The American Relief for Poland was organized in 1939 to aid Polish war victims and refugees. Funds were gathered in connection with drives for the "National War Chest Fund" and United War Fund, national clearinghouses fo relief funds. In 1945, following the war, a delegation from the organization visited displaced persons camps in Western Germany where thousands of Poles had been forced into slave labor. The American Relief for Poland helped to sponsor relocation of these refugees, substantially aided by the Catholic Relief Organization. Florian Piskorski was especially active in this effort. Relief supplies were also sent to Poland after the Armistice and distributed through efforts of Caritas, a relief organization. The total value of relief goods exceeded five million dollars. In 1958, the ARP sponsored construction of an artifical limb factory in Poland and also, with the efforts of Dr. C. Walton Lillehei, contributed to installation in Warsaw of surgical apparatus for heart ailments. The ARP also sponsored a colony for Polish refugees, many of them children, in Santa Rosa, Mexico.
Records (1952-1950) of the American Relief Fund for Poland, a charitable organizaton which participated in relief efforts in Poland during and after World War II, consist of correspondence; questionnaires; and case files.Also included are records produced by the American Committee for Resettlement of Polish Displaced Persons (1948-1968). The records are mostly personal files of persons brought to the United States from Europe after World War II. They also contain some correspondence and organizational papers of the ACRDP.
No inventory available.
A related collection at IHRC is the records of the American Committee for the Resettlement of Polish Displaced Persons.
This collection is indexed under the following headings in the catalog of the University of Minnesota Libraries. Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons or places should search the catalog using these headings.