Tomasz Miedzinski at the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Anniversary

This is me with one of my friends. The photo was taken in Warsaw next to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monumment on one of the anniversaries in the 1960s. In 1968 I was at the Ministry of Higher Education and in charge of a department that organized academic cooperation with other socialist countries. I traveled a lot to those countries, even accompanying ministers on their travels. In 1968 purges began in the ministry. The xenophobic, nationalistic and anti-Semitic atmosphere got worse. True, some directorial posts were held by people of Jewish origin, departmental directors and assistant directors, but they were specialists in their field. The Party got these primitive activists to give critical speeches about some Jewish employee of the ministry. Meetings like that could go on for 23 hours. They had material like that on me, too. But they couldn't have anything against me: I had brought up my children so that until 1967 they didn't even know they had Jewish blood. It was only when it all started that I decided to tell the children about their background, because I didn't want their school or people on the street to do it for me. My son accepted it calmly, and only now, 35 years later, during a visit to Horodenka, did he tell me that he did experience several times people shouting at him: 'You Jew!' I personally have never been the victim of anti-Semitism. Nobody has ever suggested in the least that they have anything against it..., I've never been made to feel like that directly. It never affected me directly, although I still feel uncomfortable about it. I was clean, I never gave them any grounds to come out and remind me that I have a few millimeters missing in my pants. I didn't stay long in that department after that, only a few months, and then I decided that I ought not to give them any chance to accuse me of having contacts with other countries, even though they were socialist countries, and I asked the minister to transfer me to a domestic department. About ten or twelve people in my ministry lost their jobs.