REPORTER: Olivia Rousset
Inside Poland's Institute of National Remembrance there are secrets with the power to destroy lives. These tattered old files contain stories gathered by a massive network of spies during Poland's 45 years of Communist rule. Now a new law could open this Pandora's box.
Behind me is some of what remains of the Communist legacy in Poland. Some 90km of secret police files are stored across the country. Under the new law the past of hundreds of thousands of Poles will be scrutinized here.
The government wants to punish people who collaborated with the Communist regime. Janusz Kurtyka is the director of this archive.
JANUSZ KURTYKA, ARCHIVE DIRECTOR, IPN (Translation): The aim of this operation is, first, to reveal the past of people who hold key state positions, secondly, the past of people who occupy key positions in the media or who practise professions which involve public trust.
The new law covers everyone from politicians to journalists and teachers. Those found to have been collaborators would then be banned from working in their professions for 10 years.
ANDRZEJ KRAWCZYK: I was officially informed that I was arrested in this building.
The files have already exposed the past of this man, Andrzej Krawczyk. What happened to him here in 1982 was to destroy his career 25 years later.
ANDRZEJ KRAWCZYK: It was about 6pm. It was dark in Poland in February at 6pm. And I was arrested by the military police.
In December 1981, Poland's Communist regime was threatened by the popularity of the Solidarity movement. The country's leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, sent tanks onto the streets.
GENERAL WOJCIECH JARUSELSKI, (Translation): The Council of State, in accordance with the Constitution, has declared martial law as of midnight across the entire country.
Solidarity was pushed underground. Like many students at the time Krawczyk was active in the resistance, and handed out leaflets like these calling for the end of martial law.
ANDRZEJ KRAWCZYK: I know it was risky and maybe naive to go through streets of Warsaw during martial law with the backpack, but somebody must deliver these leaflets to the factories, to the university.
While in detention, afraid of being separated from his pregnant wife and 2-year-old daughter, Krawczyk signed a statement agreeing to collaborate. He insists he never followed through.
ANDRZEJ KRAWCZYK: I was blackmailed - three years jail or cooperation. It was not free choice. When I was blackmailed, I wasn't free man, I was in jail.
Until January this year Andrzrej Krawczyk was the undersecretary of state to the President, one of the most trusted men in Poland. But then he was told the statement he had signed agreeing to collaborate had come to light. A few days later he was sacked by the President.
ANDRZEJ KRAWCZYK: It was painful for me that nobody tried to talk to me, to ask me about the explanation, to show me this document.
Krawczyk challenged the allegation of collaboration in court, and was cleared earlier this year but he still hasn't heard from the President and is still unemployed. This policy of cleansing former collaborators is called 'lustration', which roughly translates as 'ritual purification'. Others call it McCarthyism.
WIKTOR OSIATYNSKI, LAW PROFESSOR & HISTORIAN: We've had the witch-hunt always in history, quite often, not the first time. And the witch-hunt is precisely about almost collateral damage only. It actually very seldom helps to find the real witches, you know.
REPORTER: It seems that accusation is enough for a lot of people to feel that their lives have been ruined. What safeguards are in place to protect people and assure that there is an accuracy in the files?
JANUSZ KURTYKA, (Translation): I always answer this question fairly unequivocally. We need to remember that the people who suffered under the Communist regime weren't the ones who denounced, the secret collaborators, but the ones who were denounced. The people whose lives could be ruined by one denunciation, one seemingly unimportant word. We must never forget that.
Driving this purge is the ruling Law and Justice Party, or PiS, which is holding its national convention.
SONG, (Translation): With PiS, with PiS, Poland, the tiger of Europe. Beautiful women, strapping blokes, Poland, the tiger of Europe.
Today Poland's right-wing Prime Minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, is promoting his radical agenda.
JAROSLAW KACZYNSKI, POLAND PRIME MINISTER, (Translation): A new Poland can't be built without a great cleansing. It can't be built on the foundations that were created by the late, decomposing communism.
The Prime Minister founded the Law and Justice Party in 2001 with his identical twin brother, Poland's President, Lech Kaczynski. He took office last year promising a moral revolution.
PRIME MINISTER, (Translation): You could say the cleansing is under way. It has already begun and it will continue.
Even Poland's most powerful and trusted institution is being rocked by accusations of collaboration. The Catholic Church was the only institution that openly opposed Communist rule. And John Paul II, the Polish Pope, is often credited with helping bring about democracy. In January this year, Stanislaw Wielgus was supposed to be inaugurated as the archbishop of Warsaw. Instead, he made a shock announcement.
STANISLAW WIELGUS, (Translation): I'm placing in the hands of Your Holiness my resignation from the office of the Archbishop of Warsaw.
CONGREGATION, (Translation): No! No! No!
For several weeks the media had reported that Wielgus had collaborated with the Communists. Nonetheless his resignation devastated his supporters inside and outside the church.
ANNOUNCEMENT, (Translation): We're participating in Holy Mass. Please respect the Archbishop's will.
As a young man who needed official permission to study theology abroad, he had agreed to inform on his fellow priests.
MAN, (Translation): A man is being destroyed only because he wanted to travel abroad to study. The only way to do that then was to sign an insignificant declaration.
One Catholic priest says he saw the scandal coming.
FATHER TADEUSZ ISAKOWICZ – ZALESKI, (Translation): For a few months now I've been feeling like Cassandra who predicted that events like these could happen. I warned the church authorities. Unfortunately, they didn't listen to me. When the scandal about Archbishop Wielgus erupted I felt bitter because it could all have been avoided.
For years Father Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski has been crusading to have the truth known about collaborators within the church.
FATHER TADEUSZ ISAKOWICZ – ZALESKI, (Translation): The question is why a church commission wasn't set up four years ago.
Tonight he is launching his book which exposes 39 priests and bishops who collaborated with the Communist regime.
FATHER TADEUSZ ISAKOWICZ – ZALESKI, (Translation): It was unavoidable. It was growing like a boil. Sooner or later it had to explode.
Like many priests at the time, Zaleski was an activist with the Solidarity movement. Here he is in 1985 after he was dragged from his bed and beaten by Communist agents.
FATHER TADEUSZ ISAKOWICZ – ZALESKI, (Translation): Then I was gagged. They shoved it's over there a gag into my mouth.
The police filmed Zaleski re-enacting the attack a couple of hours later.
FATHER TADEUSZ ISAKOWICZ – ZALESKI, (Translation): Then I was hit here, more or less in this area. And then I was hit on the head several times when I was being lifted up, with a stick.
After the fall of communism Zaleski dug up this tape in the secret police archives. From his own file he discovered that some priests were passing on information about anti-Communist activities in the church. His church superiors told him to destroy the files.
FATHER TADEUSZ ISAKOWICZ – ZALESKI, (Translation): This is a problem of neglecting history, and sadly, history, like an Australian boomerang, has come back and hit Poland. I think there is a bitterness amongst many people - mainly those linked to the Solidarity movement - that this history is like an illness that hasn't been healed. And I think that groups connected with Solidarity want the authentic truth about those years to come out.
The fact that the truth hasn't come out until now has a lot to do with how Poland made the transition from communism to democracy. I've come to the city of Gdansk, where the Solidarity movement began 27 years ago.
In 1980, an unemployed electrician scaled the walls of this Gdansk shipyard and gave an impromptu speech that changed the history of this country. The Solidarity movement was born, and its leader, Lech Walesa, provided the spark that marked the beginning of the end of communism.
LECH WALESA, (Translation): Let them show me one man who believed we'd get away from the Soviets and smash communism. One man in the whole world at that time. I don't know any.
In 1989, after years of martial law, negotiations were finally held between the Communists and Solidarity, paving the way for democracy in Poland. Solidarity agreed to draw a thick line between the past and present, which meant not opening the secret police archives and not seeking retribution. The following year Lech Walesa was sworn in as president.
LECH WALESA, (Translation): Poland was the first to make reforms. Poland made compromises with the Communists. Poland created a chance to cleanse and destroy documents but that's the price you pay for being a leader.
WOKCIECH ROSZKOWSKI, MEMBER OF EUROPEAN PARILIAMENT: I think that Walesa went wrong soon after he was elected.
Wokciech Roszkowski is a Member of the European Parliament for the ruling Law and Justice Party. He thinks Walesa should have introduced vetting when he became president.
WOKCIECH ROSZKOWSKI: He ran for presidency in 1990 under the slogan "A new beginning, clearing," and so forth and so on. When he got into the Presidential Palace he started doing the other things, exactly the opposite things.
Walesa claims it was the best that could have been done at the time.
LECH WALESA, (Translation): Of course I'd like to be young, beautiful and rich. And to do more. Gladly. But with what and how? In a democratic country I could do nothing more. Absolutely nothing.
His detractors won't let him off the hook so easily. Many, even from his own ranks, have actually accused the Nobel Prize-winner of being a collaborator himself.
LECH WALESA, (Translation): I laughed and I've been laughing to this day. I've proved 300% it was nonsense. I hunted down people who had doubts, I took them to court, and I won two cases. I've won all of them. Can I prove more than that?
It took Walesa seven years to clear his name, and he blames the campaign against him on his comrades-turned-rivals, the Kaczynski twins. They too were a part of Solidarity, but had a falling out with Walesa in the early '90s.
LECH WALESA, (Translation): I'm great and God gave me a cross to match my greatness. You fight with great people, not with pipsqueaks. They fight with me as with a great man. They can't comprehend that I was so brave and successful. They're jealous. It's envy. They're cowards. They couldn't do it, but I could. So they do it for those reasons as well.
Critics of the new vetting law think that it fails to pursue the real villains - the paid agents of the security services. They agree the Kaczynskis are more interested in settling old scores than obtaining justice.
WIKTOR OSIATYNSKI: So actually it is very clear that if they have the opportunity to smear, you know, and put dirt on the entire generation of older people, why not use it?
For the last decade Poland has had a vetting or lustration law that covers about 30,000 people in positions of power. The new law radically expanded the scope of the vetting as the head of the archive, Janusz Kurtyka, explains.
JANUSZ KURTYKA, (Translation): There was a fierce public debate about lustration. It centred on defining the scope of this operation, as well as its intensity and depth. How deep into the social fabric it should reach and to how many people it should apply.
Now hundreds of thousands of Poles have been required to sign an affidavit declaring whether or not they collaborated. The Institute of National Remembrance, or IPN, then has the authority to decide who has lied and who has told the truth according to the information it finds in the files.
REPORTER: How long do you think it might take to process a few hundred thousand people?
JANUSZ KURTYKA, (Translation): I think it will be a very lengthy process. It will most definitely take years, rather than months. I believe Poland will need at least ten years to vet such a large number of people and ascertain the truth of their lustration declarations.
10 years is a long wait for people who face losing all they have worked for. Although the government received a mandate for its vetting law at the last election, the issue has divided Poles.
MAN (Translation): In my opinion, we definitely don't need it. This kind of seeking each other out, a kind of hatred It's sowing hatred.
GIRL, (Translation): It's good they're checking who did what in the past.
GIRL 2, (Translation): Although this sort of investigation, to see if someone did something bad, ruining someone's reputation, humiliating him that's not good, either. But I don't know. In one way it's good, in another, it's not.
Victims of communism have always had access to these archives.
EWA BEYNAR – CZECZOTT, (Translation): This file was created in 1959. This is, let me see.. This is the first file I got.
Last year Ewa Beynar-Czeczott applied to the IPN to see the files on her father, the famous historian Pawel Jasienica, who was prohibited from publishing his work under communism. She discovered that her family had been spied on for years.
EWA BEYNAR – CZECZOTT, (Translation): It's as if thieves had entered your home and rifled through your drawers. That's more or less how it makes you feel. I didn't feel the best.
What she found shocked her. This file was written by Ewa's stepmother, Zofia, who spent her entire marriage informing on her husband.
EWA BEYNAR – CZECZOTT, (Translation): No, I didn't expect it. Well, I more or less knew that the lady was no saint, really, but I didn't expect the scale of what I saw there.
Ewa went to court to fight for the copyright to her father's work, which had been inherited by her stepbrother.
EWA BEYNAR – CZECZOTT, (Translation):
These are my father's books.
She won her case last December.
WIKTOR OSIATYNSKI: I was approached by phone and then by meeting with someone who introduced himself as the ministry of interior worker.
For law professor and historian Wiktor Osiatynski, the issue of collaboration is far from black and white. He says the secret police targeted those most active in the resistance, including himself.
WIKTOR OSIATYNSKI: Am I an agent? I think I am not. Am I considered an agent? I don't know. And frankly if I were to sign, to write in the affidavit if I were or not, I would say "I don't know." I know I was not but I don't know how I was classified or how I am classified.
Osiatynski met with the secret police agent four times. Eventually he got drunk enough to denounce him in the coffee shop where they met.
WIKTOR OSIATYNSKI: And I said publicly, "People, do you see this son of a bitch? He is an employee of the secret service, and he is meeting with me, asking me questions. Let's beat the shit out of him." The guy took his briefcase and left. Never after secret service or whoever approached me any longer. So it took me four times and about a pint of vodka to realize that the courage is not that expensive and it's not that risky.
Osiatynski says Poles shouldn't judge those who collaborated too harshly.
WIKTOR OSIATYNSKI: Heroes should have monuments but we cannot ask everybody to deserve a monument. What I am saying is that people had a right even to be broke down, and they are also victims.
In the last few weeks opponents of the law have made progress in the courts. Poland's Constitutional Court has ruled that the scope of the vetting is too broad and breaches civil rights. The Law and Justice Party, however, is determined to see vetting carried out.
WOJCIECH ROSZKOWSKI: We want to clean the house. This is being done by the right-of-centre government. That is not to the liking of the Western left, that is for sure. But we are cleaning the house. We are not oppressing anyone. We are still a country of liberal democracy and the rule of law. Nobody is discriminating anyone. And the message given to the West is sometimes extremely distorted.
WIKTOR OSIATYNSKI: Polish society has never been so divided along the lines that we were supposed to bridge. Dealing with the past is to heal the past, and to let all of us cooperate and work with trust together in the future. This law and this approach is just doing the opposite.
Feature Report: Poles Apart
Reporter/Camera
OLIVIA ROUSSET
Editors
ROWAN TUCKER-EVANS
Subtitling
ZOSIA HOEY
Fixer/Translator
KRZYSZTOF DZIECIOLOWSKI
Additional Footage
Telewizja Polska SA.
Inside Poland's Institute of National Remembrance there are secrets with the power to destroy lives. These tattered old files contain stories gathered by a massive network of spies during Poland's 45 years of Communist rule. Now a new law could open this Pandora's box.
Behind me is some of what remains of the Communist legacy in Poland. Some 90km of secret police files are stored across the country. Under the new law the past of hundreds of thousands of Poles will be scrutinized here.
The government wants to punish people who collaborated with the Communist regime. Janusz Kurtyka is the director of this archive.
JANUSZ KURTYKA, ARCHIVE DIRECTOR, IPN (Translation): The aim of this operation is, first, to reveal the past of people who hold key state positions, secondly, the past of people who occupy key positions in the media or who practise professions which involve public trust.
The new law covers everyone from politicians to journalists and teachers. Those found to have been collaborators would then be banned from working in their professions for 10 years.
ANDRZEJ KRAWCZYK: I was officially informed that I was arrested in this building.
The files have already exposed the past of this man, Andrzej Krawczyk. What happened to him here in 1982 was to destroy his career 25 years later.
ANDRZEJ KRAWCZYK: It was about 6pm. It was dark in Poland in February at 6pm. And I was arrested by the military police.
In December 1981, Poland's Communist regime was threatened by the popularity of the Solidarity movement. The country's leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, sent tanks onto the streets.
GENERAL WOJCIECH JARUSELSKI, (Translation): The Council of State, in accordance with the Constitution, has declared martial law as of midnight across the entire country.
Solidarity was pushed underground. Like many students at the time Krawczyk was active in the resistance, and handed out leaflets like these calling for the end of martial law.
ANDRZEJ KRAWCZYK: I know it was risky and maybe naive to go through streets of Warsaw during martial law with the backpack, but somebody must deliver these leaflets to the factories, to the university.
While in detention, afraid of being separated from his pregnant wife and 2-year-old daughter, Krawczyk signed a statement agreeing to collaborate. He insists he never followed through.
ANDRZEJ KRAWCZYK: I was blackmailed - three years jail or cooperation. It was not free choice. When I was blackmailed, I wasn't free man, I was in jail.
Until January this year Andrzrej Krawczyk was the undersecretary of state to the President, one of the most trusted men in Poland. But then he was told the statement he had signed agreeing to collaborate had come to light. A few days later he was sacked by the President.
ANDRZEJ KRAWCZYK: It was painful for me that nobody tried to talk to me, to ask me about the explanation, to show me this document.
Krawczyk challenged the allegation of collaboration in court, and was cleared earlier this year but he still hasn't heard from the President and is still unemployed. This policy of cleansing former collaborators is called 'lustration', which roughly translates as 'ritual purification'. Others call it McCarthyism.
WIKTOR OSIATYNSKI, LAW PROFESSOR & HISTORIAN: We've had the witch-hunt always in history, quite often, not the first time. And the witch-hunt is precisely about almost collateral damage only. It actually very seldom helps to find the real witches, you know.
REPORTER: It seems that accusation is enough for a lot of people to feel that their lives have been ruined. What safeguards are in place to protect people and assure that there is an accuracy in the files?
JANUSZ KURTYKA, (Translation): I always answer this question fairly unequivocally. We need to remember that the people who suffered under the Communist regime weren't the ones who denounced, the secret collaborators, but the ones who were denounced. The people whose lives could be ruined by one denunciation, one seemingly unimportant word. We must never forget that.
Driving this purge is the ruling Law and Justice Party, or PiS, which is holding its national convention.
SONG, (Translation): With PiS, with PiS, Poland, the tiger of Europe. Beautiful women, strapping blokes, Poland, the tiger of Europe.
Today Poland's right-wing Prime Minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, is promoting his radical agenda.
JAROSLAW KACZYNSKI, POLAND PRIME MINISTER, (Translation): A new Poland can't be built without a great cleansing. It can't be built on the foundations that were created by the late, decomposing communism.
The Prime Minister founded the Law and Justice Party in 2001 with his identical twin brother, Poland's President, Lech Kaczynski. He took office last year promising a moral revolution.
PRIME MINISTER, (Translation): You could say the cleansing is under way. It has already begun and it will continue.
Even Poland's most powerful and trusted institution is being rocked by accusations of collaboration. The Catholic Church was the only institution that openly opposed Communist rule. And John Paul II, the Polish Pope, is often credited with helping bring about democracy. In January this year, Stanislaw Wielgus was supposed to be inaugurated as the archbishop of Warsaw. Instead, he made a shock announcement.
STANISLAW WIELGUS, (Translation): I'm placing in the hands of Your Holiness my resignation from the office of the Archbishop of Warsaw.
CONGREGATION, (Translation): No! No! No!
For several weeks the media had reported that Wielgus had collaborated with the Communists. Nonetheless his resignation devastated his supporters inside and outside the church.
ANNOUNCEMENT, (Translation): We're participating in Holy Mass. Please respect the Archbishop's will.
As a young man who needed official permission to study theology abroad, he had agreed to inform on his fellow priests.
MAN, (Translation): A man is being destroyed only because he wanted to travel abroad to study. The only way to do that then was to sign an insignificant declaration.
One Catholic priest says he saw the scandal coming.
FATHER TADEUSZ ISAKOWICZ – ZALESKI, (Translation): For a few months now I've been feeling like Cassandra who predicted that events like these could happen. I warned the church authorities. Unfortunately, they didn't listen to me. When the scandal about Archbishop Wielgus erupted I felt bitter because it could all have been avoided.
For years Father Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski has been crusading to have the truth known about collaborators within the church.
FATHER TADEUSZ ISAKOWICZ – ZALESKI, (Translation): The question is why a church commission wasn't set up four years ago.
Tonight he is launching his book which exposes 39 priests and bishops who collaborated with the Communist regime.
FATHER TADEUSZ ISAKOWICZ – ZALESKI, (Translation): It was unavoidable. It was growing like a boil. Sooner or later it had to explode.
Like many priests at the time, Zaleski was an activist with the Solidarity movement. Here he is in 1985 after he was dragged from his bed and beaten by Communist agents.
FATHER TADEUSZ ISAKOWICZ – ZALESKI, (Translation): Then I was gagged. They shoved it's over there a gag into my mouth.
The police filmed Zaleski re-enacting the attack a couple of hours later.
FATHER TADEUSZ ISAKOWICZ – ZALESKI, (Translation): Then I was hit here, more or less in this area. And then I was hit on the head several times when I was being lifted up, with a stick.
After the fall of communism Zaleski dug up this tape in the secret police archives. From his own file he discovered that some priests were passing on information about anti-Communist activities in the church. His church superiors told him to destroy the files.
FATHER TADEUSZ ISAKOWICZ – ZALESKI, (Translation): This is a problem of neglecting history, and sadly, history, like an Australian boomerang, has come back and hit Poland. I think there is a bitterness amongst many people - mainly those linked to the Solidarity movement - that this history is like an illness that hasn't been healed. And I think that groups connected with Solidarity want the authentic truth about those years to come out.
The fact that the truth hasn't come out until now has a lot to do with how Poland made the transition from communism to democracy. I've come to the city of Gdansk, where the Solidarity movement began 27 years ago.
In 1980, an unemployed electrician scaled the walls of this Gdansk shipyard and gave an impromptu speech that changed the history of this country. The Solidarity movement was born, and its leader, Lech Walesa, provided the spark that marked the beginning of the end of communism.
LECH WALESA, (Translation): Let them show me one man who believed we'd get away from the Soviets and smash communism. One man in the whole world at that time. I don't know any.
In 1989, after years of martial law, negotiations were finally held between the Communists and Solidarity, paving the way for democracy in Poland. Solidarity agreed to draw a thick line between the past and present, which meant not opening the secret police archives and not seeking retribution. The following year Lech Walesa was sworn in as president.
LECH WALESA, (Translation): Poland was the first to make reforms. Poland made compromises with the Communists. Poland created a chance to cleanse and destroy documents but that's the price you pay for being a leader.
WOKCIECH ROSZKOWSKI, MEMBER OF EUROPEAN PARILIAMENT: I think that Walesa went wrong soon after he was elected.
Wokciech Roszkowski is a Member of the European Parliament for the ruling Law and Justice Party. He thinks Walesa should have introduced vetting when he became president.
WOKCIECH ROSZKOWSKI: He ran for presidency in 1990 under the slogan "A new beginning, clearing," and so forth and so on. When he got into the Presidential Palace he started doing the other things, exactly the opposite things.
Walesa claims it was the best that could have been done at the time.
LECH WALESA, (Translation): Of course I'd like to be young, beautiful and rich. And to do more. Gladly. But with what and how? In a democratic country I could do nothing more. Absolutely nothing.
His detractors won't let him off the hook so easily. Many, even from his own ranks, have actually accused the Nobel Prize-winner of being a collaborator himself.
LECH WALESA, (Translation): I laughed and I've been laughing to this day. I've proved 300% it was nonsense. I hunted down people who had doubts, I took them to court, and I won two cases. I've won all of them. Can I prove more than that?
It took Walesa seven years to clear his name, and he blames the campaign against him on his comrades-turned-rivals, the Kaczynski twins. They too were a part of Solidarity, but had a falling out with Walesa in the early '90s.
LECH WALESA, (Translation): I'm great and God gave me a cross to match my greatness. You fight with great people, not with pipsqueaks. They fight with me as with a great man. They can't comprehend that I was so brave and successful. They're jealous. It's envy. They're cowards. They couldn't do it, but I could. So they do it for those reasons as well.
Critics of the new vetting law think that it fails to pursue the real villains - the paid agents of the security services. They agree the Kaczynskis are more interested in settling old scores than obtaining justice.
WIKTOR OSIATYNSKI: So actually it is very clear that if they have the opportunity to smear, you know, and put dirt on the entire generation of older people, why not use it?
For the last decade Poland has had a vetting or lustration law that covers about 30,000 people in positions of power. The new law radically expanded the scope of the vetting as the head of the archive, Janusz Kurtyka, explains.
JANUSZ KURTYKA, (Translation): There was a fierce public debate about lustration. It centred on defining the scope of this operation, as well as its intensity and depth. How deep into the social fabric it should reach and to how many people it should apply.
Now hundreds of thousands of Poles have been required to sign an affidavit declaring whether or not they collaborated. The Institute of National Remembrance, or IPN, then has the authority to decide who has lied and who has told the truth according to the information it finds in the files.
REPORTER: How long do you think it might take to process a few hundred thousand people?
JANUSZ KURTYKA, (Translation): I think it will be a very lengthy process. It will most definitely take years, rather than months. I believe Poland will need at least ten years to vet such a large number of people and ascertain the truth of their lustration declarations.
10 years is a long wait for people who face losing all they have worked for. Although the government received a mandate for its vetting law at the last election, the issue has divided Poles.
MAN (Translation): In my opinion, we definitely don't need it. This kind of seeking each other out, a kind of hatred It's sowing hatred.
GIRL, (Translation): It's good they're checking who did what in the past.
GIRL 2, (Translation): Although this sort of investigation, to see if someone did something bad, ruining someone's reputation, humiliating him that's not good, either. But I don't know. In one way it's good, in another, it's not.
Victims of communism have always had access to these archives.
EWA BEYNAR – CZECZOTT, (Translation): This file was created in 1959. This is, let me see.. This is the first file I got.
Last year Ewa Beynar-Czeczott applied to the IPN to see the files on her father, the famous historian Pawel Jasienica, who was prohibited from publishing his work under communism. She discovered that her family had been spied on for years.
EWA BEYNAR – CZECZOTT, (Translation): It's as if thieves had entered your home and rifled through your drawers. That's more or less how it makes you feel. I didn't feel the best.
What she found shocked her. This file was written by Ewa's stepmother, Zofia, who spent her entire marriage informing on her husband.
EWA BEYNAR – CZECZOTT, (Translation): No, I didn't expect it. Well, I more or less knew that the lady was no saint, really, but I didn't expect the scale of what I saw there.
Ewa went to court to fight for the copyright to her father's work, which had been inherited by her stepbrother.
EWA BEYNAR – CZECZOTT, (Translation):
These are my father's books.
She won her case last December.
WIKTOR OSIATYNSKI: I was approached by phone and then by meeting with someone who introduced himself as the ministry of interior worker.
For law professor and historian Wiktor Osiatynski, the issue of collaboration is far from black and white. He says the secret police targeted those most active in the resistance, including himself.
WIKTOR OSIATYNSKI: Am I an agent? I think I am not. Am I considered an agent? I don't know. And frankly if I were to sign, to write in the affidavit if I were or not, I would say "I don't know." I know I was not but I don't know how I was classified or how I am classified.
Osiatynski met with the secret police agent four times. Eventually he got drunk enough to denounce him in the coffee shop where they met.
WIKTOR OSIATYNSKI: And I said publicly, "People, do you see this son of a bitch? He is an employee of the secret service, and he is meeting with me, asking me questions. Let's beat the shit out of him." The guy took his briefcase and left. Never after secret service or whoever approached me any longer. So it took me four times and about a pint of vodka to realize that the courage is not that expensive and it's not that risky.
Osiatynski says Poles shouldn't judge those who collaborated too harshly.
WIKTOR OSIATYNSKI: Heroes should have monuments but we cannot ask everybody to deserve a monument. What I am saying is that people had a right even to be broke down, and they are also victims.
In the last few weeks opponents of the law have made progress in the courts. Poland's Constitutional Court has ruled that the scope of the vetting is too broad and breaches civil rights. The Law and Justice Party, however, is determined to see vetting carried out.
WOJCIECH ROSZKOWSKI: We want to clean the house. This is being done by the right-of-centre government. That is not to the liking of the Western left, that is for sure. But we are cleaning the house. We are not oppressing anyone. We are still a country of liberal democracy and the rule of law. Nobody is discriminating anyone. And the message given to the West is sometimes extremely distorted.
WIKTOR OSIATYNSKI: Polish society has never been so divided along the lines that we were supposed to bridge. Dealing with the past is to heal the past, and to let all of us cooperate and work with trust together in the future. This law and this approach is just doing the opposite.
Feature Report: Poles Apart
Reporter/Camera
OLIVIA ROUSSET
Editors
ROWAN TUCKER-EVANS
Subtitling
ZOSIA HOEY
Fixer/Translator
KRZYSZTOF DZIECIOLOWSKI
Additional Footage
Telewizja Polska SA.