Dr. Stefan Waydenfeld, was fourteen when Nazi Germany invaded his home country of Poland in September 1939, beginning World War II. Seventeen days later, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east.

Within a few months, young Waydenfeld and his parents, like a million and a half other Polish civilians, were forcibly deported to one of the Soviet labor camps in the frozen Russian north. Only about half such deportees survived; Stefan Waydenfeld was one. When Hitler turned on his erstwhile ally Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Stalin released the surviving Poles as part of his price for joining the Allied effort in fighting the Nazis. Waydenfeld went on to fight with the Allies as an officer in the Polish army, taking part in a number of battles, including Monte Cassino.

Following the end of the war, Waydenfeld studied medicine at the University of Bologna, Italy; the University of Paris, France; and graduated from the Royal College of Surgeons, Dublin, Ireland. He decided to settle in England. A member of the British Medical Association, he is now retired from his general medical practice and lives in London.

Fluent in English, Polish, Russian, French and Italian, Waydenfeld has translated many books and articles, both medical and non-medical, for several publishers, in addition to writing his own spellbinding story in The Ice Road.

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