Legendary RFE Polish Service Director

Jan Nowak Dead at 91

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty

Washington / Prague - January 21, 2005

Jan Nowak, the legendary fighter for the Polish resistance during World War II who went on to head the Polish service of Radio Free Europe for a quarter of a century, died Thursday evening, January 20 in a hospital in his native Warsaw. He was 91 years old.

RFE/RL President Thomas A. Dine, traveling in Ukraine, said that "Jan Nowak was a great leader. He was a great Polish patriot. He made the Polish section of RFE the jewel in the crown."

Born in 1913 as Zdzislaw Jezioranski ("Jan Nowak" was his nom de guerre), Nowak first attained prominence thanks to his storied service with the Polish underground during World War II, when he shuttled between London, Stockholm, and Warsaw to lobby allied leaders and to organize the resistance at home. During the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, Nowak oversaw English-language broadcasting from the Polish capital. It was during the Uprising that he married his wife Greta, who was working as a courier for the resistance. Greta Nowak died in 1999.

After the war, as his country fell into the hands of Soviet-sponsored Communists, Nowak continued to fight for Poland's freedom by helming the Polish Service of Radio Free Europe. His audience included Pope John Paul II, who once told Nowak that he used to listen to him every morning as he shaved. After Jan's 1976 retirement from Radio Free Europe, the Nowaks moved to the United States, where Jan served as national director of the Polish American Congress and later, at the behest of his countryman Zbigniew Brzezinski, as a consultant to the National Security Council during the Carter Administration. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996.

Throughout his years in the United States, Nowak assumed that he would never see his beloved homeland again, a fact that caused him great sorrow. However, in 1989 the Solidarity movement toppled the Communist regime, and in August of that year Nowak made his triumphant return to the nation to which he had devoted his life. He received a hero's welcome. He moved back to Warsaw permanently in 2002.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a private, international communications service to Eastern and Southeastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia, funded by the U.S. Congress through the Broadcasting Board of Governors

Jan Nowak-Jezioranski

Washington Post

Saturday, January 22

THE DEATH OF Jan Nowak-Jezioranski, a Polish World War II hero who became a Western Cold War hero, marks the end of an era. Mr. Nowak-Jezioranski, who died Thursday night at age 91, was also known as the "courier from Warsaw," the man whose extraordinary journeys between wartime London and occupied Poland sound now like episodes from spy novels. It was he who informed the Allies of the Polish underground's resistance to the Nazis, and he who told the world of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. Later, he took part in the Warsaw uprising against the Germans, which resulted in the deaths of 150,000 of his fellow Poles and the destruction of his city.

But if Mr. Nowak-Jezioranski is a hero of the past, he is also worth remembering in the present. After the war, he became the head of the Polish section of Radio Free Europe, diligently organizing anti-Communist broadcasts for two decades. Indeed, his dogged, long-term and ultimately successful dedication to democracy could almost be a model for those who wish to spread democracy now. Instead of seeking quick solutions, he shaped the perceptions of his compatriots by providing reliable information and a forum for debate, preparing them for democracy when it finally came. Instead of playing politics in Washington, where he lived for most of the last 29 years of his life, he advised successive administrations on how they could best help first dissident Polish democrats and later newly democratic Poland itself. In his last article for The Post in 2002, he wrote a Fourth of July thank-you note to the United States for its support of freedom in his native Poland during his nine decades. Perhaps it is we who should have thanked him for showing us the right way to support freedom, in his country and around the world.