Jane Rogoyska

Jane Rogoyska

Jane Rogoyska is a British author, filmmaker, and historian of Polish heritage whose work focuses on 20th-century European history. She is the author of Surviving Katyn: Stalin’s Polish Massacre, and the Search for Truth, Gerda Taro: Inventing Robert Capa, and the novel Kozlowski. She studied Modern & Medieval Languages at Christ’s College, Cambridge, then trained in film production in Leeds and at the Polish National Film School in Łódź.

The Hotel Lutetia, the only grand hotel on Paris’s Left Bank, has long been a gathering place for artists, writers and politicians. André Gide lunched there, James Joyce stayed there, and Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. Yet behind its glamorous reputation lies a darker history. In the 1930s, the hotel became a refuge for intellectuals and political exiles fleeing Hitler’s rise to power, who gathered there in hopes of shaping an alternative future for Europe. During the Nazi occupation of Paris, however, the Lutetia was taken over by German military intelligence and used as a base to hunt enemies of the Reich. After the war, it was transformed again — this time into a reception centre for survivors returning from concentration camps. Hotel Exile explores lives shaped by war, exile and ideology through the stories of people connected to the Lutetia across these turbulent decades.

Jane Rogoyska traces how individuals tried to survive, resist and rebuild amid some of the twentieth century’s most devastating events, creating a deeply humane portrait of history at its most intimate.