Look Who it Was Random video

Aleksander Smolar - Early memories of Russia (85/201)

128 views · Published 18 December 2018 · 2:04 · Indexed 15 October 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: [VT] Can you remember what happened there, what was going on apart from that horse?

I don’t remember, I don’t remember. I do remember meeting my father, I remember how he looked but I can’t say that these aren’t mediated memories, memories generated by a photograph, his very ascetic appearance at the time, very slim. Soon after he arrived in Poland, his portrait was painted by quite a well-known woman artist from the GDR who was a friend of his; she had been an expressionist painter before the war. An artist called Lea Grudig painted his portrait which to this day is circulating somewhere in the family; it’s very good and it shows his physicality back then. I only remember one other scene when I was sitting in one of those Russian lorries which back then were modelled on American pre-war cars, and there was a wooden step and I was sitting on this and the driver drove off, and the fear this caused – my fear and the fear of the adults who could see me going off into the distance, sitting there. But that’s not important… that’s not important.

I remember the crèche and the nursery and those were good memories which means that the atmosphere that I was registering was good.

[VT] So that was where?

Pardon?

[VT] Where was that?

Well, that was deep inside Russia, Czkałowsk or something like that, and then later, Minsk. But again, that’s just a general impression, I can’t even tell you what language I was speaking at that time. I can’t rule out that Russian was the only language I spoke, definitely while I was in the crèche and in nursery, but what language my mother spoke in, I don’t really know. She spoke Russian perfectly – well, her first language was Polish, but she spoke Russian perfectly, I don’t know.

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