People of the Revolution and the USSR

1906–1987 ○ Natural causes

A writer who joined Jewish and Catholic memory and organized public remembrance

Born Jewish and later baptized a Catholic, he called himself with the title of his best-known story: 'I am the Jew from the Wedding.'

Roman Brandstaetter was a Polish writer who composed poetry, fiction and drama in Polish and translated the Hebrew Bible and Shakespeare. Born into a Jewish family, he explored Zionism and assimilation, then converted to Catholicism in Rome while retaining Jewish tradition as a living tension in his literature. After the war he settled in Poznań, where he joined biblical imagination to historical memory in major works including the four-volume Jesus of Nazareth. In 1980 he chaired the Social Committee for Construction of the Monument to the Victims of Poznań June 1956, helping organize the workers’ uprising’s passage into public memorial form.

1914–2005 ○ Natural causes

A Polish courier who connected resistance, exile, and radio

On 29 July 1944, he told Home Army leaders that substantial Western support was impossible, but the decision to rise did not change.

Jan Nowak-Jeziorański was a courier and journalist who linked the Polish Home Army with the government-in-exile in London. Returning from London in July 1944, he warned Home Army leaders that Western support for an uprising would be limited, but he could not stop the decision to rise, and he broadcast during the Warsaw Uprising. After the war he directed the Polish Service of Radio Free Europe, making exile broadcasting a sustained instrument of political communication. He returned to Poland in 1989 and continued to advocate its integration with the West.