Ośrodek Karta

The Karta Center (Ośrodek Karta) is a non-government organization, which came into existence in 1991. Its history is closely related with the periodic "Karta" which was published in the 80's in independent editorial movement. The main purpose of Karta Center is documentation and dissemination the modern history of Poland and Eastern Europe. It leads various undertakings in education, collection and edition of historical materials.The History Meeting House (www.dsh.waw.pl), at 20 Karowa Street in Warsaw, operates independently of the KARTA Centre. It opened its doors on 1 March 2006 as a municipal institution of culture. Its mission is to facilitate intergenerational and international contacts with testimonies to the twentieth-century history of Poland and Central and Eastern Europe. It conducts its work using resources amassed by the KARTA Centre and other institutions. In 2004 it opened its multimedia exhibition “Europa XX wieku: oblicza totalitaryzmu” (Europe in the twentieth century: the faces of totalitarianism).

The most important forms of Karta Center activity are, for example:

• The East Archive (Archiwum Wschodnie): documentation of the history of Poles in the East territory of Poland (Kresy) and USSR after 1939.
• The Archive of Opposition: social resistance against communism in 1944-1989.
• The Archive of Photographs: over 190 000 photographs from 1890-1990.
• The Archive of Oral History: over 2500 reports and memoirs recorded in 1987-2007.
• The Archive of "Close History" (Archiwum Historii Bliskiej): collection of over 6700 essays prepared by over 11 000 pupils of secondary schools, which described the history of villages and towns in all regions of Poland. The Karta Center also is an initiator of the following undertakings:
• The Archival Emergency (Pogotowie Archiwalne): protection of all endangered documents and archival holdings.
• Database of Poles repressed in the USSR in 1939-1959.
• "Opposition in PRL": history of anticommunist opposition in Poland and the database of its activists in 1956-1989.
• Database of repressed people in 1981-1989.
• Database of "Polish-Ukrainian Conflict" in 40's. KARTA also has a photographic archive, where photographs documenting events of the twentieth century are collected. Among its holdings are a collection of photographs and documents that belonged to Herbert Joost, a non-commissioned officer serving in the Wehrmacht who fell on the Eastern front in 1942, photographs from the ghetto in Zawiercie, and around 1,300 photographs taken by the Jewish photographer Chaim Berman in Kozienice (in the late 1930s and during the war, up to 1941). The website www.fotohistoria.pl offers access to some 14,000 unique photographs from Archiwum Polskiej Agencji Prasowej (the Archive of the Polish Press Agency) documenting twentieth-century social history, 980 of which date from the period 1939-1945. The centre publishes the periodical Karta, several dozen issues of which have to date come out. Another product of the KARTA Centre’s publishing activity is the series “Żydzi Polscy” (Polish Jews), comprising several volumes, among them Calek Perechodnik’s Spowiedź and Chaim Icel Goldstein’s Bunkier. There is also access to interviews conducted as part of a number of projects in the series Historia Mówiona (Oral History); one of particular interest is the Mauthausen Survivors Documentation Project – Ocaleni z Mauthausen.

A. Skibinska (ed.), chapter 5.