Polish People’s Army Colonel. On Concealments in the Biographical Narrative

Abstract

The paper undertakes the issue of concealments in the biographical narrative of Polish communist government’s functionaries. It is a study of various strategies of avoiding telling the stories about the period of PRL, based on a fourteen-hour narrative interview with a retired colonel of Polish People’s Army. The author proposes a continuum of these strategies, which extends from the de-politicization of narrator’s participation in the previous system, through the strategy of minimal concessions to taking off responsibility for the participation in the system. Acording to the author, the continuum can be a first step to creating a more complex model that would be a useful tool for improving the efficiency of research on the functionaries of the previous system. The continuum is also aimed at proposing to start a reflection on the issue of concealment in such research, which seems to be particularly important in the current situation of consistent denial of the communist period within the Polish public discourse.