Unwavering commitment to the journalistic cause, even against a dangerous backdrop, was in Mr. Darnton’s DNA. He was just 11 months old when his father Byron (Barney) Darnton, a war correspondent for The New York Times, was killed while reporting in what is now Papua New Guinea in October 1942.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Mr. Darnton started his career as a copy boy, running a mimeograph machine for the New York Times news syndicate in 1966. He also had stints on the photo and metro desks, and as a foreign correspondent, before arriving in Warsaw in 1979.

The imposition of martial law in Poland, a country already ravaged by the Nazi invasion in 1939, created a host of challenges for everyday Poles. For journalists trying to tell the stories of the Solidarity movement — a free trade union that transformed into a mass movement for liberalization in Poland — the stakes were high and extremely risky.

Mr. Darnton and other Western journalists found ingenious ways to circumvent government censorship and work within the limits of martial law to file articles back home.

His first method was simple: Approach strangers. “If you consider that I wrote about a dozen stories and had three copies of each ,” Mr. Darnton said, “that is 36 times that I approached people in the country and asked them to carry the copy for me and none, that I recall, declined.”

Mr. Darnton did not ask the travelers to deliver the copy by hand. Instead, he scribbled the phone number of The New York Times’s foreign desk on the top of each article and asked his carriers to call The Times as soon as they arrived in a Western country. These aides then proceeded to dictate the story, start to finish, including punctuation, to a Times employee on the other end of the phone.

Mr. Darnton does not know which copy of each article made it back to Times headquarters. He was not in touch with anyone outside of Poland for weeks at a time.