Look Who it Was Random video

Aleksander Smolar - Schoolboy partisans (93/201)

82 views · Published 18 December 2018 · 2:30 · Indexed 23 September 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 remember being brought by someone to some boy’s house on Nowogrodzka Street where today you’ll find the headquarters of PiS and from which the real ‘governor’, as his fans call him, operates. ‘Governor’ was a concept used in [Józef] Piłsudski’s case so he’s clearly being nominated as Piłsudski’s successor. You could say that every epoch has the Piłsudski it deserves.

In any case, one of my friends brought me to this boy’s house on Nowogrodzka Street – it must have been some decent bourgeois family of lawyers. I remember they had their name engraved on the door, it was an old house which couldn’t have been destroyed and this engraved nameplate. This was… in the context of Warsaw in those times, this was something extraordinary. He started talking, telling me about an anti-communist resistance movement, about some explosives, plastic – it was the first time I’d heard this named as an explosive. Unfortunately, I told some of my friends about this after which I was summoned by the headmistress and found some men there who started asking me all about this. To be honest, this problem has bothered me all my life, did I harm this boy, did something happen to him because of my garrulousness, because I passed on what he told me to another friend? I don’t know, I have no idea of who it might have been. But in any case, you could say that this was – as a young child – this was the only incident in which I played the role of informer not to say a grass, although I didn’t do this off my own bat – I was summoned but the fact remains that I definitely spoke about it and I don’t know what happened next with that boy, with that family. I’m assuming that he had invented everything that he’d told me, he was a small boy so all of these…

[VT] How old was he?

I think he was about 12 years old, 11-12 years old.

In any case, this was in primary school.

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