The director of the Warsaw Rising Museum, Jan Ołdakowski, said in his remarks during the remembrance ceremony that Nowak-Jeziorański’s message of patriotism has lost nothing of its relevance.
”After the fall of the 1944 Warsaw Rising, he firmly believed that Poland can never be alone”, Ołdakowski stressed, recalling Nowak-Jeziorański’s lobbying for Poland’s membership in NATO.
Born in 1914, Nowak-Jeziorański volunteered in 1943 as an emissary of the Home Army. He shuttled between Home Army commanders in Warsaw and the Polish government-in-exile in London and other Allied governments, using several noms de guerre, the best known of which was Jan Nowak.
After one such mission, he returned to Warsaw shortly before the outbreak of the Warsaw Rising on 1 August 1944, and on the eve of the capitulation he was ordered by Home Army Commander General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski to go to London with a large number of documents and photos. He earned the nickname ‘Courier from Warsaw’.
After the war, Nowak-Jeziorański lived in London, working for the Polish Section of the BBC, and in Munich, where he served as Head of the Polish Service of Radio Free Europe. He then settled in Washington, where he was Head of the Polish American Congress and an advisor to the National Security Agency.
While in Washington, he organized assistance for the Solidarity movement and support for the democratic transformations in Poland after the collapse of communism in 1989.
In 2002 he returned to Warsaw, where he spent the last years of his life.
In 1994, Nowak-Jeziorański received the Order of the White Eagle, the highest Polish state distinction.
Source: X/@aan_gov_pl/@1944pl/@Historia_PR
(mk/mp)