Józef Kasparek (1915–2002) was a Polish lawyer, historian, and political scientist. Until World War II he lived in southeastern Poland (in Poland's southern Kresy), in an area that is now in western Ukraine. Early years Józef Kasparek was born in 1915 in Broumov (in German, Braunau), Bohemia, Austro-Hungarian Empire, in what is now the Czech Republic, near that country's border with what was then German Silesia and is now Poland's Lower Silesian Province. Kasparek was the son of Teodor Kasparek (1867–1940) and Emilia, née Obst von Minnenthal. The father was a lawyer who, before World War I, had been a judge in Austrian-ruled Bosnia and was now, aged nearly fifty, serving as a volunteer in Józef Piłsudski's Polish Legions; in his youth, parting ways with his lawyer-father's conservatism and Germanic-culture orientation, he had co-founded the Polish Socialist Party with Ignacy Daszyński before studying law in Zürich, Switzerland. While Teodor Kasparek was serving in Piłsudski's Legions, his son Józef spent his first years at Żurawno, on the Dniester River, birthplace of one of the 16th-century founders of Polish literature, Mikołaj Rej. Józef later attended the Lwów Corps of Cadets, a state-run military-style secondary school. He also studied piano at his paternal maiden aunts' well-regarded music school in Lwów. Later, as a young man, he participated in stage plays under the tutelage of the celebrated theater director, Leon Schiller. He drew portraits with the skill of an inspired artist. But Józef, whom his mother called a "gawędziarz" (story-teller), seemed to find himself especially as a writer. While a law student at Lwów University, he wrote for the Lwów "political-opposition" newspaper, Dziennik Polski (The Polish Daily), edited by Klaudiusz Hrabyk, and compiled a collection of short stories that was about to be published when World War II supervened. Carpathian Rus In late 1938, soon after the Munich Conference, Józef Kasparek, a 23-year-old Lwów University law student and Polish Army artillery reservist, helped initiate and carry out, under Polish General Staff direction, covert operations in Carpathian Rus. The object of Akcja Łom (Operation Crowbar)—Kasparek was unaware of the cryptonym—coordinated with operations by Hungarian paramilitary forces, was to subvert the Nazi-German-aligned regime of Avhustyn Voloshyn and restore that easternmost, smallest region of Czechoslovakia to Hungary. Carpathian Rus was being turned by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists into a Piedmont to aspirations for Ukrainian national independence, which might have been won for the first time since