He served as an underground courier, delivering a news bulletin that included domestic and international news, along with announcements of missing persons.
On Wednesday, Rawicz was a guest of honor at the opening of an exhibition entitled The 1944 Warsaw Uprising in Color at the Polish Consulate General in New York.
Artist Mikołaj Kaczmarek, Warsaw Uprising veteran Andrzej Rawicz, Polish Consul General Mateusz Sakowicz, and journalist Wojciech Maślanka pose for a photo during the event at the Polish Consulate General in New York on Wednesday, July 31, 2024. Photo: Danuta Isler/Radio Poland
"I wasn’t afraid," Rawicz said, as cited by Polish state news agency PAP. "I don’t remember feeling fear. We distributed newspapers in various places. Warsaw was burning. There were constant bombings."
He told Nowy Dziennik – Polish Weekly in an interview that "one half of the paper was news, and the other half was ads because people were searching for each other."
Rawicz added: "Every morning, we would go to the print shop, where the Information Bulletin was printed by hand ... We would take a certain number of copies and distribute them around the city."
Newspaper boy
He described the job as extremely dangerous. There were constant sounds of gunfire, fires breaking out, and bombs dropping from planes, he reminisced.
"Several decades later, when I visited Poland, my cousin Janusz Ratajczak and I donated the newspapers we had managed to preserve to the Warsaw Uprising Museum," Rawicz said.
When the Warsaw Uprising fell, the Germans sent him to the Auschwitz concentration camp, but he managed to escape from the transport.
He spent about 30 hours in an open cattle car, but at one point, "some good people" opened the wagon doors, allowing 78 people to escape. Rawicz was one of them.
He survived the remainder of World War II with relatives near the town of Piotrków Trybunalski in central Poland.
The 1944 Warsaw Uprising in Color exhibition, whose opening Rawicz attended on Wednesday, will be on display outside the Polish Consulate General in New York until early October.
Photos: Danuta Isler/Radio Poland
The exhibition's opening attracted many members of the Polish American community.
Other highlights included a performance by the Polonia Children’s Choir.
Image: Eugeniusz 'Brok' Lokajski/Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy (PIW)
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Source: PAP/Nowy Dziennik – Polish Weekly
Click on the audio player above to listen to a report from New York by Radio Poland's Danuta Isler.