Look Who it Was Random video

Aleksander Smolar - Leszek Kołakowski (170/201)

459 views · Published 20 December 2018 · 1:12 · Indexed 20 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: Similarly, I never questioned Leszek Kołakowski, to whom I was much closer. He was a teacher and a close friend in later years. His attitude towards Polish-Jewish relations was always intensely emotional and he questioned the most painful aspects of these divisions. He had different memories, he lived in Poland at its best. In his home his family helped Jews on a big scale – he was a young boy. You could see by his reactions that this was a very emotional issue for him yet I never had the courage to ask him – although I would later visit him often in Oxford and talk with him about a great variety of things – I never asked him although that question interested me hugely: why? Why was a person who could speak about so many painful issues with such detachment unable to speak with the same detachment and be purely analytical about this? Why was he so intensely emotionally involved?

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