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Polish activist Jacek Kuroń (1934-2004) helped to transform the political landscape of Poland. He was expelled from the communist party, arrested and incarcerated. He was also instrumental in setting up Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) and became a Minister of Labour and Social Policy. [Listeners: Jacek Petrycki, Marcel Łoziński; date recorded: 1987]
TRANSCRIPT: What did this introduction to life depend on? Well, for example, our children went to live on farms alongside the peasants where they worked with them, ate with them and lived normally the way they did. They brought their own food with them and they worked hard so for this reason they were, of course, made very welcome. This was known as a 'trip to the kulaks'. This immediately conjured up the worst possible image of a dreadful, filthy village, prison sentences for obligatory supplies, with fields lying fallow, unbelievable. And that's how we brought up those children. We tried to influence that world somehow as much as we were able, and as long as the children were young, there was no conflict, or at least, not much. Everything was great. This led us to make all kinds of discoveries. But I need to say something about the technique here. We set up our own organisation during the Stalinist era, and we simply based it on OH. We were given, the ZMP town council gave us the use of camps that had been set aside for the scout movement in the Warsaw suburbs. The principles that were being followed - actually, that doesn't matter. So, initially it was supposed to be a camp, there was a team which ran the camp and that's what we were involved with, for ordinary children with whom we were doing all of this stuff. That's by the way.
At first, we adopted everything we thought was useful from the scout movement, so we had tents, open air games, rituals, all kinds of things like that, it was a huge adventure, we did all those things that were missing from OH, and the kids loved it and wouldn't leave us alone. Then we started doing various things, all kinds of different stuff. To explain what this sort of journey into life was like, I'll tell you about something that happened much later, after '56. In '57, we'd organised a camp in Malinki which is in the Bieszczady Mountains but in the populated area around Lesko. The children went out on reconaissance missions for UPA. The population around there was Polish but they told some dreadful stories about the Ukrainians. At the same time, they talked about the war and they told them the truth. It made an amazing impression as those teams would come back from their patrols more and more depressed because their image was being destroyed of a war in which our soldiers were good, brave and just while the others were villains, murderers and fascists. Suddenly, they were faced with the nightmare of warfare, and were forced to consider the rights of UPA. I remember, it was amazing, how this was building up until it finally exploded - that means they were right, this land was theirs! Ukrainians used to live here, they were all around here, and there are traces of burned out villages. They were fighting for their freedom. They were cruel, very cruel but the Polish army was no less cruel, no less cruel. They heard this from people who hated Ukrainians, who were unbelievably hospitable towards the Polish army. I remember what a massive psychological shock this caused. Well, and then - and now the whole issue was that if this is how children are brought up, you can't assume that... what can they do - change the world. Changing the world meant that they played with the local children, taught them different games, planted a garden, things like that.
Later there was a library, a theatre and a ZMW group. However, eventually you have to change the world, and you begin to ask fundamental questions. I mentioned this a moment ago when I was talking about myself, I said how in the beginning a person wants to basically change the world. And suddenly, this begins to have a consequence. These children need to find a place for themselves - where will we send them out into this world? I know that in a normal country with a parliamentary democracy you can play this game, and then the children get involved and they choose which party they want to belong to and through which they'll change the world. But then again, I don't know because they want to do this together but perhaps it suddenly becomes clear that in contrast to all the directions that these youth groups form, the political ones, or at least the totalitarian ones, in order to educate people from the bottom up, there need to be adult ones which will change the world. And our children simply came up with the idea, our children were already adult, they were 18, 17, 16 years old. [...]
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