In the anxious months after Poland’s Communist government declared martial law in December 1981, leaders of Solidarity, the workers’ movement that the government was seeking to silence, were forced into hiding. Even as they eluded arrest, they did not want to lose contact with the movement’s millions of supporters across the country.
Zbigniew Romaszewski could have observed these events from a safe distance. He was a physicist, not a laborer. But he had already spent years putting himself at risk fighting Communism at the ground level. He played an early role in a seminal workers’ rights group founded in the 1970s, known as KOR (the name was a Polish acronym for the Workers’ Defense Committee), which helped establish the Solidarity movement.
In 1979, he represented KOR in meetings in Moscow with the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, a year before Sakharov was forced into exile. In 1979 and 1980, he helped start the Polish branch of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights and wrote a widely disseminated report critical of the Communist government.
In the spring of 1982, even as Mr. Romaszewski was in hiding himself, he made yet another defiant decision. With his wife, Zofia, he started Radio Solidarity, a secret station that was sometimes on the air for just a few minutes at a time over several weeks. For each broadcast, he helped haul transmitters from car trunks up to the open air of Warsaw rooftops.
Radio Solidarity became a clandestine town square, sharing news of the movement and messages from leaders who were in hiding. It was fleeting and it was dangerous, but it sent an essential signal: The cause was alive.
“Solidarity is not only a name; it is also a value,” Mr. Romaszewski said over the air on April 30, 1982. “The authorities who try to cheat and destroy the unity of our nation should remember those imprisoned. Before talking about an accord, we must talk about captives. Any other accord would be a capitulation, and any other accord would be destroying Solidarity.”
Moments after he made those comments, the broadcast ended abruptly. The station made several more broadcasts before Mr. Romaszewski was arrested that August. His wife was arrested, too.
Mr. Romaszewski was 74 when he died Feb. 13 in Warsaw, his death scarcely reported outside Poland. He was among the most widely respected human rights leaders in Eastern Europe, an activist who saw that the working class and the more educated and affluent had to form an alliance.
“He definitely was someone who put himself in danger, who didn’t just sit back and watch things and hope,” said Mark Kramer, the director of Cold War studies at Harvard University.
In 1989, in national elections that ousted the Communist government, Mr. Romaszewski easily won a Senate seat and went on to play a direct role in governing Poland, serving six terms over 22 years, longer than anyone else elected to office in Poland since 1989.
“What you need — it may be unfortunate, but it is what you need — is to have patience,” he said in an interview for an oral history created by the George W. Bush Presidential Center. “Because societal processes take an extremely long time.”
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Mr. Romaszewski was born on Jan. 2, 1940, in Warsaw, only months after Germany invaded and occupied Poland. His father, Jozef, who sympathized with the Polish resistance, was killed in a concentration camp in Sachsenhausen, Germany. Mr. Romaszewski and his mother, Zofia, spent time at the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where his grandmother was killed. He later worked in a labor camp. After the war, he was raised by his mother and an aunt and grew up hearing about mass executions and arrests.
He met his future wife, Zofia, when they were both teenagers studying physics at the University of Warsaw. Her parents and grandparents had been active in the Polish Home Army, underground resisters of Nazi occupation.
Mr. Romaszewski received his undergraduate degree in 1964. He earned a doctorate from the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1980.
In between those degrees, Mr. Romaszewski and his wife became active in the growing workers’ movement that led to Solidarity. In the summer of 1976, thousands of Polish workers were arrested, fired or punished after striking to protest government policies. KOR was formed to provide legal, financial and other assistance to the protesters. The Romaszewskis formed a group within KOR, the Intervention Bureau, that offered broader education about human rights and legal assistance.
After Solidarity rose to prominence in 1980 through a shipyard strike in Gdansk, Mr. Romaszewski became one of the few intellectuals elected to Solidarity’s governing body, the National Commission.
Irena Lasota, a longtime family friend who, with Eric Chenoweth, runs the Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe, based in Washington, said Mr. Romaszewski had been hospitalized for a brief illness before his death. His survivors include his wife and their daughter, Agnieszka, an activist who runs Belsat, a Polish-funded television station that broadcasts as an alternative to censored state-run television in Belarus.
Zofia and Zbigniew Romaszewski were both sentenced to prison in 1983 for “broadcasting false information” through Radio Solidarnosc. Zofia was released in 1984, Zbigniew in 1985.
In the oral history, Mr. Romaszewski recalled first meeting his wife in college.
“We met at an event which was organized by the first free — well, almost free — newspaper, called Po Prostu,” he said. “It organized a youth conference, which they called a ‘revolutionary youth congress.’ Oh, we were revolutionary youth, all right — both my wife and myself.”
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