Czeslaw Milosz, a poet and Nobel laureate who was a prominent symbol for anti-communist dissidents in Poland, has died at age 93.

Milosz died Saturday at his home in Krakow, in southern Poland, according to his assistant, Agnieszka Kosinska.

He was born in Lithuania in 1911 and later moved to Poland, where he was witness to the Nazi regime and later Soviet rule.

Czeslaw Milosz in 2003 (AP photo)

Milosz initially supported Poland's Soviet-imposed communist government before he rejected the ideals of totalitarianism and defected to France in 1951.

In his book The Captive Mind, published in 1953, he wrote that the twentieth-century mind could easily accept "totalitarian terror for the sake of a hypothetical future."

After moving to California in 1960, he was hired as a professor of Slavic languages and literature at Berkeley.

He was awarded the Nobel prize in literature in 1980, just as the Solidarity movement emerged in Poland.

Milosz spent 30 years in exile in the United States and France. But he returned to Poland after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989.

His poems were only published in his native country after he was awarded the Nobel Prize.