Former president of the Polish government-in-exile dies

Ryszard Kaczorowski, who has died in the Smolensk plane crash, was the last president of the Polish government-in-exile in London that for 45 years kept alive Poland’s hopes of freedom during Communist rule.

He took over the post when his predecessor died suddenly in July 1989, just when Communist hegemony was collapsing in Poland and the rest of eastern Europe, and remained in office until December 22 1990, when he handed his presidential insignia to Lech Walesa, the first freely elected president of post-Communist Poland.

A leading figure in the Polish émigré community in Britain for decades, he was, after 1990, showered with honours in Poland. For Poles, he became a symbol of the long battle against Communism that was fought not just inside Poland but around the world.

Mr Kaczorowski, who was 90, was born in the eastern Polish city of Bialystok, where he studied commerce and became a scout leader shortly before the outbreak of world war two. Under the terms of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact which divided eastern Europe, Bialystok fell into the Soviet occupation zone. The Soviet authorities abolished Polish scouting but Mr Kaczorowski quickly set to work organising an underground movement. In 1940, he was arrested and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to 10 years imprisonment and Mr Kaczorowski was sent to the Kolyma gulag camp in Siberia.

Following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin agreed an amnesty for his Polish prisoners under the terms of his hastily-formed new alliance with the western powers. Mr Kaczorowski joined about 120,000 Poles who managed to make their way to the shores of the Caspian Sea and allowed to leave the Soviet Union by ship to Iran.

Mr Kaczorowski enlisted in a newly created Polish army that later participated in the invasion of Italy and fought its bloodiest battle against German troops at the monastery of Monte Cassino. After the war, Mr Kaczorowski settled in the UK, where he became an accountant. But his passion for scouting and for Poland was undimmed – and he became chief scout of the Polish émigré scouting movement and later its president.

Despite his advancing years, Mr Kaczorowski remained active in Polish public life, both in Poland and in the émigré community in Britain. In 2004, he was made an Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George by the Queen for “his exceptional contribution to the community of Polish emigres and their descendants living in the UK.” Mr Kaczorowski leaves a widow, two daughters and five grandchildren.