PublishedIngram, December 2017 |
ISBN9781973554233 |
FormatSoftcover, 352 pages |
Dimensions22.9cm × 15.2cm × 1.9cm |
'To Live Well is to Hide Well' is the true story of a Polish Intelligence Officer, who became an elusive international spy and assassin before, during and after WW2, working for England, Poland and the USA Intelligence departments. It is based on a series of death-bed confessions, eyewitness accounts, documents, videos, photographs and verification by international experts, including aviation scientific tests and even the 2020 Canadian TRIALS.
It is the story of a deeply religious Roman Catholic man who wanted to unburden himself of the horrors of war; it is the story told by a father to his son. The father is Bronislaw Urbanski, a Polish patriot who died in Adelaide, South Australia in 1984; the son is Peter, who became the reluctant author. This is a story of spies, assassinations, intrigue and even romance, but at its heart it is the story of just one man whose actions left in their wake a man physically and emotionally scarred. Yet still he deemed his actions as justified and honourable in Poland's fight against Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Bronislaw was eventually captured and incarcerated into a few German POW camps before escaping and resuming his clandestine activities within the Polish underground (Resistance Groups) as an assassin and saboteur often directed by MI6 via wireless from London. In his death-bed confession: Bronislaw outed himself to his son as the man who assassinated General Wladyslaw Sikorski, Poland's Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Prime Minister in exile. He wanted to apologize and explain why and how he sabotaged Sikorski's plane on the 4th of July 1943 in Gibraltar. Long thought to have been 'just an accident', explained in detail. Historians, WW2 Air Crash Investigation and Aeronautical experts now acknowledge through both scientific and physical TRIALS that this explosive book actually gives evidence that Flight AL523 was 'sabotaged'. As the narrative unfolds it becomes clearer, just how this seemingly mild man who kept to himself who was actually known to the Allies as the 'King Assassin', a major international spy and NAZI hunter; a man greatly feared but also respected. Two extraordinary women played critical roles in his life. The first was Krystyna Skarbek aka British SOE Christine Granville, his lover and fellow spy who later went on to champion Bronislaw's heroics to yet another spy, Ian Fleming, resulting in Fleming's use of this information to create James Bond and produce his first fictional spy thriller Casino Royale in 1953. Early 1945 Bronislaw, as part of the US occupational forces in West Germany, met the second important woman in his life, Hildegard - the woman who was to become his wife and Peter's mother. She too, had a 'past' that in the late 1960s led to a terrifying encounter in Port Adelaide, South Australia, with Jewish Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal, this was the signal to Peter that his parents were not whom they seem. Bronislaw killed many 'targets', but also made many enemies in the process and after the War he used forged documents to flee to Australia with his young wife. But even there, they could not escape their pasts. To Live Well is to Hide Well is the story of an extraordinary man living in an extraordinary time and who, at the end of his life, wanted only to be remembered as a patriot of his beloved Poland.
