Hanna Świderska was curator of Polish collections at the British Library from 1961 to 1990. In 1940, she was deported by the Soviet authorities to Siberia. Freed in 1941, she left the Soviet Union with General Władysław Anders' army. She settled in Great Britain in 1947, did BA in history in Birmingham, and received DPhil in history from the University of Oxford in 1958. Świderska founded Solidarity collection at the British Library in the late 1970s when she began collecting Polish samizdat collections. A collaborator of Jerzy Giedroyc's Kultura review, she received shipments of underground monographs, brochures and periodicals from Paris. She also purchased materials from anynomous visitors from Poland. Having organized books exchanges between the British Library, the National Library in Warsaw and the Jagiellonian University Library in Kraków, she set up a network of suppliers of both legal and illegal publications from Poland.