The underground and the verdict
He was born on 24 October 1931 in Kamień Duży, in the Radom region. In 1945, as a secondary-school pupil, he joined the anti-communist underground.
He was most probably arrested in 1950. On 19 April 1951 the District Military Court in Kielce, sitting in Radom, sentenced him to ten years in prison for keeping weapons and for membership of a clandestine organisation in which he was deputy commander. He was nineteen.
Rawicz
He served his sentence in Rawicz prison. In February 1955 he was conditionally released under an amnesty. His memoir of the prison years is the book W lochach socjalizmu.
Lawyer
After his release he completed a law degree (1962) and worked as a legal adviser. In 1976–1984 and 1986–1987 he sat on the board of the Catholic Intelligentsia Club in Warsaw.
The democratic opposition
From 1976 he gave legal aid to workers persecuted after the protests in Radom and Ursus, working with the Intervention Bureau of the Workers' Defence Committee (KSS „KOR”).
On 25 March 1977 he was one of the 18 signatories of the appeal that launched the Movement for the Defence of Human and Civic Rights (ROPCiO). The communist Security Service (SB) had been watching him since 1974, under the code names „Józef” and „Gospodarz”; according to Poland's Institute of National Remembrance, it never broke him.
Martial law and the final years
On 13 December 1981 he was interned in Białołęka; he was released in July 1982. He died in Warsaw on 20 July 1987.
A year after his death, in 1988, the underground publisher Wydawnictwo „Kurs” printed his memoir W lochach socjalizmu. In 2006 he was posthumously awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta.
Sources: IPN, Przystanek Historia; Encyklopedia Solidarności; Wikipedia (Polish); IPN internee database; Monitor Polski