Extracting the Human Being From History: the KARTA Center Archive

This article describes the emergence and specific characteristics of the largest social archive in Poland, the KARTA Center Archive of the KARTA Center Foundation [Archiwum Ośrodka KARTA; https://karta.org.pl/archiwa], a Polish non-governmental public benefit organization. The archive contains important source material relating to recent Polish history, including documentation of the fate of Polish citizens under Soviet occupation and in the USSR, and the history of the activities of independent groups in the Polish People’s Republic. In the course of its 37 years of operation, over a dozen thousand people have donated their own collections to the KARTA Center. Such gifts have included the personal collections of such significant figures of the anti-regime opposition as Jerzy Jedlicki, Stefan Kisielewski, Jacek Kuroń, Jan Józef Lipski, Zdzisław Najder, and many others.The archive also contains the “Twenty-One Demands-Birth of the Solidarity Trade Union” collection, which has documentation from the years 1980–1981 and was entered in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2003. The KARTA Center Library, which currently contains the largest collection of independent Polish publications from the 1970s and 1980s, has been granted the status of an academic librar