Rafał Marceli Blüth (1891–1939)

Rafał Marceli Blüth was born to a Jewish family. He studied chemistry at Lviv Polytechnic in 1911-1914 and Polish studies at the University of Warsaw from 1915 to 1921. Near the end of World War I and for three years afterwards, he served in the Press Department of the Polish Army's General Staff. In 1921, he converted to the Catholic faith. He became a prominent intellectual, a literary critic and historian of literature, specializing in Russian studies. In 1933 he received a doctoral degree from the Jagiellonian University. From 1934, he wrote a regular column for Verbum, a Catholic cultural and religious quarterly magazine. He was one of the first in Poland to write about the Moscow show trials held in the USSR from 1936 to 1938. His many other published works included books on Adam Mickiewicz, Joseph Conrad, and Russian literature. On November 13, 1939, after the onset of Nazi Germany's occupation of Poland in World War II, Dr. Blüth was arrested in his home and shot in a mass execution in the Natolin district of southern Warsaw. He was married to Elida Maria Szarota and was the father of historian Tomasz Szarota.