The First Months at the Office of the Prime Minister
On September 1, 2008, I became Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s advisor and his special commissioner for the Museum of the Second World War. This enabled me to take the first organizational steps, even before the Museum was formally established a few months later by the minister of culture. I invited Piotr M. Majewski and Janusz Marszalec to join me. Piotr worked at the Historical Institute of the University of Warsaw as well as at the historical magazineMówią Wieki. We became acquainted when Majewski submitted his articles toMówią Wieki in the 1990s. At the time, I was an editor in the magazine’s twentieth-century history department. Piotr specialized in the history of Czechoslovakia and the diplomacy of the 1930s and 1940s. He had published very highly regarded and award-winning works on Edvard Beneš, Sudeten Germans, and the Munich crisis. I had known Janusz Marszalec, a graduate in history from the Catholic University of Lublin, since 2000, when we created together the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN). In the summer of that year, after being appointed director of the Public Education Office and becoming its first employee, I found a pile of CVs submitted to the Office by historians who were seeking employment. I chose Janusz, who was the best candidate to create a branch of the Office in Gdańsk. His expertise was in the Polish Underground State, a wartime resistance organization; his PhD, enthusiastically received by historians, dealt with the security forces of the Home Army during the Warsaw Uprising.
After a few months, at the turn of 2009, Rafał Wnuk joined our museum trio. Rafał, was a professor of history at the Catholic University of Lublin as well as head of the Public Education Office in the Lublin Institute of National Remembrance. He was an expert—in my opinion the most knowledgeable in Poland—on the underground independence movement in Poland after 1945, and he also specialized in Polish intelligence during the Second World War. He was a member of the Polish-British government commission to examine the wartime activities of Polish intelligence; as part of this task force, he had conducted archival research in London and Washington, DC. Wnuk was also the coordinator and editor in chief of the monumentalAtlas of the Pro-Independence Underground in Poland, 1944 – 1956. The latter was a true magnum opus that chronicled all major actions undertaken by various resistance units. However, Wnuk’s critical position on the term “cursed soldiers,” used as a token of admiration by Law and Justice followers to describe anti-Communist armed postwar opposition, earned him many enemies on the political Right
