Działalność Biura Informacji i Poszukiwań Polskiego Czerwonego Krzyża. Wybrane zagadnienia
The operations of the Polish Red Cross Tracing and Information Bureau. Selected issues

Summary/Abstract: The acknowledgement of moral suffering as one of the greatest tragedies which war brings in its wake, gave rise, at the end of the 19 century, to the widespread emergence of national information services. The Polish Tracing and Information Bureau came into being in 1918 and from the very beginning it was one of the most active institutions of this type. Amongst its main tasks were, and still are, the collection and registration of all information with regard to prisoners of war, receiving under deposit personal items and documents belonging to prisoners of war and le behind during their repatriation, release, escape or death, collecting and registering all information which may help in the identification of the dead, wounded or missing, as well as passing on the information to their closest relatives, facilitating correspondence between members of divided families when all other connections have been broken off, tracing missing persons, as well as those of whom their relatives have no information, obtaining documents from institutions and administrations, issuing various types of document e.g. certification of captivity or death, and travel documents, tracing the victims of war, armed conflict and natural disaster, searching for war graves, participating in the exhumation of war victims, and passing on messages (the Red Cross messaging system) to and from countries caught up in armed conflict. The most difficult period in the Polish Service’s activity was the period of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. The loss of the archives twice during the war, the impediments placed in the way by the Polish authorities and the lack of access to Soviet documents and to the millions of people in need of help meant that discharging the tasks with which it was entrusted became exceptionally difficult. Even now, more than sixty years a er the end of the war, it is ma ers relating to the war which predominate in the work of the Tracing and Information Bureau of the Polish Red Cross.

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