The following year his plane was damaged above the Baltic Sea and Nagórski was declared missing. After several hours at sea, he was rescued by a Russian submarine and escorted to a military hospital in Riga. He quickly recovered and returned to his unit, but the report of his recovery never reached headquarters. Return to Poland After the October Revolution, Nagórski's unit became a part of the Red Army and took part in the Russian Civil War. He returned to Poland in 1919 and attempted to join the Polish Navy, but was turned down due to his past service with the Reds. In the chaos of the Russian Civil War, Nagórski's personal files were lost and he was declared dead by Russian authorities. He then settled in southern Poland and started working as an engineer and designer of refrigerators and coolers for the sugar and oil industries. In 1925 Nagórski's report of his flights to the Arctic reached Richard Byrd, who contacted him and asked for more details on weather conditions and other tips. The information obtained proved valuable during his later Arctic and Antarctic expeditions. Among other pioneers of Arctic aviation to take advantage of Nagórski's experience were Walter Mittelholzer and Boris Chukhnovsky. Forgotten in Poland and believed dead in Russia, Nagórski gained much fame. In 1936 the Nagurskoye meteorological station in Franz Josef Land () was named after him. Nagórski survived World War II and continued his career as a civil worker in Gdańsk and then as an engineer in Warsaw. In 1955, during one of his lectures, Czesław Centkiewicz, a renowned Polish polar explorer and author, presented the audience with a short biographical note of a "long-forgotten pioneer of aviation, pilot Jan Nagórski who died in 1917". Nagórski, who remained interested in exploration of the polar areas and was present at the lecture stood up and announced that he was not Russian and definitely not dead. This revelation became widely publicised by the Polish media and Nagórski's achievements were rediscovered. On Centkiewicz's suggestion, Nagórski described his Arctic flights in a book entitled The First Above Arctic (1958). In 1960 he published Over the Burning Baltic, the memoirs of his World War I service. As a late recognition of his deeds, Nagórski was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Polonia Restituta by Polish President. Death He died on June 9, 1976, and was buried at the Wólka Węglowa