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Celebrating May Day with a 'captive' audience

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My prison cell mates
Aleksander Smolar Political scientist
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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?

W każdym razie spędzałem też czas właśnie w izolatce w trudnych warunkach, że tak powiem. Natomiast cele czasami były urocze. Pamiętam taka najwybitniejsza scena była: wspaniała cela – to było gdzieś tam, na pewno w okolicach 1 maja – pewnie i przedtem, i później, bo zorganizowaliśmy akademię pierwszomajową w celi. Było nas czterech. Był człowiek, z którym bardzo się zaprzyjaźniłem wówczas w więzieniu. Otóż w tej celi był on, Janusz Szpotański, który był aresztowany za to, że napisał operę o gęgaczach. Gęgacze to była dla niego liberalna inteligencja, która gęgała, a tej władzy za bardzo zaszkodzić nie mogła. On był świetnym obserwatorem. Prezydentem tam była wybitna postać opozycji, Jan Józef Lipski, który wywodził się nie z komunistycznej, a z prawdziwie liberalnej opozycji. Była taka postać, potwór taki – Polan-Haraschin, był profesorem Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, gdzieś tam z Węgrów się wywodził. On w czasie wojny kolaborował z Niemcami, a później z UB, a wsadzili go – on twierdził – za to, że – przypuszczam, że to jest prawda – że on za pieniądze, korupcyjne afery kierował studiami zaocznymi na Wydziale Prawa Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego i dawał dyplomy, sprzedawał dyplomy, między innymi ubekom różnym, ludziom władzy, bo na tych wydziałach zaocznych studiowali ludzie władzy, dla celów kariery – to było pierwsze pokolenie, gdzie przyjmowano robotników, a trzeba było mieć jakieś wykształcenie. Ale czy to była prawda?

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.

Listeners: Vitek Tracz

Vitek Tracz is a London-based entrepreneur who has been involved in science publishing, pharmaceutical information and mobile phone-based navigation.

Tags: Jagiellonian University, Janusz Szpotański, Jan Józef Lipski, Polan Haraszim

Duration: 2 minutes, 1 second

Date story recorded: September 2017

Date story went live: 20 December 2018