The contents of a police chest buried during the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, and recently rediscovered by a farmer, have been painstakingly restored.
The collection is “unique” in Poland, says the director of the Łódź State Archives, Piotr Zawilski, quoted by Gazeta Wyborcza, “because of what happened to it at the beginning of Second World War and the wartime fate of the people who transported it”.
The chest was used during the evacuation of the Horse Reserve Headquarters of the State Police in the city of Łódź. Hundreds of documents, as well as wallets and other personal effects, were loaded into the chest for transportation. The documents were dated up to 1 September 1939 – the date of the German invasion that began World War Two.
The chest was then taken by policemen on horseback in the direction of Warsaw. However, German air raids posed a constant danger. Eventually, the officers decided to bury the chest in a field in Żelechów, most probably on 12 September 1939, when the Germans seized the area.
At that point there was also a threat from the Soviet Union, reminds Zawilski, which invaded Poland on 17 September 1939. Soviet security forces used police documents to identify and arrest Polish officers.
The chest lay buried for 75 years, before being discovered by a farmer working in Żelechów in summer 2014. It was then sent to archivists in Warsaw, before being passed on to a team in Łódź.
The fittings on the chest were “so heavily corroded over the years that at first we did not see the lock,” Piotr Strembski, head of the conservation and department of the state archives in Łódź, told Gazeta Wyborcza.
The chest was full of plant roots, soil and damp, with the documents inside stuck together. Other items were also disintegrating, with scissor handles eroded and paperclips and pen nibs merged into one block.
A specialist team of conservationists set to work to rescue the contents of the chest, a process that took four years. The papers were meticulously separated, whilst experimental work was undertaken to try to save the items of stationary.
“It was necessary to take care of metal, heavily corroded objects or rubber stamps, which without appropriate treatment would simply fall apart,” explains Anna Ostaszewska, senior conservator from the archive. “We had to experiment a little with the rubber parts of the seals. We spent a long time looking for a way that would restore their flexibility.”
In total, the team saved 4,000 pages of documents as well as other items, including a glue container, pencil and a holepunch. Leather wallets within the chest were also saved, with 94 police ID cards still legible. The chest can also be locked again, after a locksmith restored the original padlock.
“The chest contained not only papers concerning everyday police work, but also, for example, a bill for broken glass in the barracks…a list of contributions from individual policemen for a game of billiards or documents regarding the organisation of horse competitions,” explains Zawilski.
Some of the most damaged items in the chest could not be restored, but the archivists hope that they can be in future, when new technological possibilities are available.
In 1939, two officers and 97 privates served in the Horse Reserve Headquarters of the State Police in Łódź. Of these, reports Gazeta Wyborcza, 24 were murdered by Soviet forces during the war, victims of the Katyń massacre.
In the 1990s, IDs belonging to several policemen from Łódź were found in mass graves in Miednoje – one of the Katyń massacre burial sites – when exhumation works were carried out.
Main image credit: Tomasz Stańczak / Agencja Gazeta
Juliette Bretan is a freelance journalist covering Polish and Eastern European current affairs and culture. Her work has featured on the BBC World Service, and in CityMetric, The Independent, Ozy, New Eastern Europe and Culture.pl.
