What will happen to my documents?
Materials donated to the Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance become a part of the national archives repository. They will be professionally arranged and described, as well as conserved and stored with the utmost care.
Preserved from destruction and obscurity
How we work
On June 30, 2020, Zofia Zając of Kalinowo donated her family’s most precious documents to the Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance. Thanks to her generous donation, IPN’s archival repository was enriched by documents of her father – Józef Krata – who served in the Border Protection Corps (Korpus Ochrony Pogranicza, KOP). Among them are his KOP badge, military record book, and military identity card. Mrs. Zając also donated documents of her parents – forced laborers in Nazi Germany (e.g. Arbeitsbuch, Arbeitskarte) as well as her personal documents of the post-war period and many photographs. The documents donated were given appropriate conservation treatment to safeguard them.
Some personal documents and objects are not only of historical and informative value, but also sentimental. In such cases IPN suggests their owners lend the materials in order for them to be digitalized. The original documents and objects are then returned intact to their rightful owner, and the digitalized files are added to the IPN archival repository.