Józef Czapski (1896-1993) was a writer and artist, as well as an officer in the Polish army. Czapski was drafted into the army at the beginning of World War II, soon after landing in a Soviet prisoner of war camp. Once free, he was assigned to investigate another disappearance of officers, who he would discover were victims of the Katyn Massacre, the subject of Inhuman Land . Czapski spent the rest of his years painting and writing. NYRB Classics publishes Inhuman Land and Lost Time , as well as Eric Karpeles' bio of Czapski, Almost Nothing . Alissa Valles is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Hospitium. Her translations include Zbigniew Herbert's Collected Poems and Collected Prose , Ryszard Krynicki's Our Life Grows (NYRB Poets), and Józef Czapski's Memories of Starobielsk and other Russian Writings, forthcoming from NYRB Classics in 2020. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Irena Grudzioska Gross has taught East-Central European history and literature at Emory University, New York University, Boston University, and Princeton University. Her books include Golden Harvest (with Jan T. Gross), Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets , and The Scar of Revolution: Tocqueville, Custine and the Romantic Imagination . She is a recent Guggenheim fellow and is currently working on a biography of Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski. She lives in Brooklyn.