Zofia Korbońska was a remarkable Polish-American woman who fought against two of the 20th century’s deadliest totalitarian ideologies. She was a World War II anti-Nazi resistance hero in Poland, and later, she was my colleague for many years in the Polish Service of the Voice of America in Washington, D.C.
Her husband, Stefan Korboński, was a Polish political leader and a hero of the wartime struggle against fascism and Soviet communism. In 1980, he received the Righteous Among the Nations medal from the Yad Vashem Institute in Israel for saving Jews during the German occupation of Poland. Throughout their long life together, Zofia was constantly at his side doing the same work in defense of freedom and human rights.
This month has a special meaning in Poland’s history. In August 1920, Polish soldiers and volunteers stopped the advance of the Red Army in central Poland in the Miracle on the Vistula. At the end of August 1939, German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and Soviet communist dictator Joseph Stalin reached their agreement to attack and divide Poland. World War II began when Nazi Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. Soviet Russia attacked Poland on Sept. 17.
On Aug. 1, 1944, the Warsaw Uprising began. It lasted 63 days but ended in defeating the Polish underground army because Stalin wanted to see anti-communist Poles in Warsaw killed by the Germans. He refused to assist the Warsaw Uprising.
During much of the World War II German occupation of Poland, Zofia Korbońska was in charge of coding secret radio transmissions to London, where the free Polish government-in-exile was based. Her messages included information about the Jewish Holocaust and the medical experiments on women by Nazi doctors in German concentration camps. In her life of exile after the war, she continued her radio work as a VOA broadcaster starting in 1948 — first in New York City and later in Washington, D.C.
After more than three decades of her radio career with VOA, on Aug. 31, 1980, the independent Solidarity trade union, led by Lech Wałęsa and supported by Pope John Paul II and millions of Poles, signed the Gdańsk Agreement with the communist regime. The communists did not intend to keep their promises forced upon them by the striking Polish workers. A year later, they introduced martial law to crush the pro-democracy movement.
Zofia Korbońka and my other colleagues at the Voice of America documented Solidarity’s struggle for freedom and democracy. Then, in June 1989, Poland held its first partially democratic elections since pre-World War II. The nightmare of communism and Soviet domination finally ended, partially thanks to Korbońka’s VOA broadcasting work.
Zofia Korbońka’s life shows that freedom is precious, and it can be easily lost. When Poland did not become free after World War II, it was mainly because of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Red Army, and a small group of Polish communists armed and supported by Moscow. But Poland’s freedom was also lost because President Franklin D. Roosevelt caved to Stalin’s demands at the wartime conferences in Tehran and Yalta. FDR was deceived by Soviet propaganda and his own U.S. government propagandists, some of whom had worked at the Voice of America.
One Polish journalist who listened to radio broadcasts during the Warsaw Uprising described how VOA ignored the struggle by the democratic anti-fascist Poles, who were also opposed to communism, and Russia’s control over Poland as wartime VOA repeated Soviet propaganda.
“With genuine horror, we listened to what the Polish language programs of the Voice of America (or whatever name they had then), in which in line with what [the Soviet news agency] TASS was communicating, the [1944] Warsaw Uprising was being completely ignored,” said Czesław Straszewicz, a Polish journalist in the West, in 1953.
It was not an uncommon observation. Members of Congress from both parties issued warnings during the war that the Voice of America had become the voice of Stalin. Stanisław Mikołajczyk, the Polish prime minister of the government-in-exile, complained to U.S. State Department officials that VOA wartime broadcasts to Poland “might well have emanated from Moscow itself.”
One pro-Soviet agitator employed during that time by VOA was Stefan Arski, who was initially a socialist but joined the Communist Party in Poland after the war left the U.S. and produced some of the most virulent anti-U.S. propaganda. His work in post-war Poland included attacks on Voice of America journalists, such as Zofia Korbońska and other members of the anti-Nazi, anti-communist Home Army hired by VOA after the war. Some of the first VOA English wartime news reports, translated into other languages, were written by Arski’s communist friend Howard Fast, a future Communist Party USA activist and the 1953 recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize.
Zofia Korbońska joined VOA shortly after Arski resigned under pressure during the Truman administration. Several other Warsaw Uprising veterans also worked for VOA and many more for Radio Free Europe, which, unlike VOA, had an untarnished record of defending freedom.
In Poland, Arski often described these anti-Nazi resistance fighters as fascists and Nazi sympathizers. It was a patently false and vile accusation, but the communist authorities imprisoned, brutally tortured, and murdered thousands of former Polish fighters who risked their lives to defeat Hitler. Korbońska and her husband might have shared their fate, but they managed to escape from Poland in 1947 and became refugees in the U.S.
The contributions of anti-communist Voice of America refugee journalists were never fully acknowledged by the VOA management. VOA’s Cold War immigrant broadcasters are now increasingly ignored and forgotten as fascination in Marxist concepts of group hatred, encouraged by President Vladimir Putin’s Russian social media manipulators and their helpers, is on the rise in America.
Russian propagandists again take advantage of Americans’ limited knowledge of foreign affairs, as they did during and after World War II. In 1946, Mira Złotowska Michałowska, VOA Polish Service friend of Howard Fast and Stefan Arski, tried to convince Americans in an article in Harper’s magazine the Stalinists were fully dedicated to the observance of the rule of law.
Such deceptive propaganda is on the rise. If one looks at the Voice of America program content during the last decade, one can find examples of glorification of communists: Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Angela Davis. Under the watch of the recent and current leadership of the VOA and the U.S. Agency for Global Media, these communists often get more uninterrupted airtime than today’s heroes of democracy in Cuba and China.
Zofia Korbońska’s life exemplifies how defending freedom takes courage and sacrifice. When she died in Washington, D.C., in 2010, I wrote an obituary in the Washington Times. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, delivered a eulogy at her funeral in which he stated, “Zofia Korbońska — heroically brave in battle, prudent in political exile — was an example of what a dedicated and successful service in a great cause entails.”
In 2020, USAGM issued a press release about Korbońska during Michael Pack’s brief tenure as USAGM CEO.
Zofia Korbońska’s life was a constant struggle against falsifiers of truth and history. A proper tribute to this heroic refugee journalist would be a bipartisan effort from the U.S. to reform the Voice of America and bring back its noble mission of defending the truth and basic human rights from assaults by all types of totalitarian ideologues promoting hatred, censorship, and exclusion. President Joe Biden should follow the example of President Harry Truman, who launched the “Campaign of Truth” and quietly replaced some of the bureaucracy in charge of VOA in the early 1950s.
Instead of mourning Castro’s passing and showing long videos of demonstrators burning Israeli and U.S. flags, the Voice of America should present more videos of anti-regime protests in Cuba and Iran. It should use more voices of Cuban Americans, Chinese Americans, Iranian Americans, Ethiopian Americans, and leaders of other immigrant communities opposed to dictatorial and authoritarian regimes. I have no doubt Zofia Korbońska would agree that the Voice of America, which we had served during the Cold War, has lost its way.
Ted Lipien is a journalist, writer, and media freedom advocate. He was Voice of America’s Polish service chief during Poland’s struggle for democracy and VOA’s acting associate director. He also served briefly in 2020-2021 as RFE/RL’s president.
