Post-war changes such as urbanisation, heavy industrialisation, resettlement, and the collectivisation of agriculture made Poland one big social laboratory, so there was plenty of work for sociologists. Memoires of the time of the Nazi German occupation were also collected in large numbers.
Between 1945 and 1989 there were more than 1500 contests, to which half a million memoirs were sent. By the mid-1970s alone there were a total of 3 million typed pages. Two-thirds of these came from villagers. In the Polish People’s Republic, contests were no longer organised solely by institutions and research centres, but also by the press (including daily, trade, women's, and youth press), schools, and workplaces.
The most monumental example of this phenomenon is the nine-volume publication Młode Pokolenie Wsi Polski Ludowej (The Younger Generation of Rural Inhabitants in People's Poland), prepared by Józef Chałasiński. The first volume, entitled Awans Pokolenia (The Social Advancement of the Generation) and published for the 20th anniversary of the Polish People's Republic, used selected autobiographies to depict the socio-economic transformations of the Polish countryside after 1945 and the great migrations of rural youth to cities. The content was, of course, appropriately chosen. In his excellent book Każdy Został Człowiekiem (Everyone Became a Person), Piotr Nesterowicz found other documents and relatives of the memoirs’ authors. These new sources made it possible to give a broader picture of the first generation of social advancement and to convey things that were likely censored from the original memoirs.
Another important collection of historical documents is the Pamiętniki Osadników Ziem Odzyskanych (Memoirs of Settlers in the Recovered Territories), which were submitted for a contest announced by the Western Institute in Poznań in 1956. Subsequent editions included children and even grandchildren of the first settlers. In the times of the Polish People's Republic, many of them were censored for their critical view of the colonisation of post-German territories. Today, they have been collected in a volume edited by Beata Halicka, entitled Mój Dom nad Odrą (My House on the Odra River).
The spirit of memoirism did not die in Poland after the transformations of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The ‘Karta’ Centre played an important role in preserving narratives that had been neglected in the era of communist rule. It collected, among other things, the memoirs of private entrepreneurs, as well as memoirs of martial law and of the Soviet occupation of the Eastern Borderlands. The 2020s have seen another revival of Polish memoirism. In 2021 alone, several contests were announced for memoirs from the time of the pandemic, as well as memoirs from marginalised groups such as protesters, the LGBTQ+ community, and the unemployed. It seems that the tradition of Polish diarists is not going to fade any time soon.