- Daniel Passent
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Daniel Passent (*April 28, 1938 in Stanisławów, Poland, now Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine) - a Polish journalist and writer. He is an author of a blog En passant which appears as a column in a Polish weekly Polityka .
As a Jewish child he was saved from holocaust by a Polish family.
Passent studied journalism at the University of Warsaw, Saint Petersburg State University, Princeton University, and Harvard University in the 1950s and 1960s. He first wrote for a communist youth magazine Sztandar Młodych in his sophomore year at the University of Warsaw in 1956. In college, he wrote satirical texts for a student standup comedy group STS (Studencki Teatr Satyryków). There he met his wife, Agnieszka Osiecka, a Polish poet and lyricist. Their daughter, Agata Passent, is also a journalist. From 1959 on, he has been working for a Polish weekly Polityka. 1990 to 1997 he was a journalist in Boston for a Spanish monthly magazine El Diario Mundial. 1997 and 2002 Passent served as a Polish ambassador to Chile.
In addition to his articles and columns, Passent has written several books, among others about the Vietnam War, the Olympic Summer Games 1972 in Munich, about the drug problem in the USA, and about the Polish world class tennis player, Wojciech Fibak. He also translated books and other texts by James Baldwin and Martin Luther King into Polish. He speaks Polish, English, German, Spanish, and Russian.
Controversy
An article[1] in a conservative Polish newspaper Dziennik, claimed that Passent worked in the 1960s as a spy for the communist government under the code names "Daniel" and "John". Passent has asked an independent court to review such claims through a procedure called lustration; this request has been denied[2] as Poland's lustration law applies only to people holding (or running for) a public office.
Sources
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