Karta, Poland

KARTA came into being at the beginning of the 80’s as an anticommunist underground periodical. It was created by people who wanted to introduce to the democratic opposition a new style of thinking about society and politics. They were trying to escape from the current politics into the realm of the unsaid and often distorted by the communist regime recent history of Poland and Central-Eastern Europe. They focused on the occupation of Eastern Europe and Poland by the Soviet Union as well as on the events that took place after the end of World War II, to which they came by confronting individual testimonies of surviving victims of the totalitarian system. That was a way of bringing into the collective consciousness some of the most difficult themes: deportation to the Soviet Union, life in the Soviet labor camps, emigration, March 1968, Polish-Jewish relations’ history and the painful absence of Jews in contemporary Poland. Today the KARTA Center is a non-government, non-profit organization working on the accumulation and distribution of knowledge about current Polish history. The working method is based on the assumption that only a personal contact with eye-witnesses may enable an understanding of the true spirit of the times. Among the many different ways of telling about history, the most universal is always giving voice to the direct participants of the events, to the witnesses of history. The Center publishes the historical quarterly „Karta” and other various library publications, has historical archives and engages in projects connected to the spread of current history’s knowledge. In 2005 the Center initialized the activity of the History Meeting House, a self-governing cultural institution that presents to a wider audience the achievements of KARTA through permanent and temporary exhibitions, educational activities, film projections, meetings with historical witnesses, historians and artists, as well as disclosure of the Center’s archives to the public.

www.karta.org.pl