According to Der Spiegel’s “In the Hell of the Files,” a book in Poland, The Secret Police and Lech Walesa, claims that Walesa, after his first arrest in 1970, agreed, under the code name of Bolek, to inform on his follow workers in Gdansk, and received 13,000 zlotys, about two months pay, for his work.
Walesa, founder of Solidarity and Nobel Prize winner, denies it and says the secret police files are false.
The national conservative paper Rzeczpospolita, which has also reported on the sexual misconduct of Archbishop Juliusz Paetz, has printed a preview of the book by Slawomir Cenckiewicz und Piotr Gontarczyk of the Institute of National Memeory (IPN).
In 1992 the conservative government presented a list of 66 prominent Poles who had cooperated with the Communists, and Walesa was on that list.
But the Polish secret police had destroyed many of their files as Communism was falling, and it was impossible to determine what these men had done. Such accusations were used as a weapon to destroy political foes. The lustration or cleansing of Polish society from Communism became a farce.
The files were sealed, and liberals such as Adam Michnik want them to be sealed forever.
The Institute of National Memory has custody of the remaining files of the secret police, and the new book is based on those files.
Cardinal Paskai of Hungary betrayed his priests to the Communists; and Paetz is suspected of being a Communist informer in the Vatican.
Until the generation of Europeans who might have collaborated with the Communists dies off, the suspicions and accusations will be an open wound on the new democratic societies.