Among its many strengths the Hoover Institution Archives boasts the largest and most comprehensive documentation on twentieth-century Poland outside Poland. A very substantial part of these archives is from the period of World War II and includes large collections of documents generated by various institutions and agencies, as well as the leaders of the London-based Free Polish government in exile. Less numerous are the archives of ordinary individuals and families; the just received family papers of Krystyna Sklenarz and Stanislaw Bokota fall into that category.
Krystyna M. Sklenarz and Stanislaw Bokota, who would become husband and wife, were both from middle-class families in southeast Poland when the war started in September of 1939. Their families were divided by the war, with some members living under German occupation, others under Soviet, and several able to escape to the West. Both children experienced the brutal conditions of being deported to Soviet Kazakhstan; Krystyna lost a younger sister to hunger and disease. In the end they were the lucky ones, surviving the horrors and able to leave the USSR in 1942 because of “amnesty” for Polish citizens and the evacuation of some of the survivors to Iran. They were both educated in the West, and eventually met and married in the United States. Krystyna, a psychiatrist, died a year ago; Stanislaw, a retired US Department of Commerce economist, lives in Indiana.
The Sklenarz-Bokota archives include personal documents, photographs, and reminiscences of both Krystyna and Stanislaw. Additionally, the papers contain the photographs, documents, clippings, and memoirs of Stanislaw’s father, Colonel Jozef Bokota, a decorated cavalry veteran of the 1920 Polish-Soviet war, the September 1939 campaign, and the clandestine Home Army.
