On February 16, 2016, Maria Kiszczak, widow of General Czesław Kiszczak, brought a single page from the files of the secret collaborator "Bolek" to the Institute of National Remembrance. That evening, an IPN prosecutor seized six bundles of documents, approximately fifty kilograms of paper, from her home. All of Poland was talking about "Kiszczak's wardrobe" and "Bolek's" file, and the dispute over Lech Wałęsa dominated the debate. This film tells a different story: what the Polish Minister of Internal Affairs kept to himself for decades, what was missing from his archives, and where those documents are today.

We show what was really contained in the documents from Kiszczak's home. They include manuscripts of memoirs, materials for biography, and letters from Cardinals Glemp and Macharski. There's also an original letter from Adam Michnik from the Rakowiecka detention center, defense drafts regarding martial law and the "Wujek" mine, and over 1,300 photographs from Zawrat, Magdalenka, and the Round Table.

We compare these with documents that were not found in the general's home. The first is a note regarding the death of Grzegorz Przemyk. The second is a dispatch from US Ambassador John Davis from August 1989. The third is a judgment declaring martial law the work of an armed criminal group. We also discuss the destruction of Security Service files in the years 1989-1990, at the ministry headed by Kiszczak. Finally, we show how part of the general's archive ended up at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. Among them is a previously unknown letter to President Wałęsa from 1993.

This is the history of the Polish People's Republic told through documents. The protagonists are the general, his widow, the security service archives, and documents that had been circulating outside state archives for years.

The film was based on publicly available sources. We used the Institute of National Remembrance's announcements from February and March 2016 about documents seized from Maria Kiszczak's home, as well as the IPN's announcement about the Supreme Court's decision from March 31, 2016. Materials from the Przystanek Historia website and the IPN documentary film "Potargana historia" (A Tattered History) were helpful. We also used a dispatch from the United States Embassy from August 11, 1989, published by the Cold War International History Project. A significant source was the journalistic investigation by "Rzeczpospolita" and Polish Radio from December 2018 about Kiszczak's archive at the Hoover Institution. We also drew on Maciej Siekierski's article in the yearbook "From the Research on Books and Historical Collections" and Kamil Szewczyk's book "Kiszczakowa. The General's Secrets." We also included reports from the Polish Press Agency, RMF FM, TVN24, Polsat News, "Polityka," "Wprost," and the dzieje.pl website. We also utilized historical texts from the websites Histmag and Nauka w Polsce about the destruction of SB files. Where the accounts are disputed or come from a single source, we explicitly address this in the film.