Gustaw Herling-Grudziński was born into a relatively wealthy, assimilated Jewish family. He studied in the Mikołaj Rej high school in Kielce. In an interview recorded by Zdzisław Kudelski in Naples in 1996, Herling-Grudziński said:
When I was born, my father owned a small property in Skrzelczyce near Busko, which later on was the main subject of many stories about its amazing abundance. Apparently everything there was huge, incredible. Mushrooms that you had to jump over, fish that weighed a few kilos. It was an often recalled legend about this abundance of Skrzelczyce and an incredible wealth of this small property.
In reality, soon after Gustaw Herling-Grudziński was born, his father sold the property in Skrzelczyce and bought a mill in Suchedinów. The future writer grew up there.
For two years he studied Polish philology at the Warsaw University. He collaborated with magazines Ateneum, Pion and was an editor of Orka na Ugorze. In October 1939 together with his colleagues he established one of the first conspiracy organisations – Polska Ludowa Akcja Niepodległościowa (PLAN). He went to Lviv and then to Grodno. In 1940 he was arrested by the NKVD while he attempted to go to Lithuania.
Sentenced to five years in a gulag, he was imprisoned in the far North and was liberated two years later. His dramatic experience was described in Herling-Grudziński’s most famous book, A World Apart. He left Russia together with Anders’s army and fought in the battle of Monte Cassino.
Since 1946 he has been a member of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), which he abandoned in 1960. In 1947 he co-founded the Kultura magazine, which was then published in Rome. He moved to London for a few years and then, after his first wive’s death, he came back to Naples, where he married Benedetto Croce’s daughter Lidia, and where he stayed until his death. Between 1952 and 1955, he collaborated with Radio Free Europe, he was a member of the Polish Writers Association. Later on he collaborated with the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR) and Polish Independence Agreement (PPN).