Scope and Content Note

About half of the collection consists of letters, most in Polish, addressed to Leon and Irene Zietara from Leon's brothers and sisters and from friends.

Among the family members are:

• Leon's brother Stansilsaw Zietara (born 1902 or 1903) living in Krakow with his wife Julia
• Leon's brother Jozef Zietara (born 1907 or 1908) living in France with his wife Gertuda (a Frenchwoman of Polish descent) and their children, Jan, Michal, and Laurent
• Leon's sister Lucja (Zietara) Satke (born 1911), a widow living in Rzeszow, Poland and her daughter Elzbieta Zgoda
• Leon's brother Eugeniusz Zietara (born 1914), living in a village near Medrzechow, Poland
• Irene's brother Piotr Wolosewicz, his daughter Joanna Zdonowicz, and her son Jon Zdonowicz

Friends include the Eugene M. Jasinski family in Hamilton, Ontario, and Genowefa Orlowski of Birmingham, England, formerly a Polish refugee living in the Middle East, with whom Irene Zietara began a correspondence in 1942. Most of the letters concern family and personal matters.

Noteworthy attachments to the letters from Stanislaw Zietara are:

• a Polish newspaper clipping regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, attached to a letter dated December 6, 1963
• a clipping concerning Polish politics and quoting a relative from the community of Medrzechowa, with a letter dated April 1974
• a clipping giving the official Polish viewpoint of the SALT talks, attached to a letter of November 3, 1974
• a Polish clipping reporting on American neo-Nazis, March 14, 1977
• a picture of Pope John Paul II, December 2, 1978
• a Polish newspaper editorial on the development of the American neutron bomb, August 3, 1979
• an article speculating on President Reagan's new style of government, with a letter of November 9, 1980

The remainder of the collection consists of Zietara's class notebooks and lessons from the period following World War II when he studied forestry, woodworking, and English in Scotland. The notebooks are in both English and Polish. Among the personal documents are Zietara's military identification and travel papers, some issued by the Polish Government in Exile, used both in England and for his departure to the United States. Several photographs of Zietara are attached to his identification cards and passes. There are also a few grade reports and other papers from Zietara's schooling in Poland prior to World War II.