The Institute of National Remembrance will make an extensive catalogue with the names of people who collaborated with the communist secret service accessible for journalists and researchers this month.  

The catalogue will contain thirty times more information than the so-called Wildstein List, an index of 240,000 names of communist era security police officers and their informers, mingled with those of their victims.  

The so-called ‘Wildstein List’ was smuggled out of the Institute of National Remembrance  (IPN) - a body investigating Nazi and communist-era crimes -  by right-wing journalist Bronislaw Wildstein and published by him four years ago on the internet. The disclosure of the names of secret police agents, informers and those who were under surveillance, resulted in a fiery national debate concerning the vetting process and initiated several vetting trails.  

The new data base will be ready at the end of the month. For the time being it will be available only internally, on the institute’s premises. “The data is fit for external use but we decided not to place it on the web,” said Janusz Kurtyka, the head of IPN.  

Researchers from the Institute of National Remembrance assure that the new catalogue will serve its purpose much better than the old one. It will be possible to identify anyone because the list will contain materials also of those, whose files were damaged.  

The catalogue will comprise files of people who co-operated with communist secret services as well as those who were persecuted by them, such as John Paul II and Solidarity priest, Jerzy Popieluszko. (mg/pg) 

Source: Rzeczpospolita