<p>WARSAW, Poland — Rescue officials were searching Monday for the body of Jan Litynski, a Polish communist-era dissident and democracy-era politician who drowned in a river while trying to save a dog. He was 75.</p>
<p>His death was first announced by Eugeniusz Smolar, another former democracy activist from the Solidarity era.</p>
<p>Police spokesman Mariusz Ciarka said Monday that police are searching for Litynski’s body in the Narew River in the area around Pultusk, a town north of Warsaw. </p>
<p>Litynski had entered the river trying to save a dog that had been on ice and had fallen into the water, and Litynski’s wife witnessed his drowning, Ciarka said. There was no information about the fate of the dog.</p>
<p>Litynski was engaged in a student protest movement against the communist authorities in 1968. He later joined a 1970s civic movement, the Workers’ Defense Committee, which was a precursor to the Solidarity trade union and democracy movement of the 1980s, to which he also belonged.</p>
<p>During the communist era he was arrested multiple times and was interned during the martial law crackdown imposed in 1981, according to the Rzeczpospolita daily.</p>
<p>Litynski was a participant in the Round Table talks of 1989 that paved a peaceful transition from communism to a market economy and democracy, and went on to be a lawmaker. He was an adviser to former President Bronislaw Komorowski.</p>
<p>He was being remembered in Poland on Monday as a good and erudite man who had done much to serve the country.</p>
