In 1951, the communist governments of Poland and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics concluded an agreement to exchange some territories. Poland transferred lands located in the Hrubieszów and Tomaszów counties in the Lublin Voivodeship in the upper Bug basin (the so-called Grzęda Sokalska). The USSR gave up the area in the Bieszczady Mountains east of the upper reaches of the San River, including the town of Ustrzyki Dolne. The mentioned areas were part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Areas of 480 km2 for each side were exchanged. Poland and the USRS had to evict their citizens from the ceded areas and take away their movable property. Soviet Ukraine resettled 32,066 people. Poland over 14 thousand its citizens. Both sides had to provide care and state assistance to the displaced population. However, the grief for the lost „small homelands” remained among Poles and Ukrainians. Only a few managed to return to their hometowns in the Bieszczady Mountains after 1957, including: to Łobozewo, Teleśnica Oszwarowa and Polana. The return involved a change of citizenship. The exchange of some territories is sometimes referred to as “Action H-T”, from the first letters of the names of the Hrubieszów and Tomaszów counties from which Polish citizens were expelled. In turn, the term “Action-51” appears in Ukrainian literature. The border change made in 1951 was the largest in the post-war history of Poland.

In the first years after World War II, the effects of the war were eliminated, industry was nationalized, agriculture was collectivized, and annexed areas were merged with the rest of the country. In Lower Silesia, the Polish authorities wanted to implement a development plan. To this end, it was necessary to launch and develop industrial and agricultural production and to prepare means of transport and communication. The task was difficult because the new terrain required solving the problems of social issues, ordering and activating industry and taking initiatives in the area of educational and cultural life. The establishment of enterprises and industrial plants in Lower Silesia was associated with the preparation of an educational and cultural offer for employees, which took the following forms: libraries, common rooms, reading rooms and dance, theater, music, ballet and company orchestras. An important role in the above activities was played by the media: newsreel and Lower Silesian press. They published information about the initiatives of the management of workplaces in the direction of promoting the activity of spending free time by workers and the creation of new places for the development of interests and opportunities for innovative activities. The economic development of the Recovered Territories after the war took place in complex political and social conditions. The problem was the post-war chaos and the limited possibilities of the state, which did not have adequate financial and material resources that had to be allocated for reconstruction. The aim of this article is to present educational initiatives in factories and plants in Lower Silesia after World War II. Drawing attention to the implementation of ideological and political assumptions through the prism of cultural activities with the use of local press.

The article concerns selected aspects of the housing policy of “people’s” Poland, due to the adaptation of new legal regulations regarding the housing market in the post-Stalinist period. They are shown against the background of normative acts and the actual situation in the first, post-war decade of communist rule in Poland. The actual exclusive electrical installation was also presented: Elbląg and Wąbrzeźno. The basis of the article was the literature on the subject, legal acts regarding housing management in the “Journal of Laws” and “Monitor Polski”, as well as archival documents, providing access to selected cities during the communist period for socio-economic purposes.

The Toruń Security Service tried with extraordinary zeal to dismantle underground structures, especially secret printing houses and distribution structures. For this purpose, informers were used and the information obtained from them was carefully collected. All found copies of leaflets, underground leaflets, posters, etc. were also carefully collected. By January 11, 1982, the Security Service in Toruń had collected a collection of 172 leaflets, into which (as well as subsequent leaflets), the prosecutor’s office initiated an official investigation. They continued until the fall of 1983. The article discusses the methods of operation of the Security Service in Toruń in order to crack down on the Solidarity underground. Searches, interrogations (sometimes brutal), informers and technical means (e.g. wiretapping) were used.

From 1975, as part of the operation code-named “Zapora” carried out by the Security Service, counterintelligence operations are documented as having been carried out with the aim of protecting facilities and units of the Polish and Soviet Army in Piła Voivodeship. Department II of KWMO/WUSW in Piła, in cooperation with WSW and MO, kept diplomats and foreigners from Western countries under surveillance. This control extended to the monitoring of all persons, regardless of nationality, in the areas adjacent to the facilities and those employed in enterprises providing services to the Polish Army. These persons of interest were identified as part of operational checks and registration questionnaires, using numerous secret collaborators and personal contacts. As a part of “Zapora”, major military exercises such as “OPAL 87” and “Przyjaźń 87” were also safeguarded. Operation „Zapora” was completed in January 1990.

The participation of the Catholic Church in the systemic changes in Poland is unquestionable. The significant role of church hierarchs, middle- and lower-level pastors in accelerating the erosion of the communist dictatorship in Poland over the years, and especially in the last decade of the Polish People’s Republic, is unquestionable. Analogous processes of political, social, economic and cultural changes taking place in neighboring countries where Catholicism was the dominant religion were also stimulated to a large extent by representatives of the clergy. However, the issue of the importance of the Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union for the systemic changes at the end of the 1980s remains slightly more complicated. Therefore, the article compares two powerful Churches, Catholic and Orthodox, from the point of view of analogy and diff erences in the role, influence and importance of these institutions for the collapse of both authoritarian systems.

Biography of one of the priests (members of the Society of Jesus) living and working in the Vilnius region in the first half of the 20th century; persecuted by the Soviet authorities for his pastoral activities; one of the confessors and spiritual directors and the author of one of the first studies on the life and spirituality of Sister Wanda Boniszewska CSA – a Polish mystic and stigmatic.

The process of settling accounts with the communist past is an answer to the question for countries that are leaving communism through peaceful negotiations with the authorities. In the case of the Polish control system, the first non-communist introduction by Tadeusz Mazowiecki, which is used as the socalled ‘thick line’, it leaked that the problem of lustration and decommunization had been postponed. In the subsequent years of the 1990s, verification tests among people performing the most important functions ended in failure. The most serious consequences occurred in the attempt to implement the lustration resolution by the Sejm in May 1992, which resulted from the failure of Jan Olszewski’s actions. The first lustration act was issued in Poland only in 1997.

Following the end of second World War, 48 percent area of the Second Polish Republic was incorporated into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic. A significant number of Polish citizens remained in the annexed areas and along with them their pastors. As for members of the Society of St. Francis de Sales (Salesians), ten remained in the areas incorporated into the USSR, who helped organize the religious life of the faithful under very difficult circumstances. They maintained contact with the religious congregation in Poland, mostly it was limited to correspondence and short visits on the occasion of family visits to Poland. The source presents notes from the stay in the USSR of Fr. Stanisław Rokita SDB, who in 1973 was the first Salesian superior to visit his congregation remaining in the East.

The present text is a contribution to the reinterpretation of the poetic biography of Czeslaw Milosz, with a particular emphasis on the threads that can contribute to an insightful reinterpretation of the famous work “Whom You Wronged”. The author touches on the future Nobel Prize winner’s ties with the Żagary poetic group, recalls the catastrophic motifs in his work and, above all, focuses on the aforementioned work in the context of an analysis of wrong – doing and wrong-doer, power and faithful servility, putting into discussion the hitherto exposed attempts at interpretation.