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Aleksander Smolar - Fighting for the preservation of Jewish cultural autonomy (18/201)

242 views · Published 17 December 2018 · 2:23 · Indexed 4 November 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2018 · News & Politics

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To listen to more of Aleksander Smolar’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwlxPLurqAOCrabBgGrqLA7

Aleksander Smolar (b. 1940) is a Polish writer, political activist and adviser, vice-president of the Institute for Human Sciences and president of the Stefan Batory Foundation. [Listener: Vitek Tracz]

TRANSCRIPT: After the war, he [my father] returns to Minsk and is also in an anti-Fascist committee – a Jewish anti-Fascist committee – but thanks to his contacts in Warsaw, he gets an official invitation, meaning he has a sense of impending danger. A wave of anti-Jewish persecution was coming and so he leaves for Poland. Then he also joins the apparatus – they propose that he should work for the apparatus in the Central Committee in the security services. He chooses what Jews call the Jewish street in the Jewish world. That was always his passion, a genuine passion. Well, he was a writer, a Jewish journalist and he was in that world, repressing any kind of pluralism there but also fighting for the preservation of social, cultural autonomy. Poland was the only country where there were established Jewish organisations, they didn’t exist in any of the other communist countries. Everywhere else this had been destroyed, including in the Soviet Union. Poland was the only country. He was proud and played a fairly significant role in the West because he represented this Jewish world in various organisations. His role there was ambiguous because he told them all kinds of nonsense about the living conditions in Poland, the Soviet Union and so on. I don’t want to focus on this too much. There were important moments like 1956 when he wrote that famous article which resonated throughout the world, ‘Our pain, our tears’, and it was about the persecution of Jews in the Soviet Union. This article was reprinted because it was the first piece of writing describing what had happened in the Soviet Union. The Soviet authorities intervened so that there was a moment in ’56 when it looked like their forces might invade. He was afraid that he might be arrested as there allegedly were prescriptive letters in circulation released by so-called Natolinians but this might be a complete fabrication. Never mind… that’s not important.

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