Meet the Author: Alex Storozynski – Spies in My Blood: A Polish Family’s Fight Against Nazis and Communists

“Spies In My Blood” winner of the “Best Storyteller Award”
At the United Solo Theatre Festival on 42nd Street Comes to Ohio

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alex Storozynski was raised by soldiers, spies, and assassins. His mother begged them to keep it a secret from him, but he learned the truth when he ventured behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

Alex and his big brother George grew up in New York City in a family of World War II exiles. The brothers knew that their father fought in the Allied invasion of Normandy and that their mother was forced by the Germans to work in a Nazi slave labor camp. In 1985, after graduating from Columbia University’s Journalism school, Alex traveled to Warsaw, Poland, interviewing the Communist government’s propaganda minister, Solidarity opposition leader Lech Walesa, rock stars, filmmakers, and artists. Alex was put under surveillance and pulled in for questioning by the secret police, who declared him an “enemy of the state.”

After returning to New York, where he had a successful journalism career, Alex dug through military archives, family correspondence, and artifacts to learn that in the 1930s, his paternal grandfather ran a spy ring that used chimney sweeps to snoop on Russian agents carrying out a mass murder campaign against Poles and Ukrainians. His father was also a spy during WWII. Alex discovered that his maternal grandfather was a tank commander and assassinated German officers in brothels the night before battles during the Allied invasion of Italy.

When the fall of the Berlin Wall loosened the Soviet Union’s stranglehold over Eastern Europe, Alex obtained secret dossiers disclosing that the Communist secret police gave him and his brother the codenames “Rocky and Nemo.” George admitted on his deathbed that he, too, went into the family business and worked for the CIA, carrying out one of the most dangerous missions of the Cold War.

This true story is revealed in the engaging memoir, “Spies In My Blood: Secrets of a Polish Family’s Fight Against Nazis and Communists,” available on Amazon.com. The performance in Ohio will include dramatic surveillance photos and images to bring this fascinating tale to life.

For more info contact: Alex.storozynski@gmail.com

Books can be pre-ordered on Amazon. Please note that they will not be available for purchase during the event.

Alex Storozynski is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, award-winning author, director, and President Emeritus & Chairman of the Board of The Kosciuszko Foundation. His memoir, Spies In My Blood: Secrets of A Polish Family’s Fight Against Nazis & Communists, is receiving rave reviews. He is also the writer and director of the documentary, “Kosciuszko: A Man Ahead of His Time.”

As a New York Daily News editorial board member, Storozynski wrote editorials and op-ed columns on public policy issues and was part of the writing team that won the Pulitzer Prize, George Polk Award, Sigma Delta Chi Award, Deadline Club Award, Associated Press and Silurian Awards. He is a former City Editor of The New York Sun and founding editor of amNewYork. He has also been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Post, Newsday, Forbes.com, The Huffington Post, and other publications.

His book The Peasant Prince: Thaddeus Kosciuszko and the Era of Revolution, won the Fraunces Tavern Book Award, The Templar Military History Award – “Military Order of Saint Louis,” and other honors. His documentary film, Kosciuszko: A Man Ahead of His Time, was broadcast on PBS WNET New York, WTTW Chicago and WLIW Long Island and PBS stations across America.

When American newspapers shifted blame from Nazi Germany for their concentration camps such as Auschwitz by calling them “Polish,” Storozynski authored a petition signed by 300,000 people asking the media to ban this phrase. As a result, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, and other news outlets changed their news stylebooks to prohibit use of the erroneous phrase “Polish concentration camps.”

Storozynski received a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, a bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at New Paltz, and a postgraduate fellowship at the University of Warsaw.