Spasowski, Ambassador Romuald, House

The house at 3101 Albemarle Street NW in Washington, D.C. served as the official residence of Poland's ambassador to the United States. Romuald Spasowski lived here with his wife, Wanda, during his second term as ambassador. In December 1981, after communist authorities imposed martial law in Poland, he asked the United States for political asylum and left the house with his family under police and FBI guard.

The ambassador

Spasowski was born in Warsaw in 1920. His father was a respected Polish writer and intellectual, and the son was active in the communist party in his youth. After World War II he went into diplomacy for the People's Republic of Poland, the Soviet satellite state set up in 1946. He served two terms as ambassador in Washington, the first from 1955 to 1961 and the second from 1978 until his defection in 1981.

Not long after he returned for the second term, he concluded that his own embassy was, in his words, "a Security espionage unit" of the KGB. Wanda, like her husband, found the surveillance suffocating. Earlier ambassadors had been required to use a cramped apartment in the suburbs, and the couple pressed the Polish government for a proper official residence. The government agreed to buy the historic house on Albemarle Street.

Strikes, Solidarity and martial law

By 1980 Poles lived in poverty while the communist party elite kept their privileges, and the contrast kept growing. That August workers walked out at mines and Baltic coast shipyards, with the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk the most prominent. Lech Walesa, an electrician from the free trade union movement who spoke for the strikers, reached a deal with the party on August 31. The Gdansk Accords gave workers independent unions and the right to strike without reprisals, along with freedom of expression, raises, better working conditions, Saturdays off and Sunday Mass broadcast over loudspeakers. Delegates from thirty regional strike committees met in mid-September and formed one union for the whole country, the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union. It became known as Solidarity.

All through the crisis, the possibility of a Soviet-led military intervention hung over relations between Poland and the Soviet Union and within the Eastern Bloc, and it led in the end to martial law. In October 1981 the party chose General Jaruzelski as first secretary. He extended military service for conscripts and spread military operational groups across the country, then declared martial law on December 13, 1981. That ended sixteen months of openness known as the Polish Crisis.

A refuge on Albemarle Street

Spasowski's loyalty to communism was already weakening when he came back to Washington in 1978. The untimely death of his son, an anti-communist, turned him toward the Polish Catholic Church. In 1980 he and Wanda went to Rome to meet the pope, a trip that risked more Soviet suspicion. There he said that he had been a communist and had come to realize, at sixty, how badly mistaken he was.

The house became the couple's refuge as his loyalties moved. He ran his efforts to get material aid to Polish workers from here, which strained his relations with the Soviet Embassy and made him more of a suspect. Ambassadors from western European countries met him secretly at the residence to talk about Solidarity and how to help the Polish people. Nobody from the embassy was let inside, so Wanda Spasowski took on a large role.

December 1981

On December 19, 1981, Spasowski said openly that he would do everything he could to help the Polish people "in their hour of need," and that he had asked the U.S. government to give him and his family shelter and political asylum. He believed his life was in danger. Asylum was granted right away.

After he asked for asylum, friends helped the family pack the residence over several hours. Guards came while they worked, District police first and then a large force of FBI agents, and stayed until the family could be escorted to a safe house. It was close to eight in the evening by the time they had packed what was theirs. By the evening of December 20 he was on camera condemning the Jaruzelski government for martial law and for arresting Solidarity leader Lech Walesa.

Candles in the windows

Spasowski met President Ronald Reagan on December 22 and asked him to call on Americans to set a lighted candle in their windows at Christmas to show support for Solidarity. Reagan's Christmas address the next day cited that request and urged Americans to do it.

The appeal grew into an American diplomatic campaign, Light a Candle for the People of Poland, which ended in a film, Let Poland Be Poland. The U.S. International Communications Agency made it in 1982, working with the State Department. Spasowski appeared alongside Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra and other celebrities, as did Reagan, Britain's prime minister Margaret Thatcher and the heads of West Germany, Belgium, Norway and Denmark. Its television and radio audience added up to nearly 350 million people.

For the Reagan administration the defection was a public relations win, arriving while the U.S. government was still working out its answer to the Solidarity crisis and martial law.

After the defection

Spasowski went on to advise Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush on U.S.-Polish relations. A death sentence passed against him in absentia after his defection was lifted in 1989, when Poland's communist regime was overthrown. President Lech Walesa restored his Polish citizenship in 1993. Spasowski died at his home in Oakton, Virginia, in 1995.