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Aleksander Smolar - Leaving my mark (3/201)

349 views · Published 17 December 2018 · 5:36 · Indexed 14 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: This was the reason why, although I don’t feel any great compunction to leave my mark. I mean that in this matter I’m quite pessimistic. We could say that we are here, we do what we can, we try to do various things, but all of this is wiped very quickly even from the memories of those who are close to us, in the sands of forgetfulness, so to speak. So this explains in part why I refused, for instance, to accept the French Legion d’Honneur or to be exalted here by President Komorowski. I wasn’t making this into any kind of protest, it’s just that for me these things are meaningless, even these ways of commemorating, of arresting the present moment – I’m quite pessimistic about this, I don’t believe in any of it. I don’t believe in any of it. I live in the moment although in some sense I’m always thinking about the future, I mean this is my world, this is the world of today and of the future.

I changed my mind, well, in the first place because you kept on at me. We’re friends and I found it hard it hard to disregard that. But there were also other important factors. Firstly, I recently had a similar request from my children. My eldest daughter from my first marriage, Monika – she’s always been interested in history and she didn’t ask me directly, but she asked about any records my father left behind, anything I might have, about many things, and I was thinking about her. Then my son, who is a journalist for the French newspaper 'Le Monde', he’s their correspondent in Jerusalem. He’s writing a book… to be honest, I don’t know much about this book, but I do know that it’s to be about my father, with whom my son is fascinated. He's read one or maybe more of his books about his wartime experiences. But this book won’t just be about him. In some way, it’s going to be linked – I don’t know how – with my son’s experiences as a correspondent in Israel, so the Jewish issue will be presented from that side. And maybe somehow it will be linked with the family history. Anyway, he was asking me all kinds of things about my father’s life and about mine, too. Apart from anything else, during last year’s summer holiday, this year’s summer holiday, my younger daughter recorded several hours of a conversation with me or rather, as in this case, of my monologue. Again, I think she had two reasons for this: on the one hand, this is somehow connected with the theatre production she’s preparing about ’68. The round anniversary of ’68 is approaching and she’s working on a play which will be performed in Jewish and in Polish theatres. It’ll be performed at the [National] Polish Theatre. It won’t be so much about ’68 as about the children of the generation of ’68. So I’m guessing it’ll show ’68 seen through not so much the memories of these children, because I’m assuming that most of them were either born abroad or, if in Poland, then sometime after the events, or else they were very young when they left, and therefore theirs won’t be actual memories, but rather, I’d imagine, a kind of reflection and the issue of experiencing the situation through the eyes of their migrant parents. They have their awareness… oh, and she questioned me in the same way that she questioned her brother. She questioned me… I think she needed this as material which helped her to get her bearings in relation to the broader issues, but maybe also because she was looking for concrete inspiration in the things that I would say. I don’t really know, but the fact is that I told her my story. I’m sure it wasn’t exactly the same as the things I’ll have the opportunity to record here, but it was about my life and so it’s unavoidable that there will be many similar threads. All of these things inclined me to… when you renewed your invitation, then, as you know, I agreed without hesitation and we arranged to meet here.

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