In the second week of martial law, news circulated in the communist Poland that two ambassadors had asked for political asylum in the USA. For many, this was comforting and encouraging, as it meant that even the most faithful of the faithful were cracking. But when time brought no further displays of insubordination by the clerical apparatus and refusals to obey orders in the military, public interest in diplomats subsided. On the international stage, however, it meant something.

The asylums were Romuald Spasowski, ambassador to the USA, and Zdzislaw Rurarz, ambassador to Japan. Attention was focused more on the former, because Tokyo was not Washington. And in the Cold War, the US was the main enemy of the socialist camp. Although both diplomats asked for asylum in the US, it was Spasowski who was on post there, in the very gut of the enemy of the peace camp.

Hand in hand with Reagan

Two options clashed in the State Department: to help Solidarity in Poland as much as possible and to help, but not to irritate the USSR too much - a necessary factor in the balance of power in a divided world. Spasowski's decision gave propaganda support to adherents of the former and to President Ronald Reagan himself, which was reflected in the media. Spasowski was on the spot and at a press conference said: "I cannot continue to represent the power responsible for acts of brutality and violence."

On 19 December 1981, the former ambassador asked for asylum, and two days later the diplomat and his wife were received in the Oval Office by President Ronald Reagan in the presence of the vice-president and his closest advisers. Reagan was to ask his guest what he thought he should do for Poland. Spasowski advised against any economic aid to the country, opting instead for humanitarian help and asked for a candle-lighting action at the White House on Christmas Eve, 24 December, as a sign of solidarity with Solidarity.

In his Christmas Address, Reagan appealed to Americans to light candles and declared 30 January 1982 as the International Day of Solidarity with Poland. A photo of the president escorting visitors to his car circulated the world. It was raining, Reagan held an umbrella over them, caringly embracing Mrs Spasowska. Spasowski was holding the President's hand. Such a farewell to guests by an American head of state had never happened before or since.

An American government agency promptly financed the television programme 'Let Poland be Poland', where, in addition to President Reagan, other Western leaders, pop culture and cultural stars such as Czesław Miłosz spoke in support of a free Poland. The programme was watched by 185 million viewers worldwide. It was broadcast on 31 January 1982, and on Solidarity Day (30 January) there were demonstrations in solidarity with the enslaved Polish people in many Western capitals. Never had Poland been so popular.

Perhaps the impetus for this propaganda strike against the socialist camp and the USSR itself, which was suspected of inspiring martial law in Poland, was the act of Romuald Sapasowski; incidentally, both asylum seekers were an important element in the US information offensive against the Soviet subordinate camp. They also both appeared on the programme "Let Poland be Poland", because in the meantime Zdzislaw Rurarz had arrived in the USA from Tokyo.

The immediate impetus for Rurarz's conduct was probably Spasowski. The ambassador in Tokyo did the same thing four days later at the local American embassy. There are testimonies explaining the delay by the fact that the Ambassador's beloved dog was just passing away at the time and Mr and Mrs Rurarz did not want to leave their pet in the last days of his life. The fact that Zdzisław Rurarz travelled to the dog's 'funeral' in a official car decorated with the national flag seems to confirm the importance of this event in the life of the Rurarz family.

Zdzislaw Rurarz, his wife and daughter were immediately granted asylum by the US ambassador to Japan.

From mansion to safe house

Besides, the circumstances under which the two ambassadors were granted asylum are worthy of thrillers.

There were two hierarchies in communist embassies, the official one and the other, created by the civilian and military secret services. Malicious anti-communists say - but this cannot be true - that a driver, for example, could be more important than the ambassador, in this second, more important hierarchy.

Ambassador Rurarz's wife left her residence, which was located on the embassy grounds, alone on 'asylum' day, announcing that she was going to the hairdresser's. A little later, the ambassador loaded his suitcases into the car, did not use the driver and drove with his daughter 'to the laundry'. At the agreed location, his wife got into the car and they all drove together to the US embassy in Tokyo.

The ambassador's residence in Washington was located a few kilometres from the embassy, which made things easier. Following Romuald Spasowski's phone call to the Deputy Secretary of State requesting asylum, the residence was discreetly surrounded by the FBI. The ambassador's driver returning from the city was held at the side of the road. No one from the staff went in or out of the building, while employees serving double duty were in the embassy. After packing up, the Spasowskis left the residence under protection.

In both cases, the asylum seekers' next destination was a so-called safe house at the disposal of the relevant US services. From the safe house in Tokyo, the Rurarzs travelled the next day on a scheduled flight to the USA. From the Spasowskis' safe house in Washington, D.C., they were moved to an also secret permanent home, and so were the Rurarzas after they landed in the USA.

Very quickly in the People's Republic of Poland, both were given the death penalty, loss of citizenship, public rights and property in their entirety. Interestingly, the reborn Polish Republic changed Rurarz and Spasowski's death sentences to 25 years in prison in 1990. The sobering up - not without the participation of American diplomacy - came after a few months and the sentences were cancelled for the convicts. The property of both was not recovered and they did not return to Poland.

A principled communist

Romuald Spasowski is said to have supported Solidarity, his daughter joined the union, and his wife, an openly practising Catholic, believes that the first impetus for her husband's departure from communism was their church wedding - Romuald was nominally an evangelical, practically an atheist - in 1944. The next significant moment was to be a private audience with John Paul II in 1980. The process was thus a long one, but better late than never, one might say. Those who have read Spasowski's recently published book of memoirs say - and you have to believe them, because the book is 728 pages long - that the author has been suggesting his doubts about the system almost ever since.

The facts, on the other hand, are as follows: after Warsaw was occupied by the Red Army, 25-year-old Romuald Spasowski entered the School for Political Officers. He is then in the Polish Military Mission in West Berlin, i.e. he became an intelligence officer with the task of tracking the occupying British Army of the Rhine. Within a dozen months he was promoted from second lieutenant to major. Shortly afterwards, he went into the reserves and began a career in diplomacy. The question arises, is it possible to be a former intelligence officer?

After gaining diplomatic practice at the communist embassies in London and Germany, he became a diplomatic envoy in Buenos Aires, ambassador to the United States from 1955-61, ambassador to India from 1967-70, director and then undersecretary of state at the Foreign Ministry from 1972-78 and again ambassador to the United States from 1978 until the end of 1981.

Reporting on the American Polish community's opinion of Spasowski, Jan Nowak-Jeziorański described him as an exceptionally zealous, principled and hardline communist. Nowak's opinion comes from a sentimentally psychologising and apologetic film by Wincenty Ronisz. In the same film, however, Nowak-Jezioranski states: "I believe in honest conversions".

The aforementioned film tells a lot about Romuald Spasowski's childhood and the influence of his father, also a communist, to which he was subjected almost all his life.

SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE Wladyslaw Spasowski was a Marxist-Leninist and a fanatical admirer of the Soviet Union. During the occupation, the elder Mr Spasowski did not live to receive a Soviet visa from the embassy in Berlin. Had it arrived, he was told at the Gestapo, the Spasowskis, father and son, would have been released from the General Government. Instead of a visa, the Third Reich's aggression against the USSR came, and so Władysław Spasowski committed suicide. In a letter, he commanded his son to be faithful to his ideals. The son swore an oath; he survived the occupation in his mother's house (his parents were divorced) in Milanowek, learning foreign languages. The arrival of the Red Army brought the possibility, and the necessity, to follow in Władysław's footsteps - not everyone has a father who has a street in Warsaw (1952-1992).

Following in the footsteps of 'Career and Conscience', it can be assumed that the Spasowskis were the type of believers. Wladyslaw and Romuald believed in Marxism-Leninism, while Romuald's son and Wladyslaw's grandson, Wladyslaw Kajetan equally fervently disbelieved in Marxism. At the age of 19, he committed suicide in New Delhi, at his father's residence, because he very much did not want to return to Communist Poland. This is in the film and this is what Dr Patryk Pleskot believes in the video on the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) website. Romuald Spasowski lived in the shadow of two suicides of his closest relatives after his return to the country and later in the USA.

The Communist TV News (DTV) made a predictable statement about Spasowski's abandonment of his post. "For his own selfish, petty interests, although he owes so much to his homeland", he was to vilify the People's Republic of Poland, meeting the expectations of his principals "for Judas silver". A surprising turn of phrase for DTV, by the way. There was also the fact that headquarters refused to extend the mission because Spasowski's work was getting worse and worse, supposedly due to "depression caused by personal experiences". That is, the end of his career, and here America and dollars. As simple as that.

Not so much. Jozef Czyrek, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, recounts in the aforementioned film that in mid-1981 he had announced to Spasowski that he would complete his mission in the spring of 1982, but that as soon as the seat of any deputy minister became vacant because that one was going to an outpost, he would immediately appoint Spasowski to the vacant position.

Even assuming that Czyrek was sweetening Spasowski's definitive departure from the ministry with empty promises, what was so terrible about it? The communist state of martial and post-war Poland was not a nice place to live, but - as the notorious spokesman Jerzy Urban said - "the government will feed itself". Spasowski would have been in that group, maybe he would have put up a dacha in some elite area in the Masuria and written his memoirs. There was not so much to fear.

Meanwhile, the asylum-seeker is a psychologically uncomfortable position in many respects, and after receiving a death sentence - which Spasowski was not surprised by - also dangerous. This makes it additionally inconvenient in life, having to change clothes, forgetting one's own name, etc.

Knowing the world, Spasowski certainly wasn't counting on a villa with a swimming pool in sunny California. There was some 'silver', but the flat - as his American friends report - was filled with second-hand stuff. He lived modestly, mainly on an advance from a publishing house for his book "The liberation of one", which was supposed to be a reckoning with his father's pre-war work "The Liberation of Man". There were some incomes for lectures and readings.

The book 'The liberation of one' did not sell well. It was fashionable in opinion-forming circles to be "anti-anti-Communist", as Leopold Tyrmand had written about his writing situation a decade earlier. The New York Times raked the book over the top; at promotional meetings there were even questions routine in the USA towards Poles, suggesting anti-Semitism. In material terms, asylum in the USA for Spasowski was not the best deal.

In the more balanced 2009 film 'Ambasador Spasowski' by Tadeusz Śmiarowski, Stanisław Głąbiński, long-time Polish Press Agency (PAP) correspondent in Washington and New York, describes Spasowski's choice bluntly: "idiocy", and "he has crossed out his entire life so far with this".

For the former comrades it must have looked like this. Among the anti-system opposition, Romuald Spasowski and Zdzislaw Rurarz could not inspire confidence. Spasowski's greatest support came from Jan Nowak-Jeziorański, who "believed in honest conversions", through an interview for the Radio Free Europe (RWE).

Energetic and pragmatic activist

If Romuald Spasowski was a believer, then Zdzisław Rurarz, according to Patryk Pleskot, was pragmatic. He simply believed that there would be no other Poland after the war and one had to try to do something good under the conditions as they were. He must have wanted to do something very quickly for Poland, that is, for himself, that is, for Poland - who would have known - because at the age of 16, just after the war, he joined the Polish Workers' Party; he was already in the Communist Youth as a 15-year-old. He was an "energetic activist", as Pleskot says.

An energetic minor in the adult party in Końskie took off and made a career at Spasowski's pace. Also associated with the military services, and overtly not with 'pure' diplomacy, but with the Ministry of Foreign Trade. He graduated from the School of Foreign Service and the School of Planning and Statistics (SGPiS), where he obtained his doctorate and habilitation in economics. In between numerous postings, he was a lecturer at the SGPiS, and crowned his academic career with the title of Associate Professor.

He partied with Spasowski in Washington, D.C., where he worked in the Office of the Economic Counsellor at the Polish People's Republic embassy in the 1960s. He was a recurring representative of the People's Republic of Poland at UN missions in Geneva, at home, among others, economic adviser to Edward Gierek, and ambassador to Tokyo, also accredited in Manila, for only ten months in 1981.

Zdzislaw Rurarz received less attention than Romuald Spasowski, but his open letter to General Jaruzelski was found there after he left the post:

"Mr. General, by giving the order to use the Polish Army against the Polish nation, you have secured your place in our bloody history as a torturer of that nation. Even worse, because not only as a torturer, but also as a cynic and a liar, and even a comedian who dares to tarnish the words of our national anthem when declaring martial law! You acted, General, not in the name of defending the interests of our nation, but in the name of defending the interests of Soviet imperialism. As a Polish soldier, you raised your hand, General, not against foreign aggressors, against whom it is your sacred duty to defend the Fatherland, but against your own nation! (...) Are you, General, so naive that you do not realise who you are serving? Or are you, General, a mere coward who finds it easier to murder defenceless miners than to fight against foreign aggression?"

The rebellious ambassador ended the letter like this:

"Even after you declared martial law, I wanted to believe that you were looking for a pretext to put our troops on combat alert and regroup them in such a way as to resist foreign intervention as effectively as possible. It is true that logic and knowledge of our realities told me otherwise, but I really did not suspect you, General, of having the soul of a traitor and the mentality of a murderer (...). If you really had the honour of a soldier, you would kneel in front of the Monument of the Unknown Soldier and shoot yourself in the head! Maybe then the nation would forgive you for the crimes you committed".

A communist all his life, and here suddenly such things with Boziewicz's 'Code' in hand. The pathos-laden letter, however, was hardly ever seen.

Between non-conformism and opportunism

The mystery of the two PRL ambassadors' request for asylum in the USA probably lies somewhere between non-conformism and opportunism, at least in the opinion of those who have thought about it. Human acts not infrequently have complex motivations, and this was probably the case with these two men.

The impetus for requesting asylum was the imposition of martial law in Poland. Spasowski, according to testimony, was supposedly shaken by the massacre at the 'Wujek' mine. But both did not blink an eye at the bigger massacres - Poznan 1956 or December 1970 on the Coast. Why now?

The reason may be the hope given by Solidarity, destroyed precisely by martial law. Before that, there was no alternative in communist Poland.

So much for the spiritual sphere, because materially Zdzislaw Rurarz also made a living from publishing. He wrote more articles than Spasowski, whose time was taken up by books. Zdzisław Rurarz knew nothing that he was to be recalled. He might have been hypothetically afraid of being dismissed because he had rubbed shoulders with Gierek, although he had already been appointed during the "renewal" era. Spasowski perhaps 'owed' his certain dismissal to Gierek. It was at the request of the First Secretary that he became Ambassador to the USA again, a thing not practised. If Zdzisław Rurarz had nevertheless become a victim of Jaruzelski's renewal, he would somehow have kept his nice villa with two garages and Mercedes in the country. He had his milieu at the university, connections, opportunities.

Romuald Spasowski has apologists among those associated with the US administration, and the film 'Career and Conscience' proves that in Poland too. Zdzisław Rurarz only in the US. The former US ambassador to Warsaw, Victor Ashe, stated: "Ambassador Rurarz was a man of steadfast principles who made the difficult decision to stand firm for his beliefs at a difficult time for Poland, and will be remembered for his courage."

Both cases can't be explained by the joke that every Polish man of the 1980s dreams of "jumping over the counter of Pewex (a shop selling foreign goods) and asking for political asylum".

Romuald Spasowski was baptised in 1986 and died of cancer in 1995. Zdzislaw Rurarz also died of cancer in 2007.

The right occasion to write about Rurarz and Spasowski is around 13 December, on the anniversaries of martial law, but then one writes about real heroes. To be a real hero that works on the imagination, you have to do something important in the right place and at the right time. Both of them fulfilled these conditions in part because the most important thing was happening in Poland at the time, and then there were their biographies....

– Krzysztof Zwoliński

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists

– Translated by Tomasz Krzyżanowski