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Aleksander Smolar - My prison cell mates (128/201)

104 views · Published 20 December 2018 · 2:01 · 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: In any case, the conditions during the time I was in solitary confinement were difficult, but life in the cells could sometimes be wonderful. One outstanding memory was… it was an excellent cell – it was, it must have been around May 1st – probably both before and after – because we organised a revue to celebrate May Day in our cell. There were four of us. I became great friends with one of the people who was in that cell while we were in prison, and that was Janusz Szpotański who had been arrested for writing about 'gagglers'. These were people he regarded as the liberal intelligentsia that 'gaggled' but wasn't really harming the authorities. He was an amazingly good observer. The president there was a personage acclaimed by the opposition, Jan Józef Lipski who came from… not a communist background at all but from the real liberal opposition. There was another person there, a monster – Polan Haraszim who was a professor at the Jagiellonian University, he was originally from somewhere in Hungary. During the war he had collaborated with the Germans and then later with the Polish communist secret police. He was locked up because as he claimed – I'm assuming this was true – he'd taken bribes. He was head of the extramural courses in the Department of Law at the Jagiellonian University and he handed out diplomas, sold diplomas to, among others, various secret police agents, people in authority because those were the people who studied in these extramural departments to further their careers – this wasn't the first generation – and workers weren't accepted so some kind of education was required. So he and those diplomas… but was that true?

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