Aresztowany dziennik. O Kamieniołomach Jerzego Kornackiego

Abstract

On arresting Jerzy Kornacki in September 1961, militia confiscated over a dozen of volumes of his unpublished journal entitled The Quarry [Kamieniołomy]. The notes he had made since 1943 were not included in the indictment and, formally, were not connected with sentencing the writer to one year of imprisonment. Nevertheless, the Security Service officials decided that this controversial panorama of the Polish post-war reality should be classified. The author never managed to regain his writings. Only after his death, as a result of the transformation in June 1990, they have been returned to Kornacki's heirs. The majorty of the journal's content is still unknown to the public. Researchers are challenged by the scarcity of copies prepared in the early 1960s by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, their fragments being available in the Institute of National Remembrance and the Central Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw. Describing the story of those materials, the author of this article poses questions whether and how we should use them.