Hundreds of pages of documents relating to the communist-era security services during a period of unrest in the late 1960s have been intercepted by customs officers at Chopin Airport in Warsaw after someone attempted to send them to the United States.
The files have been handed over to Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), a state body responsible for documenting Poland’s twentieth-century history.
The sender – whose identity and motives have not been revealed – could face up to eight years in prison for not handing over the files to the IPN, as required under Polish law.
The materials discovered during an inspection at the airport include 11 folders of files, each containing 30 to 250 pages, as well as over 100 electronic, digital and analogue media, revealed Andrzej Pozorski, head of the IPN’s commission for prosecuting crimes against the Polish nation.
Subsequently, premises belonging to the sender were searched and a copy of a hard drive containing scans of the documents secured, Pozorski reveals.
The documents in question were produced by the interior ministry, Citizens’ Militia (MO, the communist-era police force), and Security Service (SB) in 1967 and 1968.
That was a time of great unrest in Poland, amid large-scale protests by students, workers and intellectuals, which ended in a crackdown on dissidents. The period also saw a communist-led anti-Jewish campaign that resulted in thousands of Polish Jews being forced to emigrate.
“These documents concern the prevailing situation at the time in the [ruling communist] Polish United Workers ‘Party, as well as in student, literary, artistic and worker circles, and contain information about the protests of March 1968 and subsequent actions of the authorities,” says Pozorski.
The IPN believes that the documents will be of great value to historians.
Janusz Korwin-Mikke and Adam Michnik pic.twitter.com/NBfF7MNp0D
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) March 8, 2018
After the fall of the communist regime in 1989, many document disappeared. Some were destroyed by those wishing to hide evidence, while others ended up being kept in private hands.
Earlier this month, over 100 documents relating to the security services in the period of martial law during the 1980s were discovered hidden in the possession of a former intelligence officer.
In September, the IPN helped recover almost 300 documents produced by the German forces occupying the Polish city of Łódź during the Second World War after a man in Warsaw tried to sell them online.
The IPN was established in 1999 to document, research, educate on history, but also to prosecute crimes committed against the Polish nation, focusing on the periods of German Nazi, Soviet and communist occupation and rule.
Earlier this year, the government lifted the statute of limitations on communist crimes being investigated by the IPN.
Main image credit: Angelo Giordano/Pixabay
Maria Wilczek is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She is a regular writer for The Times, The Economist and Al Jazeera English, and has also featured in Foreign Policy, Politico Europe, The Spectator and Gazeta Wyborcza.
