Polish characters in emacs

[Wojtek]

Could someone point me to an explanation of settings so that Polish
characters are displayed correctly in an emacs buffer and whether this
has to do with the environment outside of emacs.
When I open up a connection to my account and run emacs from Fedora 7
the characters do not show up when viewing a mail message encoded as
utf-8.  However I can toggle the input method to polish-slash and
enter polish characters and they do show up.  When connecting to the
same account from a Windows machine using Cygwin-X, the characters in
the mail message show up without a problem. Since the emacs I am
running is starting up with the same parameters, what controlsl the
display of characters?

Wojciech Komornicki