"Wiesiek" met Janek in Warsaw when the boys were 8. By 11, they were comrades in arms, fighting side by side in the Polish Underground against the hated Nazis occupying their World War II-ravaged homeland. They dodged bullets together. They sabotaged enemy war operations together. And by age 15, they came to know, together, that each would have laid down his life for the other.

How could it be? "My Janek is dead," Czajkowski, now a 77-year-old retired machinist, reminded himself that evening last March when he was on the Internet. He never saw the body, he recalled. But he'd stood amid the bombed-out ruins of the Krasinski family's apartment building. No one could have survived the destruction.

Czajkowski found a telephone number for the Association of Polish Filmmakers in Poland, where Krasinski is listed as a member writer and journalist. He called. Halfway 'round the world, as Czajkowski's hauntingly familiar deep voice on the phone line asked about things only a best friend could know, Janusz Krasinski's heart also jumped. And for a moment, the only response Krasinski could muster was: "Wiesiek." On Jan. 28, the two friends reunited in San Diego after nearly a lifetime of thinking the other had perished. "When we (lost contact at 15), I thought he might have been killed by the Nazis," a bespectacled, white-haired Krasinski now says. "But I never forgot about him. We were such good friends."

In the intervening years since they last saw each other, Czajkowski and Krasinski's lives would take very different turns. Czajkowski spent much of his adult life in agriculture of Communist-run, post-war Poland. He finally was able to immigrate to America with his wife and two children in 1971. He labored as a factory worker in St. Louis for few months before coming to San Diego and working as a machinist at Rohr Industries until retiring in 1989. Krasinski, now 76, is a man passionately tied to his native land.

During the war, in 1944, he was thrown into a concentration camp at Auschwitz and later another Nazi work camps. After returning to Poland in 1947, Krasinski spent 9 years in prison on politically motivated charges amid regime upheavals under Communist rule. He picked up writing behind bars and later won several Polish literary awards for three books he authored, based mainly on his experiences. He married his second wife, Barbara, in 1964. They have two grown children and a grandchild.

By Ozzie Roberts STAFF WRITER

THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE 6 march 2005