Look Who it Was Random video

Aleksander Smolar - Choosing to stay in Poland (81/201)

115 views · Published 18 December 2018 · 3:19 · Indexed 7 October 2026

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

Watch on YouTube

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: Poland is my obsession and my drug. I mean, the passion… and why? To be honest, I’ve wondered why this is so a few times now, why haven’t I left. Before ’68, I had several invitations from my family to leave. I remember I was coming to the end of my secondary education and at that point I had family in France who suggested that I should come to study in France and that they would pay my tuition fees. I had a proposal to go to the States – I always refused. And I wondered… I wondered why did I do this? I think I had several motives. There was undoubtedly a passion for a country that I knew. I don’t think it was fear of the unknown. I don’t think that it was… I’ve known various people who later idealised their fidelity – the fact that they’d stayed and never left – but it was obvious to me and I could feel it, that they were flaky and they were just afraid of the wider world. I also knew people who seemed to me to be exceptionally suited to the western world and later, it turned out how very unsuited they essentially were, how they couldn’t adapt. These are things that can’t be foreseen. I think I wouldn’t have had any problem and in fact I didn’t have any problem later when I left once I was quite a bit older. I think there were different issues here – there was definitely a passion, an attachment to the politics that I knew and to the issues that were close to me. What I mean is that I grew out of a certain tradition, I evolved you could say, I was become less left-wing, even though to this day I have a certain penchant for it although I’d struggle to call myself left-wing today. Besides, I think that currently, today this has become less well-defined, indistinct, that there needs to be greater precision and definition… people should define themselves precisely in their various dimensions. In any case, at that time my passion and my attachment to the country as much as to the ideal definitely played a crucial role.

Paradoxically, the other issue which also played a crucial role was my hidden, internal polemic with the stereotypical on the subject of Jews. The very fact that in Poland Jews were blamed en masse for communism, for all kinds of sins to say nothing of the more historical sins as well as being accused of liberalism, capitalism, plutocracy and of the murder of small children, but let’s not go there, into the less historical issues. In any case, these accusations caused me to have a sense of you could say, and here I quote Brus, that you have to be able to pay a price.

More from this channel