Sikorski Institute Archives (PISM): A Family History Guide
The Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum (PISM) at 20 Prince’s Gate, London SW7, is the main archive of the Polish government-in-exile and the Polish Armed Forces in the West. Its reading room holds the records of headquarters, ministries and fighting units, including unit war diaries, daily orders, photographs and around 800 private collections, and a small free museum displays uniforms, colours and memorabilia.
What PISM does not hold is the individual service file of a Polish soldier, airman or sailor who served under British command. Those personnel files are with the Ministry of Defence, and PISM itself asks families to apply there first. The usual order is simple: get the MOD service record, then use PISM to put that service into context. Our guide to MOD Polish service records explains the first step.
What the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum is
The Institute was founded in London on 2 May 1945, first as a trust and then registered as a company on 15 November 1945. In July 1946 it bought the freehold of 20 Prince’s Gate, a townhouse facing Hyde Park in South Kensington, and the building was formally blessed on 9 July 1947. It is named after General Władysław Sikorski, Prime Minister of the Polish government-in-exile and Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Armed Forces, who was killed in the air crash at Gibraltar in July 1943.
It was deliberately set up as an independent, non-governmental body so that its collections could not be claimed by the post-war communist authorities in Warsaw. In 1965 it merged with the Polish Research Centre and took its present name, and in 1972 it absorbed the Polish Historical Institute. It remains a registered charity (no. 312168), run largely for and by the Polish community in Britain.
What the PISM archives hold
The archive runs to roughly 2 kilometres of shelving. Most of it concerns the Second World War and Poland’s part in it, but there are also inter-war papers and the records of Polish political life in exile up to 1990. For family historians, the useful groups are:
- Polish Armed Forces in the West: papers of the Commander-in-Chief’s office, General Staff and Ministry of National Defence, down to corps, divisions, regiments, battalions, companies, schools and depots.
- Unit war diaries and chronicles: day-by-day accounts of where a unit was and what it did, together with unit daily orders, which often name individuals for postings, promotions, awards and casualties.
- Polish Air Force and Polish Navy: separate subsections covering headquarters, individual squadrons, warships and non-frontline units.
- The 1939 campaign: large collections of written depositions (accounts) by soldiers about the September 1939 fighting.
- The government-in-exile: ministries and offices of the Polish government in London, during the war and from 1945 to 1990.
- Private collections: around 800 collections of papers from politicians, diplomats, officers and organisations.
- Photographs, film and sound: thousands of photographs, negatives and albums, and more than 1,300 film and sound reels.
Almost all of this material is in Polish, often handwritten or typed in military shorthand. Expect abbreviations for units and ranks, and Polish forms of names throughout.
What PISM does not hold: personnel files
PISM’s own family research guidance is clear that researchers should first contact the institutions holding the primary personal records, and only then approach the Institute to see whether anything further exists. For members of the Polish Armed Forces under British operational command, that institution is the Ministry of Defence:
- Army Personnel Centre, Disclosures 5 (Polish), Building 1 (Ops), RAF Northolt, West End Road, Ruislip, Middlesex HA4 6NG.
- GOV.UK confirms you apply to the MOD for records of Polish service personnel who served under British command in the Second World War, and that there is no fee for requesting records from the MOD. Use the current application forms on GOV.UK.
- The MOD’s Polish holdings also include the records of the Polish Resettlement Corps, which many men joined after arriving in Britain in 1946 and 1947.
- The MOD is transferring many older service records to The National Archives, so check GOV.UK for the current application route before you write.
Other parts of a Pole’s war have their own archives, which PISM lists on its family research page. For the pre-war Polish Army, go to the Central Military Archives in Warsaw-Rembertów. Records of the Polish Army in France in 1939 and 1940 are with the French Service historique de la Défense in Pau. The Central Museum of Prisoners of War in Opole covers prisoners taken in 1939 and after the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, and the Arolsen Archives cover forced labour, camps and displaced persons.
Air Force and Anders Army families often need both sources together. See our guides to Polish Air Force records in the UK and Anders Army records.
The Polish Underground Movement Study Trust
If your relative was in the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) or the wider Polish Underground State inside occupied Poland, the key archive is the Polish Underground Movement (1939–1945) Study Trust. It was founded in London in 1947 and became part of PISM in 1988, bringing with it the main archive of the Underground and the Home Army held in the West. Its collections include material on the Cichociemni, the parachutists trained in Britain and dropped into occupied Poland, and on SOE cooperation.
The Trust is at a separate address: 11 Leopold Road, Ealing, London W5 3PB. Appointments and research enquiries are made through the PISM website. The Trust keeps the same archive hours and closures as the main reading room, including the temporary closure described below.
How to use the archive as a family historian
Search the online catalogue first
PISM has an online document catalogue covering the main Armed Forces groups, such as the Polish Army in France 1939 to 1940 and the Supreme Headquarters of the Polish Armed Forces 1940 to 1947. Look up your relative’s unit, note the file references for the war diary and daily orders for the relevant months, and bring them to your visit or quote them in an enquiry. Search under the Polish unit name as well as the English one.
Visit the reading room
The archive reading room is open Tuesday to Friday from 9.30am (PISM’s pages give closing times of 3.45pm or 4pm) and is closed throughout February. Places are limited: book an appointment in advance and bring the printed, signed application form and the rules and regulations form from the PISM website. PISM has announced that the reading room will be closed from 15 November 2026 until 1 March 2027 while the archive is reorganised, so check the website before planning a trip.
Access for your own research is free, and it includes 30 minutes of guidance from archive staff on using the catalogues and indexes. A voluntary donation is encouraged.
Send a written enquiry
If you cannot visit, PISM staff will carry out a limited search. Its fees page lists the charges; the main ones at the time of writing (September 2026) are:
| Service | PISM charge |
|---|---|
| Reading room access for your own research | Free (voluntary donation welcomed) |
| Written research enquiry by staff | £50 for up to 2 hours per enquiry, no guarantee of success |
| Further staff guidance or research | £20 per hour or part of an hour |
| Photographs with your own device | £0.25 per exposure, at staff discretion |
| Certified copy of a document | £20 per page, plus copying and postage |
Copies, scans and postage are charged on top. PISM says no work is done without prior written agreement to the fees, and that postal and email enquiries can take up to six months.
Visiting the Sikorski Museum
The museum occupies rooms in the same building and shows uniforms, colours, weapons, decorations, photographs and personal items connected with the Polish forces and General Sikorski. It is open Tuesday to Friday from 2pm to 4pm and on the first Saturday of each month from 10.30am to 4pm, with last entry at 3pm. Entry is free, with a voluntary contribution welcome. Individuals and families do not need to book; groups should phone at least a month ahead.
Families with a 2nd Polish Corps connection may also like our article on Wojtek the soldier bear, the mascot of the 22nd Artillery Supply Company.
How to prepare an enquiry
For PISM and the MOD alike, the more exact the details, the better the chance of a result. Gather the following before you start:
- Full name in its Polish form, with spelling variants. Władysław may appear as Wladyslaw or Walter in British papers; surnames lose their diacritics (Łukasiewicz becomes Lukasiewicz) or are anglicised after naturalisation.
- Date and place of birth as given in Polish documents, remembering that ages in British records can be wrong.
- Service number, from discharge papers, a Resettlement Corps card, medal documents or a paybook.
- Unit, even partial: a corps, division, battalion, squadron number or ship name.
- Dates and places: where he enlisted (for example, the USSR in 1941–42, France in 1940 or Britain), campaigns, and when he reached Britain.
An illustrative example
Suppose a family has a Polish Resettlement Corps discharge showing a (fictional) Private Jan Kowalski and a service number. The MOD file, requested first, gives his unit as a battalion of the 3rd Carpathian Rifle Division and his route: deportation to the USSR, enlistment in the Anders Army, the Middle East, then Italy. With the unit and dates in hand, the PISM catalogue points to that battalion’s war diary and daily orders for 1944, which may record his arrival, a wound at Monte Cassino or a decoration. That is context the personnel file alone rarely gives.
From PISM back to records in Poland
A service file and unit records usually give the clues that take you back to Poland: the place of birth, father’s name (and often mother’s maiden name), religion, pre-war address, and, for soldiers deported in 1940–41, the district from which the family was taken. With those details you can look for the birth entry in parish or civil registers, many now indexed on Geneteka, and for pre-war identity documents.
Place names need care. Many birthplaces of Anders Army soldiers now lie in Ukraine, Belarus or Lithuania, and the records may be in those countries’ archives rather than in Poland. Our guides to finding a birth entry in Poland and Polish veterans’ resettlement in Britain cover the next steps.