The difference comes after a gap – and both are the result of the pandemic, which killed last year’s Night of the Museums (except online), and enforced the sanitary adjustments in the incoming one. Since, as they say, variety is the spice of life, the altered formula will only add to the attraction, because the content – fascinating artefacts, epic stories and electrifying discoveries – remains the same.

The 2021 Night of the Museums in the IPN Archive is about walking.

The main item on the agenda is a game, taking the participants on a tour of Warsaw locations connected with the 20th century Polish fight for freedom. Of all places, Warsaw is the last one to run out of such spots – so, depending on your mood, you’ll be strolling, wading, marching or tiptoeing through history, discovering a completely new face of the city you thought you knew so well. The event takes off at 5 p.m. at the Janusz Kurtyka Educational Center in Marszałkowska Street, but you can join every quarter until 7.30, to compete in quizzes and win attractive prizes.

If you’re game, join in.

The next part is promenading too, only online: the Archive staff are hosting virtual walks round their premises, to show the tools and techniques of storing and restoring, preserving and serving to the public the exhibits that tell Poland’s history. On the one hand, it will be behind-the-scenes peek into the experts’ domain, and on the other, an opportunity to get acquainted with the most representative and fascinating of 90-odd kilometers of files, 40 million photographs, nearly 2,000 films, or thousands of oral testimonies collected in the Archive Full of Remembrance.

Many of them real gems.

Have you, for instance, read the infamous Stroop or Katzmann Reports on the extermination of Polish Jews? Seen the authentic Maria Barr photos or James Bond’s dossier? Checked out where the Warsaw Pact troops planned to attack NATO and deploy their nukes? Browsed through the Home Army counter-intelligence files? Appreciated the wealth of artefacts donated by the Polish Falcons of America, such as uniforms of Haller’s Army volunteers, or whole yearbooks of “Dziennik Związkowy”, the oldest Polish newspaper in the USA?

If not, they’re all just a few hours and a couple of clicks away on the IPN Archive Fb page: https://www.facebook.com/archiwumipn/