Well, in France – I've arrived in France –
the person who played a huge role in my life
and thanks to whom I found myself in France
was someone I'd met the previous year in Italy.
When I was leaving Poland and after the Americans had denied me a visa,
as I was applying for work or for a grant in five different countries,
I was accepted by
Johns Hopkins University in Bologna,
an excellent American university,
to their very good School of Advanced International Studies,
a high quality centre of that field.
You could say that the third subject I studied
following on from economics and sociology was international relations.
One of the lecturers there with whom I made friends almost immediately
was Pierre Hassner who was the beloved
assistant lecturer and protégé of Raymond Aron.
He was an exceptionally bright political philosopher,
political theorist who knew all of the
world's most eminent people in this field.
In addition, he was exceptionally modest
and would invite me and others to dinners
where he would always pay for his students.
He was always very interested in what they had to say.
This was a real experience for me
and as I've already mentioned, on one occasion
when I was visiting my family in Sweden, he rang me and said,
'Listen, if you can, come to Raymond Aron – do you know who that is?' Of course I knew –
he was a great figure in European humanities
whose books I'd already read; one had been translated by Giedroyc.
In any case, I went to meet Raymond Aron –
I've spoken about this already.
He gave me a wonderful grant for a year.
But let me carry on with Pierre Hassner.
He became an extraordinarily good friend and to this day...
sadly, he's now very seriously ill.
He doesn't live at home, I visit him regularly
whenever I'm in Paris.
He's exceptionally intelligent, open,
curious about the world and about people,
of such modesty and simplicity
that it would be hard to guess just how intelligent he is
until you start to talk about serious issues,
and then he immediately joins in and talks.
If you've not heard his lectures or read his articles...
he says about himself that he was a middle-distancer;
lots of his books were published
but they were always collections of his articles.
A middle-distancer means that he didn't write articles for the press
nor did he write books; he only ever wrote 30-50 pages at a time.
They were articles on strategic East-West relations,
or those between the United States and Europe,
about Europe, American strategy.
In other words, it was the whole spectrum of topics dealing with international politics.
Even our son – we named him after him but with the Polish version: Piotr,
he's Piotr but he's named after Pierre, Pierre Hassner.
He was a Romanian Jew who'd arrived in France
when he was a 19-year-old boy
where his entire career...
he'd often go to the States or some other place...
and you could say that I learned from him
firstly about international relations then France,
but apart from that there were many other things:
political philosophy which lay within the scope of
his professional interests and his expertise.
You could say that he was the person
who was closest to us and he'd come to see us
even when we were in Aix-en-Provence
or when we were still in London,
he'd come especially to visit us.