Suicide according to the secret police, murder according to Solidarity. IPN seeks answers 43 years on

On 30 June 1983 the body of Jan Samsonowicz, a co-founder of the Young Poland Movement and a member of the presidium of the Inter-Factory Strike Committee at the Gdańsk shipyard, was found hanging by a trouser belt from the fence of the Stoczniowiec stadium on Marynarki Polskiej street, a few hundred metres from the shipyard gates. The prosecutor's office of the People's Republic of Poland ruled it a suicide and closed the case within five months. A second investigation, opened after 1989, lasted eight months and ended for lack of evidence. Since June 2023 the case has been back in the hands of the prosecutors of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) under a programme called Archiwum Zbrodni, the Archive of Crimes, which in the Pomeranian region has already produced an indictment against 27 former prison officers and charges over shots fired at demonstrators in the centre of Gdańsk.

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08 september 2026   |   07:25   |   Source: Gazeta Morska   |   Prepared by: Kamil Kusier   |   Print

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A port, a shipyard and a man the secret police watched for twelve years

Jan Samsonowicz was born on 27 March 1944 in Gorlice in southern Poland. He graduated in Polish philology from the University of Gdańsk in 1977 and wrote poetry. His first job was as a forwarding clerk at Hartwig, the state freight forwarder in the port of Gdańsk, and it was that job that first brought him to the attention of the security apparatus. In 1971 the border control post in the port registered him as a candidate for recruitment as an informer, because a Hartwig clerk had daily contact with seafarers from Western ships. Jan Samsonowicz applied to terminate his contract instead, and the file was closed. He later worked as a procurement officer at the Medical Academy in Gdańsk.

His route into opposition ran through the academic chaplaincy at St Nicholas church in Gdańsk, the same milieu that produced the Young Poland Movement (Ruch Młodej Polski, RMP), a conservative and independence-oriented current of the anti-communist opposition formed in July 1979 around Aleksander Hall. Jan Samsonowicz was among its founders, alongside Aleksander Hall, Arkadiusz Rybicki, Jacek Bartyzel, Maciej Grzywaczewski and Marek Jurek, and served as one of its three spokesmen for the Tri-City. Before that he had worked with the Movement for the Defence of Human and Civic Rights (ROPCiO) and with the Free Trade Unions of the Coast, the small group of activists who two years later organised the August 1980 strike.

When that strike came, Jan Samsonowicz was the Medical Academy's delegate inside the Lenin Shipyard. He sat on the presidium of the Inter-Factory Strike Committee and ran its health service information point. After the Gdańsk Agreement he joined the presidium of the founding committee of Solidarity in Gdańsk, chaired the union's committee at the Medical Academy, founded and edited the union paper Pomost, co-organised a sit-in at the provincial office in November 1980 over health service reform, joined a hunger strike for political prisoners in 1981 and was a delegate to Solidarity's first national congress. Interned on 13 December 1981, the first night of martial law, he passed through the camps at Strzebielinek, Iława and Kwidzyn and was released on 16 July 1982, less than a month before the so-called bloody Saturday, when prison officers beat more than a hundred internees at Kwidzyn. He went back to underground work, attending clandestine Solidarity meetings and organising help for activists at risk of arrest.

Operations Dominik, Samson and Arka

Surviving records show how much attention the Security Service (SB) paid to one procurement officer. In August 1976 the fourth department of the provincial police headquarters opened an operational file on him, codenamed Dominik, over his chaplaincy activity. After the founding of the Young Poland Movement, the third department opened a separate operation, codenamed Samson, and installed a listening device in his flat, where opposition meetings were held. In Warsaw he appeared in three further operations of the Interior Ministry's third department: Hazardziści, targeting ROPCiO, Wasale, targeting the Student Solidarity Committee, and Arka, targeting the Young Poland Movement. During the Solidarity period his activity was monitored under the object file Klan, later renamed Związek, which still contains reports from three informers using the pseudonyms Antoni, Wolny and Orion.

Two details in that list now carry evidential weight. Operation Samson was closed only after Jan Samsonowicz's death, meaning the SB was running operational measures against him until the end. And the files of both Dominik and Samson were destroyed by the security apparatus. What is known today about the surveillance has been reconstructed from peripheral records, from the files of other operations and from material that survived in other units.

The night of 29 to 30 June 1983 and the first inquiry

The body was found in the early hours of 30 June 1983. Jan Samsonowicz was 39. From its first actions the Gdańsk district prosecutor's office adopted the suicide hypothesis and examined nothing else. It did not verify the account of a witness who had seen Jan Samsonowicz at the scene that night in the company of two men, and it did not ask whether the SB officers running an operation against him had any contact with him that evening. On 30 November 1983 the inquiry was discontinued on the grounds that no criminal act had been established.

The Security Service pushed a single narrative: the deceased had suffered from depression, supposedly triggered by a divorce, and had taken his own life. Other scenarios were excluded from the outset. The Tri-City opposition did not believe it. The funeral on 6 July 1983 at the Catholic cemetery in Sopot became a patriotic demonstration attended by several thousand people, the coffin draped in a white and red flag bearing the word Solidarność and the mourners walking behind it with their hands raised in the V sign. Under martial law it was a display the authorities could only watch.

The 1991 investigation

After 1989 the case was placed on the list of a parliamentary commission examining the Interior Ministry's activities, known as the Jan Rokita commission. On 17 October 1991 the Gdańsk provincial prosecutor's office reopened the 1983 inquiry. It ran for eight months and on 29 June 1992 was discontinued for lack of sufficient evidence that a crime had been committed. The prosecutors of the early 1990s worked without the archive that IPN holds today. They did not know the scale of the surveillance or that the SB had taken what its own documents describe as offensive measures against Jan Samsonowicz. A large part of the security files had been shredded in 1989 and 1990, and witnesses from inside the apparatus had no reason to talk.

For the next three decades the case sat in the archive. Jan Samsonowicz was posthumously awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta and the Cross of Freedom and Solidarity. The question of how he died remained open.

Archiwum Zbrodni: the legal basis and the mechanism

The change came on 14 August 2022 in Kwidzyn, on the fortieth anniversary of bloody Saturday. Karol Nawrocki, then president of IPN, announced the launch of Archiwum Zbrodni, a systematic return to discontinued investigations into communist crimes of the 1980s, and the same day IPN prosecutors opened an investigation into the beating of the Kwidzyn internees. Andrzej Pozorski, director of the Chief Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, explained that the programme rested on a shift in the case law of Poland's Supreme Court. After nearly a decade of litigation, IPN prosecutors had secured recognition that communist crimes committed during martial law constitute, under international law, crimes against humanity and are therefore not subject to any statute of limitations. The second argument was the archive itself: many investigations had been closed in IPN's early years, when its holdings were far smaller and far less well catalogued.

The mechanism is straightforward. Prosecutors of IPN's regional commissions review the files of discontinued proceedings for new evidential possibilities. Where new documents, new witnesses or new forensic tools have emerged, the investigation is reopened or a new one is launched. By April 2026, 19 criminal proceedings had been initiated in this category. The decision to reopen a series of legally closed cases was taken as early as 2022 by the prosecutor of the regional commission in Gdańsk, which shows that the programme had a Pomeranian centre of gravity from the start.

The Samsonowicz case reopened, June 2023

On 30 June 2023, exactly forty years after the death, Karol Nawrocki and Andrzej Pozorski announced at the IPN regional office at Grunwaldzka 216 in Gdańsk that the investigation into Jan Samsonowicz's death had been taken up again. The decision followed an analysis of the 1983 and 1991 files. IPN spokesman Rafał Leśkiewicz said further evidential possibilities had been identified, in particular the archival finding that the SB had conducted intensive and offensive operations against Jan Samsonowicz. The task of the investigation is to verify, through formal proceedings, the material that excludes the suicide version and points to the possibility of a politically motivated killing.

Karol Nawrocki stressed at the press conference that Jan Samsonowicz had been under surveillance for twelve years, persecuted and imprisoned, and was therefore a victim of the communist system regardless of how he died. Andrzej Pozorski pointed out that almost everything had changed since 1991: the IPN archive holds documents the earlier investigators never saw, and forensic experts now have toxicological and medical tools that did not exist in the 1990s. Arkadiusz Kazański, a historian at the regional office's education bureau, recalled that Jan Samsonowicz had been a known figure in the Tri-City opposition long before August 1980 and had been under SB investigation since 1976.

The strongest voice was the family's. Maciej Samsonowicz was five years old when his father was found hanged. He told the conference that the first thing he learned when his family let him in on the story was a conversation between his parents. Jan Samsonowicz had asked his wife that if anything happened to him, if he fell under a tram or was found dead, she should never try to find out why, because the people willing to harm him would be willing to harm her too. Maciej Samsonowicz thanked IPN and the prosecutors for reopening the case and said he hoped for a thorough, independent investigation that would answer what happened to his father and why the earlier proceedings had been handled so badly. His father's death, he added, was not an isolated case in those years.

Results so far: Kwidzyn, Lubin, Szczecin and Hucisko

Archiwum Zbrodni has delivered tangible results chiefly where the perpetrators acted openly, in uniform and in front of witnesses. In the Kwidzyn case, prosecutors served 25 charge notices in June 2023 and then indicted 27 former prison officers for taking part in the beating of more than a hundred internees on 14 August 1982 and for abusing them. In the Lubin case of 31 August 1982, nine former police officers were charged with unlawfully using firearms against a peaceful demonstration, and a former officer was convicted of falsely accusing a demonstrator of assaulting police. In Szczecin, three former riot police (ZOMO) officers were convicted of beating a demonstrator in 1982.

For Gdańsk the key breakthrough concerns Antoni Browarczyk, a twenty-year-old shot dead on 17 December 1981 near the Hucisko junction, one of the first and youngest victims of martial law. The investigation had been discontinued three times for failure to identify the perpetrators. Reopened in 2025 by the regional commission in Szczecin, it led on 22 April 2026 to a charge against Bolesław P., a former second lieutenant of the People's Republic armed forces who, while on patrol duty outside the provincial party committee building, fired at least 45 live rounds towards the protesters. Antoni Browarczyk died of a gunshot wound to the head and three other people were seriously injured. The prosecutor also examined how the Navy prosecutor's office had handled the case in 1981 and 1982, finding that the weapon used was never secured and that the lieutenant's role was omitted entirely. Of the five Navy prosecutors involved, three have died, but proceedings continue against the remaining two, now a retired judge and a retired prosecutor.

IPN deputy president Karol Polejowski told the Gdańsk press conference that some perpetrators had died, but others were still among us, which made it all the more important that justice be done.

- Crimes of the communist era are not subject to any statute of limitations. That has to be stated very clearly, Karol Polejowski said.

The Gdańsk office of IPN

The investigations themselves are run by prosecutors of the regional commissions, the Samsonowicz case in Gdańsk and the Browarczyk case in Szczecin. Behind them stands infrastructure without which neither would be possible, and much of it is housed at Grunwaldzka 216. The Gdańsk office holds and catalogues the records of the former provincial security headquarters, including the object files Klan and Związek that reveal who informed on Jan Samsonowicz. It was historians of the office's education bureau, among them Arkadiusz Kazański, who reconstructed the surveillance trail from operation Dominik to operation Samson, giving prosecutors the basis to conclude that the 1991 decision had rested on incomplete knowledge. And it was in the Gdańsk office that the programme's milestones were announced: the reopening of the Samsonowicz case in 2023 and the Browarczyk charges in 2026.

Marek Szymaniak, director of the Gdańsk office, noted in April 2026 that its staff meet young people at Antoni Browarczyk's grave every year on the anniversary of his death and have produced an exhibition about him. The same applies to Jan Samsonowicz: his biography in IPN's Historia z IPN series, drawn from the surviving operational files, is today the fullest publicly available account of what the security apparatus did to one man over twelve years. The programme itself was born in Kwidzyn, in the Pomeranian region, and its first charges and first indictment concerned a Pomeranian case. Seen from the Tri-City, this is work that gives names back to specific people and assigns responsibility for specific events.

New evidence and the limits of this investigation

It is fair to say where the Samsonowicz case differs from Kwidzyn or Hucisko. There, the perpetrators shot and beat people openly, in front of dozens of witnesses, and the task was to establish who held the weapon. The death at the stadium fence took place at night, without witnesses to the event itself, and the files of the two operations run against the victim were destroyed. The prosecutors have three volumes of the 1991 investigation file, documents that survived in other collections, the witness account of two men at the scene, and whatever forensic experts can still contribute after 43 years. Any surviving perpetrators or witnesses from within the security apparatus are now in their eighties or older.

More than three years have passed since the case was reopened. According to IPN's public communications, no charges and no discontinuation have been announced, and in June 2026 the Institute was still presenting the death of Jan Samsonowicz as unexplained. That does not necessarily mean the case is stalled. In the Browarczyk case a year passed between reopening and charges; in Kwidzyn, ten months separated the launch from the charge notices. The Samsonowicz case is harder than either and more closely resembles other proceedings on the programme's list that are still awaiting an outcome, such as the death of Piotr Majchrzak in Poznań in 1982 or the beating of Wojciech Cieślewicz, a journalist at Głos Wielkopolski.

There is nonetheless a difference between 1992 and today. Then, the prosecutor's office closed the case without knowing that the SB had been running an operation against Jan Samsonowicz, complete with a bug in his flat, right up to his death. Now the case is in the hands of people who have that knowledge, who work with an archive that did not exist then, and who operate within a programme that has shown in Kwidzyn and at Hucisko that charges can still be brought after four decades. The family of Jan Samsonowicz waited forty years for this. If a breakthrough in this case is possible at all, it is possible now, and it is possible in Gdańsk.

Jan Samsonowicz Archiwum Zbrodni IPN Ruch Młodej Polski zbrodnie komunistyczne Gdańsk IPN Gdańsk

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