Hans Marchwitza (1890–1965), writer and proletarian poet, was born in Scharley near Beuthen in Upper Silesia. Marchwitza worked as a miner before turning to the left‑ wing journalism in the 1920s. An outspoken communist, he fought against right‑wing forces that overthrew the Weimar Republic in Germany. In August 1940, after the German army occupied France, the writer was held in a camp in Marseille. From there, in June 1941, he went to Ellis Island and sought entry to the United States. He was one of more than thirty German émigré writers who were granted asylum in the United States, thanks largely to the involvement of American leftist writers. Of the more than two hundred applications by German writers, dozens of them, mostly prominent ones, were subjected to surveillance by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). While in America, Marchwitza self‑ published two volumes of poetry, “Untergrund” and “Wetterleuchten. Gedichte. A collection of anti‑ fascist poems” (New York, 1942). Most of the reportages and short stories collected in the volumes “In Frankreich” (1949) and “Unter uns” (1950) containing memoirs and notes from the life of a miner in Silesia and the Ruhr region, as well as selected life stations from his stay in France and Spain. The writer returned with his second wife Hilde Stern to a defeated Germany in 1946.