Not every one has the greatest respect for the writer, for the amateur writer. My dear neighbor, Pani Zofia Korbonksa, was a person who had a great kindness. She shared her books, histories of Warsaw, Poland, in the era of WWII, ones she and her husband wrote out of real personal action and experience. The things she went through, she would touch upon from time to time while we had wine and cheese late at night, only vaguely. She kept a most positive, joyous and humorous spirit.

It was a great joy to her, as she made it out to me, when I delivered a manuscript to her. "Tadzio, you are a writer," she proclaimed, and for me it was all the world, this happy, beautiful formidable person who wasn't averse to pouring me wine at such hours as 1 or 2 am. She was a most generous person to me. And somehow she conveyed a simple pleasure over reading a manuscript that made her feel fresh for reading in the midst of its creation, a brave act, just as she had done brave acts, hers against a rather large and formidable and unstoppable and cold and cruel foe.

There were four letter words in my mss, and she laughed about them as being 'very ancient words.'

I hate to say it, but it's true what she might have told me one time. Only once. She's seen people when people were blown up. She knew when THEY, the Nazis, got Joey, the kid genius radio operator, who, over the course of a year or two of our strictly amateur and off the record enjoyable sessions of wine and cheese and cold cuts, had become a person, just by the way she said his name, Joey.

It might not matter, so much, what you write, but that you write what you feel. Because at a time, the triangulating trucks were coming, homing in on a message, radio tubes humming, glowing, whatever they do, sending a message across the skies, above a captor, to back where things are free, London, the beginnings of Radio Free Europe. So she kept her generous laugh, and joy, over a message that was just about being free, and all the joys of being free, taken, as they must have been then, very very seriously.

One could not imagine a fuller life for anyone, than hers. And the stark terror of her coming of age in a Poland overrun by Nazi Germany, increased sinisterly by the arrival of Soviet iron rule and arrest--from which she and her husband escaped--left her with a long clear vision for freedom, with a dislike of party apparatchik hacks.

Perhaps, as I think, and remember, she could have, if it hadn't been for the war, began her life as a Chopinist, studing piano and university, famous, Jagellonian, in Krakow. Nazis came, shot the faculty. That was the beginning she saw to an end.

She leaves behind books, and her voice, recorded and, by many and many, remembered as a light.