Perhaps there's something which it won't occur to you to ask me about,
but which I'll gladly talk about here
because it reveals how sometimes coincidences enable a person to get through difficult times.
Namely, I believe that I was able to survive the Stalinist years
in such a way that I have nothing to be ashamed of during that time,
either of what I did or of what I published and so forth,
and also in terms of a sort of mental health.
Because there were people who have nothing to be ashamed of and yet,
on account of those times being so harsh and because they had nothing to rely on,
their experiences left very deep impressions on them, in a negative sense.
I mean they had a sense of helplessness
which stayed with them for years making them feel there was nothing
they could do even once that was no longer the case.
I managed to avoid this thanks to finding myself in a group
which seemed to come together by itself.
It wasn't a very big group, and at that time we all got on very well together
and would meet up socially every once in a while
in the home or the studio flat of the same friend, always over a bottle of vodka.
It was our antidote, we referred to it as 'black Masses'
because the point was to come up with a kind of collective behaviour
in response to what was going on around us, as a kind of antidote to all of that.
We did this consciously.
There were a few of us in this group, and when I tell you who was there, perhaps you know, it'll be really funny.
My closest friend at that time was Janusz Wilhelmi who was later an important personage at,
who was a different person then from how he was later.
Witold Jedlicki, who was also a very close friend, a sociologist and who currently lives in Jerusalem.
The literary critic, Leszek Budrecki who's currently a professor at the university
and the biologist Matuszewski in whose home we used to meet,
and a few other people, too. Janusz Szpotański!
Janusz Szpotański, who was the embellishment of many of those meetings.
This made it more bearable, easier to cope with everything,
and we had the feeling that at least there are a few other people who think the same way as we do.
We had the feeling that we weren't alone at a time when often
just the fear of being left alone destabilised some people.
For me, it was crucially important
that I had this kind of an 'island' where I found shelter, an 'island' which was invisible to the eyes of strangers.
If you can find or create something like this in difficult times,
then you're in with a chance especially from the point of view of your mental health.
That's why I was so keen to talk about this because it was very important.