Michał Waszyński

Michał Waszyński (29 September 1904 – 20 February 1965) was first a film director in Poland, then in Italy, and later (as Michael Waszynski) a producer of major American films, mainly in Spain. Known for his elegance and impeccable manners, he was known by his acquaintances as "the prince". Waszyński was born as Mosze Waks into a Polish Jewish family in 1904 in Kowel, a small town in Volhynia (now in Ukraine), which at the time was part of Imperial Russia. As Germany occupied this part of Europe during World War I, he moved first to Warsaw and later to Berlin. As a young man he worked as an assistant director under the legendary German director F.W. Murnau. Upon his return to Poland he changed his name to Michał Waszyński and converted to Catholicism. In the 1930s Waszyński became the most prolific film director in Poland, directing 37 of the 147 films made in Poland in that decade, or one out of four. Along with popular films in Polish produced for a wide local audience, he directed an important film in Yiddish The Dybbuk, today a monument of the rich cultural life of East European Jewry before the Holocaust. At the beginning of World War II Waszyński escaped from Warsaw, which was being bombed by German planes, to Białystok. That city was taken in mid-September 193... ()