Look Who it Was Random video

Aleksander Smolar - Life among the ruins (90/201)

103 views · Published 18 December 2018 · 3:43 · Indexed 2 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: After that, we moved to Elektoralna Street 13. It was a Jewish house in which the occupants were exclusively Jewish. Most probably, it was a house that had been given to the Socio-Cultural Jewish Association that my father headed. That was where, among others, the recently deceased Polish-Jewish writer from Sweden, Michał Moszkowicz, lived. I’ve read about him… I haven’t had any contact with him since my childhood, but…

[VT] Did you play together in the streets when you were children, did you have friends?

Yes.

[VT] Was there street life, life among the ruins, life…?

Yes, yes. There was both. I mean there was life among the ruins. On Elektoralna Steet, where I lived, the ruins of the ghetto began two doors down from us. We played there very often and we found all kinds of treasures there. We weren’t very aware of the Holocaust at that point, but adventures… I mean, it was a huge adventure playing in those ruins pretending we were partisan or military units and so on. I remember the greatest treasure that we found was a box, probably from an optician’s shop, containing various lenses, glasses and we of course played with these, it was… apart from that, I had close friends there. My closest childhood friend is a professor of medicine and I’m not in touch with him which is also undeniably my own fault. His father was a professor of medicine, he was a professor of medicine. He lived opposite me. We were in the same class, his name was Sławek Maśliński. His name is… I assume he hasn't died. I bumped into him a few years ago. A group of my old school-friends called me to see if I’d join them – they were meeting up. I agreed; it was the only meeting I had. I didn’t recognise any of them but later, their voices… but we were meeting after half a century, I recognised them by their voices, by all kinds of trifling things. In any case, he was my very close friend, my attitude towards him was one of enormous affection, on my part at least. Anyway, he was very popular, he was very delicate, very slim, small-boned. There were other friends, too, but I also had a fairly large group of enemies, I mean there were fist-fights in the school corridors, scrums, squaring up to one another, fights – these things happened very often and I remember that these anti-Semitic incidents were maybe not daily occurrences but they did happen. I remember one particularly painful event involving one of my friends whom I’d most probably annoyed – I wasn’t an easy child – but who, so to speak, uttered a profanity against me, using… later he apologised to me – using language that completely paralysed me. That was one situation which, especially coming from someone who was close to me, made a very strong impression on me. Otherwise, I was resilient, I fought, I took part in all kinds of battles, I responded to any sort of taunts immediately, offensively and aggressively.

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