My friend Jan Mokrzycki, who has died aged 91, was the innovative president of the Federation of Poles in Great Britain for 10 years. He campaigned for the country’s entry into the EU and for the rights of Polish people in the UK once that had been achieved. Through the pressure group Poland Comes Home, which Jan co-founded in 1995, he persuaded British politicians and business of the need for Poland to join the European community.
In 2000, Jan wrote a letter to each of the 600 or so British MPs, urging them to support the signing of the Nice treaty, which would pave the way for EU entry. The then foreign secretary Robin Cook quoted approvingly from Jan’s letter during the subsequent parliamentary debate.
After Poland’s accession to the EU in 2004, Jan involved British trade unions in a recruitment of Poles into their ranks, set up a unit monitoring hate crimes and launched a handbook, How to Live and Work in the United Kingdom (2005), to help newly arrived Poles.
In 2004 he initiated a successful campaign against the misguided term “Polish concentration camp” that had been used in the British media to describe Nazi camps set up in his native country. He was also involved in negotiations with the German government to extend the right of British Poles to receive compensation as wartime victims of forced labour in Germany.
Born in Warsaw, to Janina (nee Sekowska) and Jan Mokrzycki, both doctors, he endured the German occupation from the outbreak of the second world war. His father, uncle and grandfather were all executed for being members of Żegota, a resistance organisation that saved Jewish lives, and his mother interned in Auschwitz, then Ravensbrück, concentration camps for the same reason. Jan survived the war living with his grandmother, until, in 1946, his mother, released from Ravensbrück, smuggled him out of the country to Britain.
Initially he boarded with an English family, the Walkers, in Bolton, while his mother found work as a doctor before joining him in the Lancashire town. He was taken to his first football game by Mr Walker, and thereafter became a lifelong Bolton Wanderers fan.
After schooling in Bolton, Jan went to Newcastle University to study dentistry, qualifying in 1959. The following year he married Magdalena Okonska, a survivor of wartime deportation to Siberia, and the couple settled in Kenilworth, Warwickshire.
There he became active in the local Polish community and was instrumental in the creation of the programme Poles Apart, on BBC Coventry and Warwickshire Radio, from 1991. An active Liberal Democrat, in 1970 he was the party’s parliamentary candidate for Loughborough.
Jan retired from dentistry in 1996. From 1995, he served in various functions on the executive of the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, of which 10 years (1997-99; 2001-09) were as president. He received four decorations from the Polish state in recognition of his many achievements.
Magdalena survives him, as do their two children, Jan and Wanda, and six grandchildren.
