Józef Kasparek

Józef Kasparek (1915–2002) was a Polish lawyer, historian and political scientist.

Until World War II he lived in southeastern Poland (in Poland's southern Kresy), in an area that is now in western Ukraine.

Józef Kasparek was born in 1915 in Broumov (in German, Braunau), Bohemia, Austro-Hungarian Empire, in what is now the Czech Republic, near that country's border with what was then German Silesia and is now Poland's Lower Silesian Province. Kasparek was the son of Teodor Kasparek (1867–1940) and Emilia, née Obst von Minnenthal. The father was a lawyer who, before World War I, had been a judge in Austrian-ruled Bosnia and was now, aged nearly fifty, serving as a volunteer in Józef Piłsudski's Polish Legions; in his youth, parting ways with his lawyer-father's conservatism and Germanic-culture orientation, he had co-founded the Polish Socialist Party with Ignacy Daszyński before studying law in Zurich, Switzerland.

While Teodor Kasparek was serving in Piłsudski's Legions, his son Józef spent his first years at , on the Dniester River, birthplace of one of the 16th-century founders of Polish literature, Mikołaj Rej. Józef later attended the Lwów Corps of Cadets, a state-run military-style secondary school. He also studied piano at his paternal maiden aunts' well-regarded music school in Lwów. Later, as a young man, he participated in stage plays under the tutelage of the celebrated theater director, Leon Schiller. He drew portraits with the skill of an inspired artist. But Józef, whom his mother called a "gawędziarz" (story-teller), seemed to find himself especially as a writer. While a law student at Lwów University, he wrote for the Lwów "political-opposition" newspaper, Dziennik Polski (The Polish Daily), edited by , and compiled a collection of short stories that was about to be published when World War II supervened.

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