The initiative of Jan Rodowicz's family, welcomed by the Ministry of Justice, was supported by the Institute of National Remembrance, which funded the monument.
Jan Rodowicz was a Home Army soldier, Gray Ranks scout, Warsaw insurgent, and architecture student at the Warsaw University of Technology. His generation was the first to be born in the free Second Polish Republic, and Jan grew up in a home where patriotic family traditions and the memory of the struggle for independence were cherished. He became a member of the 23rd Bolesław Chrobry Warsaw Scout Troop, dubbed "Orangery", where he teamed up with Tadeusz Zawadzki, Alek Dawidowski and Jan Bytnar, the same boys that would become protagonists of the famous "Stones for the Rampart" novel by Aleksander Kamiński.
When World War II broke out, Jan Rodowicz was a sixteen-year-old graduate of secondary school, and further education, including the high school diploma, he received underground. In 1940, "Anoda" entered the resistance, and, just like his scout teammates, started with the "small sabotage" acts, which aimed to make life difficult for the occupant. Then, as a soldier of the Assault Groups, he took part in their most important combat actions of 1943, such as the attack at the Arsenal, rescue of prisoners at the Celestynów train station, or the raids in Czarnocin, Sieczychy and Wilanów. In the Warsaw Uprising, he fought in the Wola, Old Town and Czerniaków districts, earning the Silver Cross of the Virtuti Militari.
After the war, "Anoda" took up architecture studies at the Warsaw University of Technology. Jan Suzin, his classmate, recalled, “I tried to identify some attributes of a hero in him, and found none: he was always the same smiling, cheerful and gentle Janek. Perhaps only somewhere deep down, at the bottom of his smile, lurked those flashes of steel you see in people who went through hell." Jan Rodowicz died on 7 January 1949, during an interrogation in the building of the Ministry of Public Security at 6 Koszykowa Street.
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