The following is a press release issued by the Institute of National Remembrance (in Poland):
The straty.pl database is an intangible memorial to all those who suffered during World War II, said IPN President Karol Nawrocki, Ph.D. at the press conference related to the IPN project “Personal losses and victims of repression under German occupation in the years 1939-1945.”
On 6 September 2024, a press conference was held at the President Lech Kaczynski Central History Point in Warsaw, regarding the IPN project “Personal losses and victims of repression under German occupation in 1939-1945.” Its result is a publicly accessible online database known as the straty.pl database.
The database allows the users to set queries (searching by type, place and year of repression). It can also be used by historians and journalists. It does not contain scans of documents on the basis of which the data are entered, but it indicates the places where these documents can be found.
Since January 2020, 912,000 new records have been entered into the straty.pl database. Today there are 5.5 million records in our database. There is no family in Poland that has not been affected by the tragedy of World War II to some extent. I would like to appeal to all those who have such a family history to turn to the Institute of National Remembrance so that our work can be completed next year. On the one hand, it is a database of materials that are in the IPN Archive, prosecution materials, investigative materials from the Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, but on the other hand, it is also information that comes from you all, said the IPN President during the conference.
The Director of the IPN Archive Marzena Kruk informed that the IPN archival collection amounts to nearly 4 km of archival materials that relate to the period of World War II.
As of 2 September 2024, the database provides information on 5,565,892 victims and people repressed by the German regime, including Archbishop Antoni Julian Nowowiejski, Henryk Ząbek, Maria Hiszpańska-Neumann, as well as two women: Irena Szydlowska and Anna Stolowska, whose wedding rings were found as a result of search work in the Valley of Death in Chojnice.
The press conference was accompanied by an exhibition of documents and artifacts prepared by the IPN Archive, including files stored in matchboxes.
We encourage you to report information about your relatives repressed by the Germans, who are not included in our database yet. We would like also to encourage other institutions to join the project by providing information.
Video of the conference on the IPNtv channel: https://straty.pl/.