Mirosław Chojecki, who has died aged 76, fought to liberate Poland from communism much as his parents had fought the occupying Nazis. But where they fought with guns, he mostly fought with books, publishing materials and the uncensored word.

In the mid-1970s Chojecki joined the dissident Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR), the organisation founded by Warsaw intellectuals and workers caught up in the protests of June 1976. In consequence he was frequently harassed, jailed and assaulted by police and the state security service.

Since all public information in Poland was manipulated by the censor, it was clear to the dissidents that they needed their own ways to communicate. At the start of 1977, Chojecki got hold of a spirit duplicator. Working secretly in a friend’s apartment, he found they could print 500 copies of a small booklet in one sitting. Soon he and friends launched an underground press called the Independent Publishing House, NOWa for short.

Despite being watched continually by the secret police, Chojecki built NOWa into the biggest and most successful publisher in the underground. By 1980, it had produced about a hundred titles, including works by blacklisted Polish writers, copies of famous books sent from abroad, homegrown political quarterlies, and novels by international luminaries such as Günter Grass.

Chojecki continued to work against the government, and when industrial unrest broke out at the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk in August 1980, he threw his energy and experience behind the strike, helping to turn a regional labour dispute into a standoff between people and state. As well as winning valuable concessions, the strike produced a new, independent trade union, Solidarity, led by Lech Wałesa.

As the pre-eminent underground Polish publisher, Chojecki had helped to lay the groundwork for the movement that would one day bring down Polish communism. But his second act would prove equally important.

On 13 December 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared a state of martial law in Poland and the police began rounding up Solidarity activists. Chojecki was in Washington that night, where he had travelled to drum up support for Polish publishing operations. He knew that if he went home he would be immediately jailed, so he decided he must serve the anti-communist cause from the west, supplying logistical support to those activists who were still at large.

He would soon be formally appointed Solidarity’s minister for smuggling. Chojecki spent the next eight years organising the secret shipping of whatever non-lethal aid the underground required – presses, inks, dollars, broadcasting equipment, books, video and audio cassettes – from his base in Paris. He was supported in this role by Jerzy Giedroyc, the publisher of the periodical Kultura, and by the CIA. Giedroyc, who was also Paris-based, had been working with the US intelligence agency since the 50s under the code name QRBERETTA. Chojecki would be given the cryptonym QRGUIDE.

Smuggling contraband through the iron curtain was a delicate and at times dangerous business. Paris was busy with enemy agents, who spied on him and threatened his family. Once, they set his apartment ablaze. But this was a task for which Chojecki, an expert conspirator, was perfectly suited. He ran a network of smugglers across western Europe, and developed a range of infiltration methods. These included building a bespoke smuggling vehicle, with a secret compartment, and using canning equipment to hide miniature publications in food tins.

As the 80s progressed, Chojecki’s network flooded Poland with more and more materiel. Gradually, the regime lost control of publicly available information, and with it control of the people. When the first postwar semi-free elections were held in Poland in the summer of 1989, Chojecki supported the Solidarity campaign from Paris, sending large quantities of cash and around 50 fax machines, among other supplies. The communists lost heavily – a pattern that was soon repeated elsewhere as other countries followed the Polish example and the eastern bloc collapsed.

Chojecki was born in Warsaw, on the 10th anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of his country. His parents, Jerzy Chojecki and Maria Stypułkowska-Chojecka, had served with the Polish Home Army during the war, and his mother in particular was celebrated as a hero for her role in the execution of Warsaw’s brutal Nazi police chief, Franz Kutschera, in 1944.

Mirosław, known universally as “Mirek”, was the elder of Jerzy and Maria’s two sons. He would continue the family struggle to free Poland, in his case from the Soviets. It was Krystyna Starczewska, a teacher at his Warsaw high school, who first advised him to seek out the uncensored literature that was being smuggled into Poland from the west: she “got me reading”, he once said. These books – by writers such as George Orwell and Albert Camus, but also Polish authors and titles such as Kultura – would give him a very different account of the world from the one taught in schools: the west here was not always Poland’s enemy, and Moscow wasn’t always its friend. Gradually, through reading, he came to understand that there was a deliberate policy of excluding Poles from their own history.

He soon found himself in conflict with the authoritarian state. In 1968, he organised a student protest march which was violently attacked by riot police. “They basically beat us up,” he recalled. He was thrown out of Warsaw Polytechnic but enlisted instead at the university.

Eight years later, in 1976, the police were once again beating up demonstrators, this time workers who were striking in protest at hikes in the state-controlled price of food. Chojecki was working as a nuclear physicist at the Institute of Nuclear Research, but he dropped everything to support the strikers, and joined the Workers’ Defence Committee. “It was simply a moral decision,” he said later, “people being beaten by the police for a cause that was my cause.”

In 1990, Chojecki returned to live in Poland, where he continued some of the work he had begun in Paris, producing films through his company Media Kontakt. He served temporarily as an adviser to the minister of culture, and founded the Jewish Motifs international film festival, which ran for 15 years.

In 2022, he was awarded Poland’s highest civil decoration, the Order of the White Eagle.

He is survived by his wife, Jolanta Kessler, whom he married in 1983, and by five sons and a daughter, six grandchildren, and his brother, Sławomir.

• Mirosław Jerzy Chojecki, publisher, born 1 September 1949; died 10 October 2025