Look Who it Was Random video

Aleksander Smolar - The Stefan Batory Foundation (68/201)

171 views · Published 18 December 2018 · 4:01 · Indexed 10 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: Some time before that, once Mazowiecki’s government had ended, I had been looking for a way to survive. Then a friend told me for the first time about the Stefan Batory Foundation. He said, ‘Perhaps you could be in charge of it because then you’d be able to travel between Poland and France and continue your academic career in France while at the same time you’d be involved in public life in Poland.’ And so I turned to [George] Soros asking him to take me on and he agreed. I went to see him in London where he has a house which from the outside looks very modest, like houses in London do, but it’s enormous, and in front of the house – I don’t remember where it is – there’s a huge courtyard, a garden, fenced off. That was his garden – he took the keys and we went in and walked around this private garden of his in the huge London square. That’s when I said jokingly but also quite cynically, ‘I would like to take care of your money in Poland’. He said, ‘What does that mean?’ Well, I said, ‘I’d like to head your Foundation in Poland’. We knew each other only very vaguely at that point, we’d met a few times at conferences but really I didn’t know him at all. Well, after we’d talked he soon realised what I was after because I didn’t hide that this was a way for me to continue functioning in two countries simultaneously so that I could be with my family and be in Poland, too. When I told him that I wanted to take care of his money, he asked, ‘What’s in it for me?’ So then I proposed what I was going to do with this Foundation and he accepted my proposal. The foundation then wasn’t what it is today. Today he wouldn’t be able to nominate anyone, but then the foundation was run differently and I was made its head and to this day – I don’t know how many years it’s been, 25 I think – I’ve been heading this Foundation. I ought to resign from it to be honest but firstly, I think it’s very useful especially in these times. Secondly, I couldn’t survive… live only in Poland, I have family, a large part of my family in France. But neither could I live only in France. If I did, I’d feel like a pensioner to say nothing of the fact that the things which interest me the most would be far away. So this was the solution I discovered a long time ago. This, of course, is not my entire life, I’m the chairman which doesn’t mean that I have daily duties, I don’t manage the Foundation on a day-to-day basis, the Foundation has a director and there are other people. However, strategic decisions – and when I am in Warsaw that’s what’s going on in the background – then, when there are problems that I can help resolve that’s when I become involved.

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