Article: Defected ex-ambassador says new life is Poles apart

`I am not afraid to die," declared the Pole, who has lived under a death sentence for four years.

Romuald Spasowski, twice Poland's ambassador to the United States, defected on the day in 1981 that Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law against Solidarity. Eight months later Poland sentenced Spasowski in absentia to the maximum penalty.

Now Spasowski, his wife, Wanda, and their daughter, Misia, live cautiously somewhere "in the Washington area." Having escaped the Iron Curtain, however, Spasowski is not about to spend the rest of his life under siege. He was in Chicago - prudently traveling under an assumed name - to publicize his autobiography, The Liberation of One (Harcourt ...

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