'The Best Way to Keep the Devil at the Door Is to Be Rich.'

It was in 1968 that Rapaczynski and her family emigrated -- as did most of the remaining Jews in Poland. Luczywo, however, stayed. "I didn't want to be expelled from my country," she says, pausing to take a deep puff from her cigarette. "Maybe I was young and naive, but it seemed to be mostly verbal abuse from the communist propaganda machine. Lots of my friends were Polish, and none of them started treating me differently."

At that point, Lucwzyo's and Rapaczynski's lives took dramatically different turns. Rapaczynski moved to New York, where she married her Polish émigré boyfriend, had a child, and began building her career. She earned a doctorate in psychology from City University of New York and then worked as a researcher and a project director at Yale University's Family Television Research and Consultation Center.

In 1982, Rapaczynski quit academia to earn her management degree at Yale. She then spent eight years at Citibank, working her way up to a vice-president position and head of product development. "Doing academic research, I had no impact on real life," explains Rapaczynski, sitting in her small, cramped Agora office, which is decorated with snapshots of her daughter and a large photo of her other family -- the Agora staff. "It didn't seem to make any difference to anybody what I was doing. I decided that there was a lot of practical work that I could be doing that would be important."

While Rapaczynski was gaining the business knowledge that would prove so valuable to Agora, Luczywo was gaining editorial experience -- albeit the hard way. At first, Luczywo tried to live a quiet, normal life. She married, had a child, and began working as an English interpreter and translator. But in 1976, an opposition leader asked her to translate for a Swedish TV crew that was interviewing workers who were being persecuted by the Polish communist government. It took her three days to make the decision that would change her life. "I decided that what was important in life was that you be able to look in the mirror and see someone you approve of," she says.

A year later, when she and a small group of friends were publishing an underground paper, Robotnik (The Worker), Luczywo learned her first lesson as an editor: Push the limits, and always aim for independence. Named after a pre-World War I newspaper that was edited by a Polish independence hero, Robotnik advocated Poland's independence in its first issue -- a bold stance at a time when the Iron Curtain seemed permanent. The writers also signed their real names to every article.

"We never thought that independence was a possibility," says Luczywo. "We were still living in a dictatorship, and we wanted to fight for free-trade unions. But our philosophy was to create and expand the islands of freedom. If you don't want to be a slave, you must do something. If you act as though you are free, you will feel free."

The police beat people up and made some arrests, but they overlooked Luczywo, perhaps finding it hard to believe that such a petite young mother was vital to the movement. When Lech Walesa's Solidarity coalition began its labor strikes, and Polish General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared a "state of war" and began ordering mass arrests in December 1981, Luczywo went into hiding. Sending her daughter to live with her parents, she spent more than a year moving around and using phony identification cards.

While in hiding, she and her friends began a new underground paper, Tygodnik Mazowsze (Mazovia Weekly), which carried the coalition's red logo on its banner. While they produced some 80,000 copies of each issue, Luczywo remembers feeling tired and dispirited during much of that period, worried that she was missing out on many things in life and wondering whether it was worthwhile to devote her whole life to the cause.

In 1986, she found her answer. She secured an exit visa to spend a few months as a fellow at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute, a sort of think tank for women. Nearly a decade earlier, she had spent a summer vacation traveling around the United States in a Greyhound bus. But this time, after spending months devouring the magazines and newspapers in Harvard's library, she came to appreciate the power of a free media -- and the power of a free society. That appreciation deepened her commitment to both. "For the first time in my life, I lived in a free country, and I saw that whatever America's faults might be, it was so lively, so interesting, so unrestrained," she says.

In 1989, Jaruzelski began his famous Solidarity roundtables, during which he agreed to hold partly free elections and to allow the opposition to have its own newspaper for the election campaign. Walesa offered Michnik the editorship. Michnik, in turn, asked Luczwyo to run the paper. Temporarily taking up shop in an empty nursery school, Luczywo brought her crew from Tygodnik Mazowsze to put out what became the first legally independent newspaper in the Soviet bloc: Gazeta Wyborcza . Michnik set up his "office" in a bathroom; reporters worked on computers at knee-high tables and chairs. On warm days, they held meetings outside in the sandbox.