Jerzy Giedroyc; Emigre Kept Polish Culture Alive Through Journal

Jerzy Giedroyc, the Polish emigre editor of the journal Kultura who was widely credited with keeping his country’s culture alive during Communist rule, has died.

Colleagues at the literary magazine, which Giedroyc helped found, said he died Thursday of a heart attack in this suburb west of Paris. He was 94.

Idolized by millions of Poles, Giedroyc, as Kultura’s editor in chief, worked tirelessly from his home in France to make the banned writings of intellectuals and dissidents available in Communist Poland.

In Warsaw, Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek said Giedroyc’s death was “an irreparable loss for Poland. A man passed away who had built a monument for himself with his life and his work.”

Born in 1906 in a part of eastern Poland that is now in Belarus, Giedroyc came from Lithuanian ancestry. He spent his youth in Russia and spoke Russian fluently. He studied law at Warsaw University, graduating in 1930, and edited a number of journals while working for the Polish government in Warsaw and abroad. After serving in the Polish army during World War II, Giedroyc was demobilized in France.

From its offices in Paris, Kultura printed otherwise unavailable books, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” and Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon.”

But for Giedroyc, “literature wasn’t a goal in itself. It was a political instrument,” said Czeslaw Milosz, a Polish-born American who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980.

“For all his life he had strived for one goal--Poland’s independence and normalizing relations with Lithuania and Ukraine. His memorable merit is that he understood the importance of national relations among neighbors in Europe.”

Giedroyc and Kultura achieved legendary status in Poland. Writings were smuggled to Giedroyc in many “entertaining ways.”

Giedroyc recalled his surprise when a toy sheep arrived in the mail from Poland. “We unstuffed it and found a microfilm of a book inside,” he said.

Foreign embassies, traveling sports teams and even the Bolshoi theater group helped smuggle Kultura and books into the Soviet Bloc.

“When the Bolshoi theater troupe would come to Paris, someone would call and ask for books we printed in Russian. Among all their decorations and sets, they could take back absolutely everything,” he said.

After Communism collapsed in Poland in 1989, Giedroyc remained in France.

The Polish press agency PAP said his funeral will be held Thursday.