Look Who it Was Random video

Aleksander Smolar - My father the partisan (17/201)

225 views · Published 17 December 2018 · 2:06 · Indexed 14 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: There’s a story which Timothy Snyder writes about in his book, Bloodlands – I don’t remember the Polish title – where I believe he mentions my father twice, and writes precisely about this. From a psychological aspect it’s interesting that my father went to a well-known journalist – an activist – and that there was a  desperate need to set up an underground movement. However the journalist asked, ‘But who gave you this order?’ meaning, ‘Do you have instructions from someone? Who ordered you to do this?’ My father told him the truth that no one had given him any orders, but the other man didn’t believe him. It was inconceivable in the Soviet Union that someone could engage in this kind of initiative without an order, a directive from Moscow, meaning from the authorities. My father, even though he was a communist, was from Poland, and so he knew what it meant to be in the underground and to show initiative. It meant you couldn’t count on the initiative of others, therefore it was a natural reaction for him to organise, so he helped organise the underground in that ghetto in Minsk and also in the whole of Minsk, and he sent out units of partisan fighters. It was relatively easy to get out of the ghetto and into the Naliboki forest and other places. After he had sent out several units, he went himself and played quite a significant role in the Jewish underground resistance. The Bielski brothers were operating in those forests; they became famous thanks to the books and film about them. He knew them but he had mixed feeling about them because simply saving human lives wasn’t enough for my father – it was also imperative to fight, whereas the Bielski brothers were focussed on survival, and for as many people as possible, as many Jews as possible to survive.

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