Stanislaw Dyonizy Augustynowicz

Stanisław Augustynowicz was born in Warsaw, Poland on May 8, 1932, the only child of Ludwik and Stanisława (Zygmuntowicz) Augustynowicz. The family lived a comfortable life at 12 Żurawia St., where his parents owned a furrier shop. Everything changed during the Nazi occupation of Poland when Ludwik was caught harboring a Soviet paratrooper in their home in 1942. Beaten and arrested in the dead of night in front of his son, he was then jailed and finally executed. Stanisław and his mother remained in Warsaw, surviving its annihilation in 1944 as retribution for the Warsaw Uprising, after which they were rounded up along with remaining survivors to be transported to Dulag 121 transit camp. Incredibly, they managed to escape off the train into the surrounding woods after Stanisław’s mother bribed a guard on the train with her gold jewelry. 

After the war Stanisław’s mother reopened her fur shop in Łódź, where she met and married Kazimierz Woźniak. Eventually the family moved back to Warsaw where they lived in the Sadyba district, and in 1951 Stanisław graduated from the Państwowe Gimnazjum im. Księcia Józefa Poniatowskiego. He then attended Politechnika Warszawska, eventually receiving his PhD in cryogenic engineering.

 While studying, Stanisław was introduced by one of his classmates to journalism student Barbara Wielgomas, and they were married in Warsaw on Oct. 5, 1958. Their only child, Karolina, for whom Stan made up bedtime stories about the adventures of a monkey named BoomBoom Ramtatamtam, was born in 1976. In 1981, the family embarked on what was meant to be a brief cultural exchange in the United States, a one-year stint for Stanisław working at Frigitronics in Connecticut. Three weeks after they left, martial law was imposed in Poland. They ended up staying.

The next two decades were a time of constant change — Stanisław’s career ambitions took the family from Ansonia, CT to Charleston, SC, to Nashua, NH (where he bought his first home) and Bethlehem, PA, to the Chicago suburbs (where Stanisław worked for Fermilab), to Waxahachie, TX (where he worked for the ultimately doomed Superconducting Super Collider), to Prior Lake, MN, and finally to Florida’s Atlantic coast, where Stanisław capped off his impressive career at NASA. There he was granted multiple patents before his retirement, and it was there his wife Barbara died in 2000.

Retirement found Stanisław in Canada, where he settled down among the Polish community of Mississauga and embraced a hobby of building PCs. 

Stanisław Augustynowicz is survived by his daughter Karolina (Ben) King and grandchildren Baxter and Beatrice, as well as his second wife, Zofia Sochacka, the mutual friend who’d introduced him to his first wife Barbara all those decades earlier.