Teresa Torańska


Teresa Sławomira Torańska was a Polish journalist and writer. She was perhaps best known for her award winning monograph, Oni.

Biography

Teresa Torańska was born on January 1, 1944 in Wołkowysk, which was then part of the Second Polish Republic occupied by the Soviet Union. Following World War II she graduated from the Warsaw University's Department of Law. She worked as a journalist for the popular Polish weekly "Kultura” in the 1970s, and then throughout the following decade, for the leading Polish émigré literary journal Kultura paryska, banned in communist Poland and published in Paris, France. Her book Them was a breakthrough best seller that led to frequent parallels with Oriana Fallaci as a superb interviewer. Her probing interviewing style is perhaps best demonstrated by her disrobing on camera expose of the communist strongman General Wojciech Jaruzelski. In the 1990s, Torańska hosted two television programs for Telewizja Polska : socio-political "Teraz Wy” and historical "Powtórka z PRL-u”. Torańska wrote the screenplay for a documentary film Dworzec gdański directed by Maria Zmarz-Kozanowicz. The movie, which premiered in 2007, told a story of the Polish Jews forced to leave Poland after the political crisis of March 1968.
Before her death in 2013, she was a contributor to Poland's second-largest daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, conducting interviews with the leading Polish political figures.
Torańska was perhaps best known for her award winning book Them: Stalin's Polish Puppets, published in the United States by HarperCollins.
Teresa Torańska died on January 2, 2013, a day after her 69th birthday, after a long struggle with lung cancer. Torańska was buried on January 9, 2013 at Powązki Military Cemetery.

Works