Passent was born in Stanisławów, Poland (modern-day
Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine). As a Jewish child he was saved from the Holocaust by a Polish family. Passent studied journalism at the
University of Warsaw, Andrei Zhdanov University in Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia),
Princeton University, and
Harvard University in the 1950s and 1960s. He first wrote for a communist youth magazine
Sztandar Młodych in his
sophomore year at the
University of Warsaw in 1956. In college, he wrote satirical texts for a student standup comedy group
Studencki Teatr Satyryków (STS). There he met his wife,
Agnieszka Osiecka, a Polish poet and lyricist. Their daughter,
Agata Passent, is also a journalist. Since 1959 he has been working for a Polish weekly
Polityka. From 1990 to 1997 he was a journalist in
Boston for a Spanish monthly magazine
El Diario Mundial. From 1997 to 2002 Passent served as a Polish ambassador to
Chile. In addition to his articles and columns, Passent wrote several books, among others about the
Vietnam War, the
Olympic Summer Games 1972 in Munich, about the drug problem in the US, and about the world class Polish tennis player,
Wojciech Fibak. He also translated books and other texts by
James Baldwin and
Martin Luther King Jr. into
Polish. He spoke Polish, English, German, Spanish, and Russian. In 1997, Passent received Commander's Cross of the
Order of Polonia Restituta. He died on 14 February 2022, at the age of 83. ==Controversy==