📅 October 6, 2025, 7:00 PM The meeting with the author will be hosted by Zofia Król Foyer of the New Theatre / New Bookstore Free admission New book: "The Great Carousel. The Life of Aleksander Weissberg-Cybulski" by Irena Grudzińska-Gross, Znak Publishing House A physicist, communist, gambler, and spy who fell victim to NKVD persecution and whom Albert Einstein himself tried to rescue from Stalinist prisons. Handed over by the NKVD to the Gestapo, he ended up in the Krakow ghetto, only to hide in Warsaw after escaping. Aleksander Weissberg-Cybulski, author of the most important book on communism, which few people know about. Irena Grudzińska-Gross's biography is the first such rich account of a man who, more than two decades before Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago," exposed the terror of Stalinist Russia. In "The Great Purge," he described the origins and mechanisms of the Soviet system of violence, as well as the psychological attitudes of those imprisoned in communist jails. Grudzińska-Gross also highlights his friendships with prominent artists and activists: Brecht, Czapski, Koestler, and Giedroyc, as well as the work of his first wife, ceramic artist Eva Zeisel. Cafés filled with discussions in pre-war Berlin, the bloodily suppressed dream of utopian Moscow, and the uncertainty of post-war Paris – these are the landscapes in which this vivid story unfolds. Determination, undeterred practicality, concreteness, tireless energy. This is Aleksander Weissberg-Cybulski, a passenger on the carousel of history, who encapsulated the greatest tragedies of the 20th century in his life story, emerging victorious. Irena Grudzińska-Gross – historian of ideas, essayist, and publicist, Research Scholar (since 2008) at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University and professor at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She studied in Warsaw, Rome, and New York, where she earned her PhD in Romance Studies in 1982 at Columbia University. She has published, among others, "The Stigma of Revolution" (1995, 2000), "Miłosz and Brodsky" (2007), and, together with Jan Tomasz Gross, "Golden Harvest" (2011). Illustration for the series: Jarosław Danilenko
