Welcome to Wider Europe, RFE/RL's newsletter focusing on the key issues concerning the European Union, NATO, and other institutions and their relationships with the Western Balkans and Europe's Eastern neighborhoods.
I'm RFE/RL Europe Editor Rikard Jozwiak, and this week I'm going to talk about something a bit different: our work at RFE/RL.
The Briefing: Radio Free Europe And Me
Readers of the Wider Europe newsletter have likely noticed the uncertain times facing Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) at the moment. On March 15, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order drastically reducing the size of RFE/RL's overseer, the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM). That was followed by a letter from Kari Lake, a senior adviser to the USAGM CEO, notifying that the Congress-approved grant that funds us has been terminated.
Despite this, we are still operating. The radio has sued both USAGM and Kari Lake over these moves, and there has been talk of possible funding from the EU.
Given the circumstances, I’m going to break from the usual format and share a story I’ve never written down before -- about what RFE/RL means for me.
Behind The Iron Curtain
My father was born in Poznan, in western Poland, in 1939, just before the Nazi German invasion. With his father serving in the Polish army and later taken as a prisoner of war and his mother imprisoned for resisting the Nazi regime, my father spent most of the war in the care of his older brother and a Swedish Red Cross nurse -- a connection that proves significant later on.
After the war, my grandparents and their young son -- my father -- moved to the northern Polish port city of Gdansk in search of better job prospects. At this point in time, Sweden had one of Europe’s biggest merchant fleets and, against the grim backdrop of war-ravaged Poland, their gleaming ships in the harbor made quite an impression on my father.
Like many people stuck behind the Iron Curtain, my father listened to “the voices” -- that was what people called radio broadcasts from the BBC World Service, Voice of America, and Radio Free Europe. People listened secretly, of course, holding a transistor radio up to their ears in bed at night. They were dark times, with censorship and crackdowns, but for my father those broadcasts were a godsend. They informed and they inspired, and, in my father’s case, convinced him to flee -- to the West, to Sweden.
Crossing The Icy Sea
His first attempt, when he was 17, was to try to walk from Poland across the ice-covered Baltic Sea to reach the Danish island of Bornholm. The plan was then to continue to Sweden. Winters were much harsher in those days and ice really did cover large parts of the Baltic, but it was still a foolhardy plan. Icebreaker ships made crossing on foot almost impossible and he was forced to return -- beaten but not discouraged.
The next year, he tried again, this time attempting to canoe across the sea with a friend. The teenage boys were caught by a Polish ship and turned over to the authorities. Instead of Scandinavia, they ended up in a prison cell back in Poland. Interrogated and beaten, they admitted to being CIA spies and got sentenced to 10 years.
Luckily, in the late 1950s, there were liberal reforms under way in Poland, and they were released after a year. With my father's dream of a life in the West now on hold, he got an education and met my mother. They married and both secured jobs in what were then the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk. Through all that time, he still listened to "the voices," the jazz, the rock 'n' roll that managed to escape the jammers.
Third Time Lucky
My parents' dreams of a new life abroad resurfaced, and, in 1971, they went to Yugoslavia, one of the few countries they could travel to at the time. On a beach in Pula, in today's Croatia, they saw a German couple that reminded them of themselves. The man was dark-haired like my father; the woman was blonde like my mother.
With nothing to lose, they walked up to them and asked if they were from West Germany, which they were. They then made a request so bold I still can’t quite believe how they had the audacity: they asked the German couple if they could take on their identities. And, astonishingly, the Germans said yes. (Apparently helping “easterners” in such a way was not uncommon during the Cold War.)
So, with the couple's IDs and also their car, they drove over the border to Italy. The German couple then went to the closest consulate saying that they had been mugged. After a year as political refugees in Italy, they were allowed to go to Sweden to seek residency and later citizenship.
Because of the war, my father grew up hating Germans -- so it was a sweet irony that the act of supreme generosity that gave him his freedom came from a German. They stayed in touch, sending the German couple a card every Christmas.
Closing The Circle
I was born in Sweden in the 1980s, in the peace and prosperity my parents could only dream of when they were young. Like many others from my generation, I studied abroad, spoke a few European languages, and traveled freely and widely across the continent, believing in the idea of a “common European space.” So it made a certain sense when I ended up in Brussels.
When I got an offer in early 2011 to try out as a freelance Brussels reporter for RFE/RL, I knew it was no ordinary job offer. After being brought up on tales of RFE/RL’s significance, I felt like I was closing a family circle.
When I started, in early 2011, the big news was the fraudulent presidential election in Belarus that had taken place in December the previous year and the subsequent crackdown of demonstrators taking to the streets. The EU was imposing sanctions on Aleksandr Lukashenko’s regime, and I threw myself into reporting the story from Brussels. I've been reporting about the EU and NATO ever since.
Some things never change. Today (March 25), Lukashenko is being inaugurated for his seventh term and he is still facing EU sanctions. Under his repressive rule, there are an estimated 1,500 political prisoners in the country. One of them is my colleague, RFE/RL journalist Ihar Losik, who has been behind bars since 2020. Another colleague, Andrey Kuznechyk,was released earlier this year from a Belarusian prison.
When I think of Ihar and Andrey -- along with Vladyslav Yesypenko, an RFE/RL contributor who is jailed in Russia-occupied Crimea -- I can't help thinking of my father’s story and everything he did to live a free life.
We reach some 50 million people each week in places where media freedom doesn’t exist, is severely tested, or in environments flooded with disinformation. RFE/RL still matters, just as it did for my parents back in communist Poland. Just as it does for Andrey, Ihar, and Vladyslav -- and all the people they reached.
Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter @RikardJozwiak, or on e-mail at jozwiakr@rferl.org.
Until next time,
Rikard Jozwiak
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