Poland's Communist informers caught red-handed on the Net [View All]

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tHE Indepdendent
By Kamil Tchorek in Warsaw
15 February 2005


Poles have been logging on to the internet in record numbers this week after a journalist accidentally posted the names of tens of thousands of Communist-era police informers on a website.

The question: "Are you a spy?" is now being heard everywhere, from family gatherings and parliamentary debates to bars and nightclubs.

It is all the work of Bronislaw Wildstein, a journalist who legally made a copy of a secret police file in Poland's National Remembrance Institute containing the names of thousands of secret police collaborators, informers and the citizens they were monitoring.

But to the shock and fascination of the nation ­ and the embarrassment of Mr Wildstein ­ his list of about 240,000 names made its way from his computer, via a chain of colleagues and friends, on to an anonymous website with a dedicated search engine.

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=611194