As an attorney, Edward Kossoy represented around 60,000 victims of the Holocaust, involving restitution and reparations from the German government. His clients included Jews, Poles and Roma. He studied at the Graduate Institute, Geneva where he earned his PhD in law and political science in 1975.

Edward Kossoy published several books in various languages (English, German and Polish) and historical articles related to restitution for Nazi crimes, contemporary international relations, and Polish-Jewish dialogue. His memoirs, entitled On the Margin..., were published in 2006 and nominated for the NIKE Literary Award in 2007, one of the most prestigious awards for Polish literature.

Edward Kossoy was born in 1913 in Radom, Poland, but spent his childhood in Yekaterinoslav, Ukraine, where his parents relocated during World War. After the Polish-Soviet War and the Peace of Riga in 1921, he moved back to Poland. He studied at the Law School of Warsaw University where he graduated in 1934. In 1939, in the wake of the Nazi invasion of Poland, Edward Kossoy fled Warsaw and escaped eastward to Lviv which was taken over by the Soviet Union after the Soviet invasion of Poland. In 1940, he was arrested by the Soviet militia. He was sentenced to eight years in the Gulag and released after two years. During World War II, his father, wife and son were killed by German troops. In Tel Aviv in 1944, he wrote and published a series of essays, Stołypinka (named after the rail cars used to transport prisoners to the gulag), based on his experiences, but these essays weren't published in book form until 2003.