The Stories Polish Secret Police Files Tell Us

Guest: Anna Krakus is an assistant professor of Slavic Languages and Literature, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She specializes in Polish cinema and in the Cold War period Polish secret police files. She’s the author of No End in Sight: Polish Cinema During Late Socialism published by University of Pittsburgh Press. Music: Bauhaus, “The Spy in the Cab,” In the Flatfield, 1980. Here’s a partial transcript to whet your appetite.  If you like these transcripts and want to read more, then support them by becoming a patron of the SRB Podcast. This abridged version of the interview has been edited for clarity. Look out for the full audio version soon. What attracted you to the study of Polish secret police files? It started in 2009. I was a grad student at NYU. My advisor was Cristina Vatulescu, who had written a book about the Romanian Securitate files. One day, she very casually asked me, “Do you know anything about Michel Foucault’s secret police file from Poland?” The background to that is that every biography on Michel Foucault states that he was in Poland for a year in the 1950s. He was a cultural attaché to the ambassador. He had an affair with a young translator, who set a honey trap. The translator was an agent or a collaborator with the secret police. Foucault is subsequently deported. This is a story that’s told and retold in all his official biographies, but it’s unverified. Cristina Vatulescu basically asked, “Can we verify this? Do you want to go check it out, and we can co-author something?” It just sounded so exciting. I had read her work, and to do it together, but also to go and look at it myself was really exciting. So, I went. It turned out to be a lot harder than I expected because his file was not readily available. It’s 10 years later, and we’re finally publishing an article about it. I’m not going to give away any of our twists and turns, but through this process of looking for his file, I just found a deep passion for it myself because as a scholar of literature and film, which is what I am, you like stories. You’re interested in stories about people, and here you’re in a library of lives just reading about the minutiae of people’s lives. It was just fascinating. So, I was working on the Foucault project, but also found all these independent projects along the way, and that’s how it started. Talk about the process of these Polish police files becoming public because in one article you describe the process as slow and a highly political process. Why were they so controversial to be released? It goes back to the fall of socialism in Poland in 1989. The first prime minister after the Cold War ends says that, “We’re going to draw a thick line,” he calls it, “between ourselves and history.” Meaning we’re going to take a forgiving stance. We’re going to forget about what happened. We’re not going to pursue collaborators. We’re not going to punish the people from the former regime. There’s this thick line. So, when all of a sudden in the mid- to late 1990s, they’re not just going back into the past with the opening of police files. They’re dragging out the ugliest parts of the past. People who were collaborating in secret, and so on. So, it creates a tension with this basic idea of the new Poland that we’re going to be forgiving.