Look Who it Was Random video

Aleksander Smolar - Gearing up for rebellion (122/201)

77 views · Published 19 December 2018 · 3:04 · Indexed 22 September 2026

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

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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: In any case, it wasn't that I didn't have a sense of danger even as March was approaching and I was in that very active group which was preparing the events of March. In this way my choices were not the same as those of our intellectual seminar; some of the people there also politically active. I took part in lots of different meetings of that kind which you could say were of the hard core conspiratorial kind forming the nucleus of the group of 'commandos' with Jacek, with Karol. I remember… lots of things have stuck in my memory. One was something that happened at Iśka's, who today is my wife, in her apartment, in this apartment in which we're now sitting. We were meeting to discuss how we should respond to the cancellation of 'Dziady' and then, there was the next item, the dismissal of Adam Michnik from the university along with other less significant people, so to speak. Henryk Schleifer was there – they were talking with foreign journalists – he, too, became a rather ambiguous character later, Margherit from 'Le Monde' was there – and they were talking about 'Dziady', about the protest by the intelligentsia. They were kicked out of the university and that's when we began to see that it demanded a reaction so we started discussing what we should do, including holding a vigil. And I remember here in this apartment, I can recall who was here, and I remember Jacek who was always on fire, full of zeal and optimism, and I saw Karol's face. And again – I never spoke to him but I had the feeling that he realised that this meant going to prison again, that he was one of the few people who realised…

[VT] Who had already been in prison…

Well, they were… he was… one had done three years, the other three-and-a-half after they had written that open letter to the Party which was a rebellion, a declaration of the opposition in relation to the authorities and they were sentenced. They were released less than a year before March. There followed an intense period of discussions, debates and the formation of this group. And then I remember seeing Karol's face and I knew… that's how I read it – I think accurately although I again, I don't know why I never asked Karol. However, we never really talk about the past – we tend rather to talk about the present day. I also noticed this because I had a feeling that – although of course I didn't know – that March would turn out the way it did. I couldn't have expected that. But I did know there'd be a price to pay. I mean that the time for paying was, to use the language I'd picked up from Brus, coming closer. I realised this.

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