Roman Umiastowski, who was born on January 29, 1893, in Warsaw and died on December 29, 1982, in London, has been a colonel in the Polish Army, a patriot and a bibliophile.
When the Germans invaded Poland, Umiastowski was the head of the propaganda department in the Polish High Staff. On the night of 6/7 September 1939 he aired a message on the radio, urging all able men of Warsaw to go to the front; the idea was to man a defense line east of the Vistula.[1] The result is said to have been one of the most legendary traffic jams in history.[2] Umiastowki continued his work after arriving in England after the military collapse in 1939 and published ("with the assistance of Joanna Mary Aldridge"): Russia and the Polish Republic 1918 - 1941 (London, 1945?, pp 320) and Poland, Russia and Great Britain 1941 - 1945. A Study of Evidence(London, 1946, pp 544). The first in memory of his son, lieutenant Jan Kazimierz, who fell on May 11, 1944, as a member of The 5th Wilno Brigade at Monte Casino, Italy. Both books are documented by a wealth of source material. After the war Colonel Umiastowski pursued his hobby, bibliophily. He had a remarkable collection, among which an important copy of Copernicus's De revolutionibus, which he eventually donated to a Polish library.
In the 1970s, he published two science fiction novels, under the pen name of Boleslaw Zarnowiecki.