"Izabella Gass, Archival legacy in the resources of the archives of the Polish Museum in Rapperswil. When in 1870 the Polish aristocrat count Broel-Plater founded the Polish Museum in the 13th century castle in Rapperswil by the Zurich Lake in Switzerland, Poland did not exist on the map of Europe. The idea of the count Plater was to make of the Museum a cultural, political, educational centre for the Polish emigration. A modest collection at first, it grew thanks to donations and legacies of emigrants which contributed their works of art, historic keepsakes, militaria, books. After the WWI, when Poland regained independence, the Rapperswil collection, by virtue of the last will of the count Plater, was restored to Poland, where most of them were destroyed during WWII. Between the wars, the exhibition entitled „Polnische Kunst” was opened in the Museum. After WWII, the authorities of the People’s Republic of Poland wanted to open in the Museum a communist propaganda outpost, which led to its closure in 1949. Currently, the Rapperswil castle houses a third Museum, re-established in 1975 through the efforts of the entire Polish emigration. Apart from museum objects, paintings, numismatic collections, books, the Museum also receives manuscript legacies of Poles who died in the emigration. These legacies are stored in the archive. Currently, the archive houses 51 archival legacies. These legacies may be divided to several groups with respect to their authors: 1. Legacies of soldiers of the 2nd Infantry Fusiliers Division, who were interned in Switzerland in 1940. They form the most numerous group of legacies, although they are small in size. The archival materials are mostly dated from 1970s and 1980s, the last years of the soldiers’ lives. They are formed by personal documents, correspondence, press cuttings. There is no memoirs, journals, diaries. 2. Legacies of writers, translators, journalists. The most important of them are legacies of two well-known emigration writers: Józef Mackiewicz and Jerzy Stempowski."

Źródło: Archeion, t. 112