By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Andrzej Pomian, 97, a correspondent with Radio Free Europe who served in the Polish underground during World War II, died after a heart attack April 18 at Sibley Memorial Hospital. He was a Washington resident since 1956.
Mr. Pomian, a Warsaw University-trained lawyer who had worked in the municipal solicitor general's office, continued to practice law and lecture at his alma mater after the German occupation of Poland in the 1940s. But by night, he was also a member of the underground Polish Home Army, teaching at its clandestine university and spreading propaganda.
He was sent to London in April 1944 as an emissary to the Polish government-in-exile, just before the Polish Home Army launched what was the largest, and last, nationalist protest against Nazi occupation. The battle, known as the Warsaw Uprising, lasted 63 days and took as many as 300,000 lives.
Mr. Pomian told an audience at a 1996 Library of Congress program that his compatriots intended the uprising as "a final blow" against an enemy collapsing under pressure from the Allies. But the infamous duplicity of the Soviet Red Army -- which stayed across the Vistula River as the revolt was crushed -- ended that hope.
Remaining in London, Mr. Pomian led the government-in-exile's liaison operation with the resistance movement in Poland. In 1955, he emigrated to the United States, and the following year became the Washington correspondent for the Polish section of Radio Free Europe.
In 1974, he went to Munich on a three-year assignment. He returned to Washington in 1977 and retired; he then freelanced for radio and published articles on history, politics and literature in the Polish Daily in London and the Polish Daily News in New York.
He was born Bohdan Salacinski on Jan. 2, 1911, in Czarny Ostrów, which is now part of Ukraine. After the Polish-Russian war in 1920, his family evacuated to Poland, where Mr. Pomian was educated and began working.
He wrote or co-wrote seven books, including "Warsaw Rising" (1946), "Stalin and the Poles" (1949), "Polish Armed Forces in World War Two -- the Home Army" (1950) and "Poland Defends Her Independence 1918-1945" (1990).
In 2000, he was awarded the Commander's Cross with Star by the president of Poland. He also received the 2000 Joseph Conrad literary award of the Jozef Pilsudski Institute of New York and the 1991 Warsaw University Medal.
Survivors include his wife, Zofia Henryka Kula Pomian of Washington; a son, Andrzej Bohdan Pomian of London; two grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.