She and her husband, members of the Polish resistance, operated in Warsaw throughout the Nazi occupation.
Under Nazi occupation, Poles were forbidden to own or listen to radios. German trucks equipped with antennas patrolled Warsaw, trying to detect radio signals.
“We had 12 radio transmitters,” Mrs. Korbonski told The Washington Post in 1993. “We transmitted from different places throughout the war. And also I was in charge of organizing the watchers – mostly women – to guard these radio stations from the outside.”
At constant risk of arrest, Mrs. Korbonski sent clandestine reports to London, describing events in Warsaw and throughout Poland. Many of her dispatches made their way back as Polish-language broadcasts from the BBC and from an underground radio station known as “Swit,” the Polish word for “dawn.”
In addition to the radio transmissions, Mrs. Korbonski trained lookouts to spot German spies, who were often disguised as priests, postal carriers or utility workers.
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She and her husband had a wide network of informants who reported on developments throughout the war. Mrs. Korbonski sent the first word to the West about Nazi medical experiments on women at the Ravensbruck concentration camp. She described German troop movements, rocket tests and the location of one of Hitler’s command posts.In 1942, she reported that the Nazis were deporting 7,000 Jews a day from the Warsaw ghetto to concentration camps. BBC officials in London found the news so shocking that they refused to believe it at first. A year later, Mrs. Korbonski provided the first reports of the valiant but doomed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in which a handful of Jewish residents fought the German army with little more than bricks, stones and raw courage.
In Warsaw, Mrs. Korbonski collected food for Jewish children – which was punishable by death at the hands of the Nazis – and 50 years later recalled giving them hot cocoa and milk.
“As long as I live, I shall never forget it,” she told The Post. “If you had seen how they drank that cocoa and how they thanked me!”
On Aug. 1, 1944, Mrs. Korbonski and her husband were part of the near-spontaneous revolt known as the Warsaw Uprising. (Sometimes called the “Warsaw Rising,” it was distinct from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943.)
For 63 days, Poles fought their occupiers for control of the streets of Warsaw, until the Germans’ overwhelming might finally crushed the rebellion. An estimated 200,000 Poles were killed during the uprising, and another 700,000 were expelled from their homes, many of them to concentration camps. Warsaw was reduced to a deserted city of smoking ruins.
Through it all, Mrs. Korbonski kept broadcasting her surreptitious radio reports, telling the world the sorrowful story of her home town.
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After Germany’s surrender, the Communist Party took control of the Polish government and sought to banish dissent. The Korbonskis had hoped that their views would be heard in postwar Poland, but instead they were arrested by the Soviet secret police in June 1945.In 1947, they escaped from the port city of Gdansk aboard a coal ship bound for Sweden. They arrived in the United States with little money, and Mrs. Korbonski soon began working for Voice of America. She and her husband came to in Washington in 1954, when Voice of America moved its headquarters from New York.
Zichrona livracha.
