The French Institute opened in Warsaw (the first lecturer was Michel Foucault), theater and movie stars (Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Gérard Philipe, Yves Montand) came to visit and to perform; western books and films, avant-garde music and art became available, the first exhibit by Henry Moore was arranged.
The delegation was to tour Asia to lobby for the enlarged version of the Rapacki Plan that would suit the Soviets by creating a huge block of non-aligned countries, extending from East Berlin through Poland, Mongolia, India, China, Vietnam, Burma, and Cambodia.
