ARCHIVES

PHOTOGRAPHS

AUDIOVISUAL

MEDALS AND BADGES

STAMPS

PRESS

LIBRARY

 
The collecting of archives is one of the basic goals and activities of the Institute. Today the Institute has the largest collection of documents on the history of Poland of all Polonian institutions in America. Only the Hoover Institute at Stanford University in California can boast of a larger collection.

The archives of the Institute came from two main sources. The first one was the prewar Pilsudski Institute for Research in the Modern History of Poland in Warsaw; the second source was donations from various Polonian organizations in America, diplomatic posts, and bequests from individuals. Some collections were created from materials gathered for exhibits or commemorations of events or individuals. Often these collections consist of press clippings, brochures and other publications, photographs or even copies of documents in other collections.

The Institute collects documents related to the modern history of Poland, though some date back to the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, such as the archive of Walerian Platonow, purchased in 1955 from Ksenia Denikin, which covers the period from 1818 to 1865.

Undoubtedly, the most valuable part of the Institute's archives is the above-mentioned archive of the prewar Pilsudski Institute in Warsaw, which was saved during World War II. Evacuated at the outset of war in September 1939 to Romania, these archives, known as the Belweder Archives, were cataloged by Major Bronislaw Waligora and Captain Stanislaw Librewski. From Romania the archives were transported to France, then to Lisbon, whence they traveled to the United States, eventually finding a safe home in the Pilsudski Institute of America.

This part of the archives consists of the following units:

Archives for the years 1918-1922 of the Adjutant-General to the Supreme Commander, Jozef Pilsudski; The 1926 Liquidation Commission Report of General Lucjan Zeligowski; Judicial proceedings involving senior military personnel (1915-36); The Ukrainian Military Mission in Poland (1919-1931); The Silesian Uprisings (1919-1922).

The largest part of the archives comes from the United States, documenting the life of Polonia and of the many statesmen, politicians and senior military officers who made their way to the United States. The wartime archives of the National Committee of Americans of Polish Descent, of the Polish American Congress and of the Polish Defense Committee can also be found in the Institute, which also holds personal archives of Jozef Lipski, Michael Sokolnicki, Juliusz Lukasiewicz, gen. Kazimierz Sosnkowski, gen. Wladyslaw Bortnowski, Jan Weinstein, Wladyslaw Pobog-Malinowski and Tadeusz Katelbach. Also included in this section are the archives of many diplomatic posts and Polish government agencies, such as The Polish Consulate General in New York and Polish Information Center, which came to the Institute, in various ways, after the U.S. Government withdrew, in 1945, its recognition of the Polish Government in exile. As might be expected, one of the most comprehensive collections is that of Jozef Pilsudski for the years 1882-1996. Its contents came from many sources, including the Belweder archives, individual donations and the many articles and publications on Jozef Pilsudski.

The Institute has been keeping up-to-date donated personal archives with documents which became available afterwards. This practice evolved partly because the archivists tending the Institute archives were not professionals who might have handled such documents differently. It is worth noting that in spite of difficult conditions and the lack of funds, the Institute's archives have been well documented, maintained and protected, enabling scholars to obtain materials which were not easily accessible elsewhere, or had been destroyed.. Moreover, in the 1970s most of the important collections had been microfilmed.

The Institute's archives have been thoroughly modernized in 2002. All documents have been placed in acid-free folders and file boxes, and have been placed on new well-ventilated shelves, thus gaining space for new acquisitions. All contents have been thoroughly checked and will be described and entered in the SEZAM database, which will be available on this website in a matter of few months. This will be followed by detailed, computerized inventories of the individual archival units. All this means that the archives of the Institute are one of the best organized in the field of Polonian archives, and one of the largest and most valuable sources of documents on Polish history to be found outside of Poland.