Ludwik Kowalski

Ludwik Kowalski (born 1931) is a Polish-American physicist, anti-communist author, and professor emeritus of Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey.

Life Kowalski was born in Poland. His parents, members of the Polish Communist Party (the precursor of Polish United Workers' Party), decided to emigrate to the Soviet Union in 1932. In Moscow, they continued in their careers as an engineer and nurse. His father was arrested in the night during the Great Purge in 1938 as an "enemy of the people," never to be seen again by his family. Kowalski and his mother lost their home and lived briefly in the polyclinic where his mother worked, then moved to the Dedenievo settlement, some 30 miles north of Moscow, where his mother worked in a nursing home. Kowalski joined the Red Pioneers in elementary school. He learned that his father had died in a Siberian camp some two years later, aged 36.

In June 1941, when Nazi Germany attacked the USSR, the Red Army retreated from Dedenievo, but the German army halted in nearby Jachroma (Yakhroma). However, the Germans bombed the settlement, killing many residents. Kowalski survived this period in the basement of an old church where peasants had stored vegetables from collective farms. In 1943, Kowalski's mother became a nurse in a Polish orphanage near Moscow, while Kowalski relearned Polish in the attached elementary school. and writing about experience under the Communism of the Soviet Union from an anti-communism viewpoint. His presentations can be found online.

One of his memoirs is an autobiography based on a diary he kept between 1946 and 2004 (in the USSR, Poland, France, and the USA) and illustrates his evolution from one extreme to another—from devoted Stalinist to active anti-communist:

Diary of a Former Communist: Thoughts, Feelings, Reality (memoirs online) (2010)