Jan Nowak (1913–2005)

Jan Nowak or Nowak-Jeziorański was born Zdzisław Antoni Jeziorański to a Polish family in Berlin, Germany. He attended gymnasium (high school) in Warsaw. After completing his doctoral studies in economics in 1936 at the University of Poznań, he joined the faculty as a teaching assistant. At the start of World War II, he left academe to fight in the Polish Army. He was taken prisoner by the Germans, but managed to escape and return to Warsaw. He quickly joined the Polish Resistance and became the main organizer of Action N, a top-secret psychological warfare unit targeting German officers with propaganda materials. It was about this time that he took the nom de guerre Jan Nowak, which he later added to his own. In 1942, he undertook daring and grueling courier missions for the underground between Warsaw and Stockholm. The following year, he became an emissary between the commanders in Poland and the Polish government-in-exile and Allies in London, "the Courier from Warsaw." In July 1944, he returned to Warsaw only a few days before the Warsaw Uprising began, and took an active part in the fight against the Nazis. He also organized daily radio broadcasts to maintain contact with the Allied countries. He married his wife Greta, also a courier for the Resistance. Shortly before the fall of the city, he was ordered by the Home Army's commander-in-chief Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski to leave and make his way to London. He managed to escape, and brought with him a large number of intelligence documents and photos. For his bravery, he received the Virtuti Militari, the highest Polish military medal. After the war, Nowak-Jeziorański stayed in the West, working in London and then in Munich and Washington, DC. He was one of the most notable personalities of the Polish Section of the BBC. In 1952, he also became head of the Polish Service of Radio Free Europe, a position he held for 25 years during the Cold War. Afterwards, he became national director of the Polish American Congress and an advisor to the U.S. National Security Agency during the Carter Administration. In the 1990s, he returned to Poland and worked as a television writer/presenter. Many of his books, published abroad and in Poland after 1989, were bestsellers, and he won prestigious Polish literary awards, including the Kisiel Award (1999) and Ksawery Pruszyński Memorial Prize of the Polish PEN Club (2001). In 1996, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton for his work to promote democracy around the world. Nowak's memoir, Courier from Warsaw, was published in 1982 with a foreword by Zbigniew Brzezinski.