Look Who it Was Random video

Aleksander Smolar - Jurek Biter (165/201)

70 views · Published 20 December 2018 · 3:10 · 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: I only remember one childhood friend about whom I've spoken – that was Jurek Biter. He was very clever, very sensitive, delicate, a narcissist, from a Jewish family – terribly spoilt. His parents had adopted a little girl, an orphan but they had to give her away because he tormented her. That's less important – relations there were always strained. But thanks to the fact that I remember him, I've already mentioned this somewhere, when he was leaving probably in '58 or perhaps it was earlier than that towards the end of school, I recall, he asked me if I was leaving. At that time, Jews were leaving in droves, more left then than in '68 – it's the '68 emigration that most people remember. And when I said no, that I'm not leaving, he said, 'Well yes, you can stay. Your skin is thick enough'. I remember how that shocked me by its brutality and as the final words spoken as a farewell. Later, I met him again, relatively recently – two or three years ago. He came to Poland because he was showing his art work, I don't know whether it was in the Jewish Theatre or in the Social and Cultural Society of Jews in Poland, an institution which my father had headed at the dawn of time. And we greeted one another – he was devoid of warmth. He had two friends with him who later went off somewhere, they locked themselves away in that… I was totally dumbfounded. There was a complete lack of interest – but I was… after all, it had been a big chunk of my childhood. And I think this also stemmed from the choice I'd made, namely that they belonged to the Jewish world and that in some sense there was a judgement contained in this.

So in effect I lost contact with all of my friends and acquaintances whom I'd known either through the Jewish school I've mentioned – the first three years there – or through the Jewish summer camps or Club Babel which was attached to the institution that my father headed. It's interesting that none of them – maybe with the exception of one friend who came here once or twice and met me – no one tried to get in touch with me. Of course, neither did I attempt to contact them. But it was easier to get in touch with me because I'd stayed in the same place more or less whereas they had spread out across the world so I'm not discounting that it was because I belonged to an entirely different world in which they just weren't interested. I think I was hurt by this because I'd gone to the exhibition not because I was interested in art but on account of him to see how he looks and to exchange a few words with him.

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