page_title: Witold Kieżun
section_title: Communist Poland
hierarchical_section_title: Witold Kieżun / Communist Poland
caption_attribution_description: English: Witold Kieżun 1950
context_page_description: Witold Jerzy Kieżun is a Polish economist, former soldier of the Home Army – the Polish resistance movement against German occupation during World War II, participant of the Warsaw uprising and prisoner in the Soviet Gulags. Kieżun is a former professor at Temple University, Duquesne University, Universite de Montreal, Université du Québec à Montréal, Bujumbura University, Warsaw University. He served as Chief Technical Advisor of the United Nations Development Programme in Burundi, Rwanda, and Burkina Faso. Witold Kieżun is currently a lecturer at Kozminski University in Warsaw. He received Doctor Honoris Causa from Jagiellonian University and the National Defence University of Warsaw. Kieżun is an honorary member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and an honorary citizen of Warsaw.
context_section_description: After the Soviet Red Army seized Krakow from German troops on 17 January 1945, Witold Kieżun enlisted in the Law School at the reopened Jagiellonian University. On 9 March 1945 Kieżun was arrested by the NKVD as part of Soviet repressions against members of the Polish Anti-Nazi resistance Home Army with the objective of strengthening the imposed Communist rule over post-war Poland. Kieżun was imprisoned in Krakow's infamous Motelupich Prison and intensively interrogated for his participation in the Warsaw Uprising and membership in the Home Army by Polish and Russian-speaking members of the NKVD. In March 1945, a mock execution was conducted, in which Kieżun and his fellow inmates were led to the prison yard and stood against a wall in front of a firing squad. Before the execution was performed, a senior NKVD officer arrived with orders to cancel the execution; Kieżun and the others were led back to their cell.
  On 23 March 1945, Witold Kieżun was removed from Montelupich Prison and transported on a Soviet freight train prisoner transport, together with other imprisoned Polish Home Army members as well as German POWs, to a Gulag labor camp in the Soviet Union, near the city of Krasnovodsk (currently Türkmenbaşy in Turkmenistan). Witold Kieżun's paternal uncle, Jan Kieżun, was also deported to the same labor camp. The transport took 31 days and arrived in the labor camp on 23 April. The labor camp was located in the Karakum Desert. Prisoners were provided with very limited food rations and contaminated water and suffered from a variety of diseases, which led to a death rate between 60% to 86% over a period of 4 months after Kieżun's arrival. Witold Kieżun reported that the labor camp and NKVD guards used US military equipment provided to the Soviet Union as part of the Lend-Lease program and still bore US Army marking.
  During his stay in the camp, Witold Kieżun contracted pneumonia, typhoid fever, typhus, dystrophy, scabies, mumps and Beriberi. On 22 June Kieżun, who had fallen unconscious, was erroneously declared dead from pneumonia and his body was placed on a pile of corpses of other deceased patients. However, a nurse noticed the mistake and Kieżun was restored to the hospital, where he gradually recovered, although suffering from consequences of late stage Beriberi throughout his life. His death was also reported by a Polish fellow prisoner to Kieżun's mother in Krakow after the prisoner's release and return. In September 1945 the camp was disbanded and on 20 September Kieżun was relocated to a NKVD hospital in Kogon, currently Uzbekistan, where he was imprisoned along with Japanese POWs. In April 1946 Witold Kieżun was released to return to Poland. First, he was sent back to a NKVD camp in Brest, where he was taken over by the Polish Communist Ministry of Public Security and imprisoned in a prisoner camp in Złotów. He was released by mid-1946.
  In October 1946 Witold Kieżun re-enrolled in the Law Program of Jagiellonian University in Krakow and started working for the National Bank of Poland. In 1948 Kieżun was arrested again for 48 hours by Ministry of Public Security due to his former membership in the Polish Resistance. Kieżun graduated in Law in June 1949 and moved from Krakow to Warsaw in August of that year. In 1950, Witold married Danuta who had been a paramedic during the Warsaw Uprising.
  Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s Witold Kieżun worked at the National Bank of Poland in Warsaw and pursued an academic career in Economics at the Main School of Planning and Statistics – currently the Warsaw School of Economics. Kieżun completed his doctorate studies in Economics in 1964. Under the guidance of prof. Tadeusz Kotarbiński and prof. Jan Zieleniewski, Witold Kieżun became a major representative of the Polish School of Praxeology. In 1971 Kieżun became the head of the Institute of Praxeology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 1973 he was fired from the post due a request of the Institute's communist party unit. Over the next years he was employed as lecturer at Warsaw University. He was granted the title 
caption: Witold Kieżun 1950
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