On May 18, Herbert Hoover III, chairman of the Hoover Institution Board of Overseers, and Director John Raisian led a delegation from the Hoover Institution to the Polish Foreign Ministry in Warsaw to repatriate an important chapter of history to the Polish people. Hoover an Raisian both spoke at the reception hosted by Polish foreign minister Bronislaw Geremek as television cameras taped the historic event. The Hoover Institution’s gift - hundred of boxes of microfilm containing nearly one million carefully indexed Polish documents from the World War II era - was heaped on a nearby large table. Documents are high level diplomatic negotiation as well as information on the fate of tens of thousands of Poles deported to forced labor camps in infamous gulag. Microfilming this vast documentation cost approximately half a million dollars. Funding was generously provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, together with a matching grant from the Taube Family Foundation. Ted Taube, who heads the Taube Family Foundation, and is a Hoover Overseer, chairman of the board’s communications committee, was present at the ceremony and was recognized by Polish foreign minister Geremek for his generous contribution to the project. Taube is a native of Kracow, Poland and has worked tirelessly to support historical documentation of Poland Through the Hoover institution. Taube also was thanked by Polish officials and dignitaries including Daria Nalecz, director general of the Polish State Archives. The highlight of the visit was the unveiling of an oil portrait of Herbert Hoover, which will be on permanent display in a gallery honoring those who contributed most to the preservation of the modern Polish archival legacy. Hoover curators, archivists, and preservation experts devoted three years to the project, raising funds, organizing the papers, creating detailed indexes, and finally filming the documents according to the highest standards in the field of conservation. The microfilmed collections include the files of the wartime Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the papers of Wladyslaw Anders, records of Polish Embassy in the United States and in Great Britain, for a total of 916,615 items. Three more microfilm collections - the files of the Polish Embassy in the Soviet Union, the papers of Stanislaw Milolajczyk and the records of Polish Ministry of Information and Documentation - will be shipped to Warsaw in the near future. All together, Hoover will have donated more than 1.5 million pages of material. The original documents come to California in the wake of World War II, when Polish diplomats determined that the Hoover Institution was the safest place to preserve the exiled government’s official files because of Herbert Hoover’s well-known, lifelong commitment to a free Poland. The diplomats, whose hopes of returning to Warsaw after the end of the war were destroyed by the communist takeover of Eastern Europe, turned to the task of preserving their records of the wartime experience, including carefully saved evidence of the fate of deported Poles. Over a period of several years, those officials of the free Polish government sent the documents to the Hoover Institution, after concluding binding contract for the papers’ preservation on perpetuity.