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Aleksander Smolar - My parents' war-time experiences (16/201)

256 views · Published 17 December 2018 · 4:01 · Indexed 19 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: I’ll add a few more words about my father because like I said, before the war he was a member of Comintern and towards the end of the '20s he was sent illegally to Poland after spending nearly a whole decade in the Soviet Union. As a Comintern activist, he was sent out to work as a member of the Party apparatus in the KPZB, the Communist Party of Eastern Belorussia, which was part of the KPP but it was separate, autonomous. And there he was an activist high up in the Party. He had various functions there. By the way, I asked him, ‘What language did you speak there?’ He said, ‘Yiddish and Russian’. I think his knowledge of Polish towards the end of his life – he’d settled in Poland after the war and to a large degree was in a Polish environment – wasn’t too bad although certain Russian phrases would creep in. But at that time, I think, especially after spending a decade – since he was from this Yiddishland – and after spending a decade in the Soviet Union, then I think that his knowledge of Polish was limited. Oh and he was in prison twice… twice he was sentenced, he was tried, as I mentioned.

I mentioned that he met my mother in Białystok. He was publishing some kind of newspaper, in Yiddish probably, and my mother was also working on some paper at that time. My mother had been a student at Warsaw University earlier, she’d been studying history but she didn’t complete her degree, she only completed it after the war. Prison interrupted her studies. She was taken from Białystok and sent into the depths of Russia along with me. To Czkałowsk. To be honest, to this day I’m not too sure where this Czkałowsk is – somewhere in the depths of Russia where we were evacuated. The conditions weren’t as bad as those of some Poles and Jews, too, who’d been repressed and then exiled to the depths of Siberia. My parents as former communists, were accepted into the WKPP, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union even though that party – KPP – was disbanded because of alleged infiltration by provocateurs. So my mother was evacuated, but my father wasn’t. I don’t actually know why – he travelled on foot to Minsk in Belorussia where he got stuck. My mother and I were somewhere far away, she taught in schools while I attended the nursery. She had a small plot of land where she grew vegetables, fruit so that I could grow. Conditions were hard but no harder than they were for Russians at the time. My father meanwhile found himself in Minsk and was still there when the German army arrived. He was in the Minsk ghetto, but before he ended up in there, he began to organise an underground movement since the Soviet authorities had fled from Minsk. They deserted the city.

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