Oskar Halecki

Oskar Halecki (26 May 1891, Vienna, Cisleithania, Austria-Hungary – 17 September 1973, White Plains, New York, United States of America) was a Polish historian, social and Catholic activist.

After the Armistice was signed, Halecki was appointed secretary general of a committee of experts attached to the Polish Delegation at the Paris Peace Conference.

In 1921, he was appointed as a member of the League of Nations Secretariat in Geneva, where he spent three years organising that body's Committee on Intellectual Co-operation.

Rather than returning to occupied Poland, he went to Paris, where he organized the Polish University in Exile and served as its president, taught at the Sorbonne and edited the émigré periodical La Voix de Varsovie.

When Germany invaded France in 1940, Halecki escaped to the United States with the help of Stephen Mizwa and the Kosciuszko Foundation, where he spent two years as a visiting professor of history at Vassar College before he became executive director of the new Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, which was conceived as an American outpost of the Polska Akademia Umiejętności.

Halecki also served on the controversial "Committee of Ten" in Scarsdale, New York, which claimed communist influence in the public school curriculum in the 1950s.