A friendship that
bore fruit
An interview with Mirosław Jasiński, an activist of
the democratic opposition in communist Poland and
one of the leading activists of the Polish-Czechoslovak
Solidarity. Interviewer: Zbigniew RokitaZBIGNIEW ROKITA: When did the post-
war contacts between Polish and Czecho-
slovak opposition start?
MIROSŁAW JASIŃSKI: They start-
ed as early as 1948, when the commu-
nists took power in Czechoslovakia. That
was the same year as the first meeting
of Czechoslovak national socialists and
the Polish People’s Party. In the next dec-
ades their co-operation included differ-
ent areas: meetings at the highest level,
smuggling literature and printing equip-
ment, and active engagement with Pol-
ish students of the FA MU Prague Film
Academy during the Prague Spring – Ag-
nieszka Holland was among them. Art-
ists who were banned in Czechoslova-
kia often had exhibitions in Poland. For
decades the churches worked together
and Czechoslovak priests and nuns were
secretly ordained in Poland.
What did these ordinances look like?Let’s take Wrocław. Here, we had
occurrences of the ordaining of nuns
from the Jadwiga order, which was illegal
in Czechoslovakia at that time, but we
could only operate there in a clandestine
way. Thus, future nuns would come to
Wrocław on an organised tourist trip
and get separated from their group. They
would spend a few days in the Wrocław
monastery, become ordained, and then
return to Czechoslovakia where they
worked as nurses.What impact did these contacts have on
such important initiatives as the creation of
the Polish Committee of Defence of Work-
ers in 1976 and the Czechoslovak Charter
77 one year later?
At that time our contacts became
more vivid. There were two meetings
near the Śnieżka Mountain in the Kar-
konosze. During one of the meetings,
the idea that Václav Havel would write