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Aleksander Smolar - Refusing to be humiliated (97/201)

105 views · Published 18 December 2018 · 3:36 · Indexed 4 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 remember scenes which were important for me in that Jewish house in Śródborów but from that second phase when I was… not when I’d spent a short time in that children’s home but when I was travelling there regularly – it was a rest house just outside Warsaw. That was an exclusively Jewish world – only Jews stayed there. I knew some of the people there. I remember the daughter – she was his foster daughter – of the acclaimed poet Heller, Binem Heller. Then there was the historian and director of the Jewish Institute of History, Bernard Mark, his daughter, I was friends with her. There was also Józek Sławny, a famous physicist who left Poland – I can’t remember if it was after ’56 or ’68 – he was my friend from Jewish school. This was Jurek Bitter whom I mentioned earlier. This was the world of my childhood, apart from the world of my school-mates, there was this Jewish world. I remember when we used to go outside of our zone, which happened quite often, there were gangs of local children who used to chase us and tried to frighten us, or beat us up a bit, rough us up while they yelled anti-Semitic, hostile insults at us. I found it terribly humiliating that almost everybody would run back to safety. I would remain but I wasn’t so brave that I was prepared to confront them – instead, I stood behind a tree. But I didn’t run away and sometimes, I even risked getting beaten up. For me, it was throughout my whole life, a crucially important issue and often, many of my friends described and found funny the various situations in which I would suddenly become aggressive. I remember once I was traveling on the Paris Metro with a friend, the renowned historian of philosophy Krzysztof Pomian and Irena, and a group of young Arabs began to behave aggressively towards us and I chased them away. It was a dangerous situation, of course, as they could have had knives or something and there was quite a crowd of them, but my immediate reaction has always been to go on the offensive meaning not to retreat and not to surrender – under no circumstances to be humiliated.

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