Władysław Machejek

Władysław Machejek (February 25, 1920 – December 21, 1991) was a communist official, writer, publicist and hoax artist during the Stalinist period in Poland following World War II. He wrote fabricated accounts of anti-communist underground mainly for his own political gains as regional party secretary and later member of the communist highest parliamentary echelons. Due to the coarse and infamous nature of his works, he has been described as a "legendary socialist scribbler".

Biography Machejek was born on February 25, 1920, into a peasant family in the hamlet of Chodów. He joined the Communist Party of Poland as a youth. During World War II he served in the Soviet-sponsored partisan organizations Gwardia Ludowa and Armia Ludowa. After the war he became a member of the new Polish communist party PZPR and took over the post of its regional secretary in the town of Nowy Targ not far from where he grew up. Soon, he became a member of the provincial party cell in Kraków, and eventually deputy to the Sejm (Polish parliament) in the People's Republic of Poland. He has also been known on occasion to attack the authorities of other communist countries (such as Romania), but his criticism was tolerated. The book was based on a fictional diary of their leader written by Machejek himself. In an often coarse and even primitive prose, Machejek painted Poland's anti-communists as motley crew of bloodthirsty anti-Semites who killed Jews, persecuted the Slovak population of the region and who preyed on innocent people. Although those fragments were simply invented by Machejek, some historians, most recently Jan Tomasz Gross in his Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz (2006), have fallen for his claim that the novel was based on facts (Kuraś himself was hunted to death by secret police), thus treating Machejek's falsehood as a valid source.