Stories From The Eastern West
70 episodes - English - Latest episode: 8 months ago - ★★★★★ - 37 ratingsLittle-known histories from Central & Eastern Europe that changed our world...
Heard of how The Rolling Stones played for the Communist Party? The bear who fought in WWII? Or the man who single-handedly created an entire language?
Each episode of our narrative podcast tells incredible stories that all have one thing in common: the Eastern West.
#SFTEW
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Episodes
Aga Derlak
August 18, 2023 13:43 - 26 minutes - 24.8 MBAga Derlak remembers her fascination with music as a young child. And once she began learning piano, she would lose hours in flowing through improvised journeys at the keyboard. This passion led her to gaining a place on the year-long Berklee Global Jazz Institute program. And in this interview, she discusses the impact that has had on many levels of her life. The founder of the project, pianist Danilo Perez, who is part of the incredible Wayne Shorter quartet was a particular influence and ...
Marek Pędziwiatr
March 02, 2023 05:00 - 30 minutes - 41.5 MBIn Marek Pędziwiatr there is a connection between the past and the present. The history of jazz and the African American musicians, who created it, and Polish innovators from Chopin through Krzysztof Komeda and Niemen. Marek is a hub, a central force pulling his golden threads of jazz, hip-hop, classical music, avant-garde, and Slavic folk. But his interest in weaving these genres together is driven by the human experience. Marek is an award-winning musician and composer now based in Wroc...
Joanna Duda
February 01, 2023 11:03 - 25 minutes - 34.7 MBTo describe Joanna Duda as simply a pianist doesn't capture the extraordinary dimensions of the music she produces. Whether touching a broken keyboard, using the sound of a rewinding tape machine, or mixing in field recordings, her innate playfulness allows any instrument to blossom - you get a sense that one of her greatest strengths is to listen attentively to whatever she uses. Joanna is also an incredible editor, cutting and mixing with bold and surprising artfulness. It was a friend o...
Kuba Więcek
January 03, 2023 09:36 - 19 minutes - 26.8 MBIn the history of jazz, there haven't been many musicians that give credit to their playing video games. But as a nine-year-old hardcore player, Kuba Więcek developed an affinity with repetitive practice and now feels the need for strategic thinking and fast decision-making has stood him in good stead as a bandleader today. After a pivotal moment as a teenager, which he talks about in the interview, when he improvised on his saxophone for the first time, his 10 hour-a-day, video gaming habit...
Marcin Masecki
November 29, 2022 08:49 - 27 minutes - 38.1 MBMarcin Masecki considers that he has two parents, jazz and classical music. As a pianist, he is steeped in the tradition of learning piano as a young child with all the purity and precision that comes with that. In this interview, you get the sense of how that triggered Marcin’s disruptive streak, and how that has been central to his approach to music. There is reverence and intellectual rebellion. Like many accomplished musicians, there is music in his family. Marcin has spoken of his grand...
CHAIN
September 01, 2022 08:54 - 25 minutes - 35.5 MBIn the very last episode of Stories of The Eastern West as you knew it, we’re taking you to Estonia, 1989. A group of people there made 2 million others hold hands and create a human chain of unprecedented size and significance. The Baltic countries had a truly turbulent 20th century. They went from regaining their independence to losing it to the USSR and becoming subject to a ruthless policy of Russification. Unsurprisingly, they needed something big to jump on the bandwagon of the 1989...
PASSENGER
January 27, 2022 15:32 - 23 minutes - 32.4 MBSeveral years after the war, a strange encounter in the heart of Paris made Zofia Posmysz, a former Auschwitz prisoner, start wondering what it would be like to meet her camp overseer. Posmysz turned her fantasy in a successful radio play in which she explored the unlikely perspective of an oppressor, a Nazi German concentration camp overseer. The story inspired a prolific young filmmaker Andrzej Munk – a representative of the Polish Film School, a group of filmmakers tackling the experience...
EXILE
December 17, 2021 18:12 - 25 minutes - 34.8 MBGet to know Piotr Szkopiak, a London-based film and TV director who’s spent a good portion of his life pondering the nature of his identity. Piotr Szkopiak was born in the United Kingdom but into a Polish family. As he grew up, he learned that his parents and neighbours were all World War II prisoners of war who had escaped the USSR but couldn't go back to Poland after the war ended. His mother told him how she had travelled from the depths of the Soviet Union through Persia and southern E...
REVOLUTION
November 10, 2021 16:12 - 30 minutes - 55.3 MBNicolaus Copernicus, born in 1473, was the orphaned son of a copper merchant in Toruń. Thanks to his bishop uncle, he obtained a first class education at the Kraków Academy and then in Italy, where he became an avid observer of the night sky – even though he was supposed to be preparing for a church career. His day job as a church canon, diplomat and doctor in Frombork – when he wasn't defending castles against the Teutonic Knights – meant that it took him over 30 years to finish his book ...
DAISIES
October 07, 2021 14:08 - 26 minutes - 48.9 MBVera Chytilová was the most important woman director of the Czechoslovak New Wave – although she remains relatively unknown outside of Central Europe. As the first female student of the prestigious FAMU film school in Prague, she had to fight in order to do things her own way. During the creative explosion of the Czechoslovak New Wave, she made her most well known film ‘Daisies’ (1966) – a surrealist pop-art comedy, about two young women who set their minds on creating humorous destruction a...
VISIONARY
September 07, 2021 12:07 - 27 minutes - 50 MBStanisław Lem was a science-fiction writer whose works, abilities and quirky sense of humor convinced Phillip K. Dick that he was too brilliant to exist and must have actually been a committee of people! Indeed his rare gift for blending philosophy with technology and action made him an instantaneously recognisable voice in the European sci-fi world and elevated him to the heights of popularity and critical acclaim. But Lem’s life was far from a textbook success story. Throughout his life...
Announcing Season IV
August 24, 2021 14:01 - 1 minute - 3.26 MBThis year we have more great stories for you! There's going to be a bit of sci-fi, a pinch of socialist realism, a good portion of astronomy, and some old-fashioned moving testimonies from a region that never sleeps! Stay tuned: the first episode drops September 7th! Like our show? Get our newsletter!
The Fusionist: Zbigniew Namysłowski
July 29, 2021 13:15 - 29 minutes - 40.4 MBLike most Polish jazz musicians, Zbigniew Namysłowski learned the basics of jazz listening to Willis Conover’s “Jazz Hour”. Originally starting his musical career playing piano, cello and trombone, Namysłowski became infatuated with the saxophone after meeting composer Krzysztof Komeda, who happened to be carrying an alto saxophone with him, on a train. During that chance encounter, Namysłowski gave the instrument a try and hasn’t stopped playing the saxophone ever since. His original expe...
The Virtuoso: Adam Makowicz
July 16, 2021 11:08 - 24 minutes - 33.4 MBAdam Makowicz grew up in a house where a piano was the centre of the home. His mother had long planned for him to become a classical virtuoso, but a meeting with a musician who introduced him to jazz changed this path completely. Adam packed his bags and left for Kraków, where he moved into a jazz nightclub and immediately became part of the city’s jazz scene. It was here where his thorough classical education and incredible talent led him to create his unique virtuoso style, one that merg...
The New Yorker: Michał Urbaniak
July 01, 2021 12:50 - 29 minutes - 41.1 MB“Polish jazz group - 100$ a night” Displayed on the posters in Michał Urbaniak’s band’s van while playing across Europe in the 60s, this hippy traveling player was soon to become one of the most innovative Polish jazz musicians in history. Though his European career was quickly evolving, the old continent simply didn’t feel like enough. From a very young age, Michał knew at heart that he was a New Yorker, eventually jumping at the first chance he got to move to the world’s jazz capital a...
The Queen: Urszula Dudziak
June 17, 2021 13:00 - 31 minutes - 43.2 MBUrszula’s love for unruly musical experiments got her kicked out from music school when she was a young girl. A few years later, like many young Poles, she stumbled upon The Voice of America - a radio station meant to bring American culture and censorship-free news to people locked up behind the Iron Curtain. This program is where Urszula heard jazz for the first time. Blown away by the uniqueness of the music, one of the voices she heard marked her particularly - the voice of Ella Fitzgera...
The Pioneeer: Jan Ptaszyn Wróblewski
June 17, 2021 13:00 - 31 minutes - 43.5 MBIt may be hard to believe, but when Jan Ptaszyn Wróblewski started playing music, jazz was censored in Poland. As a result of Stalin’s cultural politics that governed what kinds of art and culture could be consumed in the country, anything that may have been associated with western imperialism was formally excluded from public life. However, these rigid policies only made jazz more appealing, leading many young people across the country, like Ptaszyn, to fall in love with it. After Stalin’...
Announcing: Rebel Spirits
April 30, 2021 13:33 - 1 minute - 2.89 MBThis week we've a special preview for you: Rebel Spirits! It's a podcast about five Polish jazz musicians who came of age in the 1950s and became mesmerised by the music they heard on the outlawed American radio station Voice of America. You'll hear how they went from learning to play jazz from worn-out vinyls to becoming icons that continue to inspire the music world today. Hosted by Paweł Brodowski, Rebel Spirits is brought to you by Culture.pl, the flagship brand of the Adam Mickiew...
STATELESS
March 31, 2021 16:00 - 28 minutes - 38.9 MBIn 1967, Marian Marzyński was a popular TV show host and filmmaker in Poland. But then a seemingly faraway military clash sparked an unexpected conflict within the Polish communist party that led its Jewish members to be accused of anti-Polish sentiments. The conflict developed into an anti-Semitic campaign that affected all of Polish Jewish society and led to the emigration of the majority of the remaining Polish Jews, whose numbers had already been dwindled due to the Holocaust. Emigratin...
PUPPETS
March 01, 2021 15:00 - 24 minutes - 28 MBIn 1938, Hitler's forces marched into Czechoslovakia, a country that had only gained its independence two decades earlier. A puppeteer named Josef Skupa was ready to fight back with the help of Spejbl and Hurvínek – a father son duo of wooden puppets. Because the Nazi German occupiers didn't seem to take puppets very seriously, Skupa's theatre in Pilsen was able to put on satirical performances that directly referred to the occupation and gave ordinary Czechs hope that one day things would ...
WITNESS
January 27, 2021 12:56 - 25 minutes - 34.8 MBBack in 2019, we got the chance to interview Anastasija Gulej. She was 95 at the time, living a happy life in one of Kyiv's suburbs. If you didn’t know her, you’d never tell be able to tell that she wakes up every day with the horrors of her past. Her past as an Auschwitz-Birkenau inmate. Anastasija was already 18 years old when she was taken there, which makes her memories especially valuable. She remembers things perfectly clearly, she understood what was going around her, she knew wha...
WITCHES
December 31, 2020 12:21 - 24 minutes - 35.5 MB‘Romania today is possibly the only European country where you can bump into a witch at the supermarket.’ The history of witches in Europe is a tumultuous and violent one. Always on the margins of society and in opposition to any form of hierarchy, their presence sparked fear and prejudice which led to prosecutions and witch hunts. But unbeknownst to many, their traditions have outlasted all of this. In Romania, the 21st century has turned out to be a surprisingly good time for witches. ...
LUNAR
November 30, 2020 17:10 - 35 minutes - 48.6 MBIn the summer of 1976, the late Polish film director Andrzej Żuławski, responsible for infamous cult classics such as The Devil (1972) and Possession (1981), was given a green light to shoot the most expensive film ever made in Poland. On the Silver Globe was meant to be a massively ambitious science-fiction epic set on the Moon, showing the birth of a new civilisation, and produced without the benefit of modern special effects. But things didn't quite go to plan. The huge ambitions of a ...
ORPHANS
October 31, 2020 15:18 - 33 minutes - 39.2 MBAfter the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east in 1939, many thousands of Polish families were deported to Siberian forced labour camps. There they not only faced bitter cold but constant hunger. Then Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, and the families that were now allowed to leave tried to get as far south as possible. In many cases, only their children made it all the way to safety in Iran. Some Polish orphans were resettled in places like South Africa and Mexico, but a group ...
NAM
September 30, 2020 14:20 - 28 minutes - 32.6 MBAs much as The People’s Republic of Poland may seem a distant country hidden behind the Iron Curtain, it was an open and welcoming one... towards other socialist states. Student exchange programmes were one of the many ways of building international socialist partnerships. The Vietnam War was just ending when Hai ‘Nam’ Bui Ngoc had reached university. He was one of the few lucky ones given a chance to travel to the other side of the world to study ship building. After a few weeks spent tra...
SHIPYARD
August 31, 2020 10:42 - 29 minutes - 33.5 MBIn August 1980, after the firing of popular shipyard worker, Anna Walentynowicz, a strike broke out at the Vladimir Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk. Suddenly this massive complex on the Polish coast, with 16,000 employees and of huge strategic importance for the Polish economy, was under worker occupation, and every day other workplaces in Gdańsk and around the country started joining in. Very soon the communist leadership in Warsaw realised that this wasn't just another strike they could snuff o...
PURE
July 16, 2020 13:06 - 31 minutes - 36 MBChernobyl had cast a shadow over our childhoods. It was reportedly the cause of all the chronic diseases we’d struggled with. In the summer of 2018, we went there. We wanted to walk into the belly of the beast, to debunk any nonsense around it. To hear about the doom, catastrophes, and everyday struggles. But what we came back with was something else entirely – a beautiful and uplifting tale about love. Love for home, love for nature, love for people. Something stronger than the bigges...
Announcing Season III
July 08, 2020 10:55 - 1 minute - 1.49 MBThis year, we've travelled to the far reaches of the globe for you: we went deep down into the Chernobyl Exclusion zone, visited New Zealand, and went back in time and space to deliver yet another set of stories that changed our world. Stay tuned: the first episode drops July 16th! Like our show? Get our newsletter!
EWA & LENA
November 01, 2019 14:06 - 14 minutes - 19.5 MBHow a teen's letter to a stranger in the Soviet Union led to a long-distance friendship that has lasted decades. Like many teens growing up in the People’s Republic of Poland, Ewa decided to send a letter to a stranger in the Soviet Union. Lena from Moscow wrote back to her, and they quickly found they had a lot in common, including a love of both dogs and Vysotsky records. They continued writing as they entered new phases in their lives. They began careers, started families, and of cours...
KAIE
October 25, 2019 14:48 - 18 minutes - 26.1 MBHow a giant communal song festival helped Estonians regain independence from the USSR. Part of our mini-series The Final Curtain. In the Estonia Kaie Tanner grew up in, learning Russian at school was compulsory, and her mother and her friends often sang 'forbidden songs' at home – Estonian folk songs that the Soviet authorities disapproved of. Music was a huge part of her life, but she didn't expect that it could help her country win independence. But in 1987, when Kaie Tanner attended the...
PETRILA
October 18, 2019 14:52 - 21 minutes - 29.3 MBHow a Romanian mining town that lost its mine fought to turn its remains into a cultural hub. In our second and final episode on Ion Barbu and the town of Petrila, we learn how the mine, the town's main employer, was unable to achieve profitability in the new era of capitalism and was closed down for good. Ion had spent 15 years of his life at the mine, and for him and many others it was more than just a place of work. So when the mine's crumbling buildings were in line for demolition, Io...
ION
October 11, 2019 14:50 - 19 minutes - 26.7 MBHow a Romanian miner made political caricatures at a time when making fun of the country's leadership could mean a visit from the secret police. After finishing university in 1978, Ion Barbu was assigned to the Petrila mine as a topographer. He only intended to be there briefly, but despite attempting other jobs such as local reporter and museum curator, he ended up staying at the mine for the next 15 years... How did Ion balance being both a miner and a political caricaturist? What hap...
IRYNA
October 04, 2019 14:21 - 19 minutes - 27.2 MBHow a single mother in Kyiv experienced the end of the USSR and survived the harsh economic realities of life in post-communist Ukraine in the early 1990s. Part of our mini-series The Final Curtain. Iryna Tkachenko is a music conservatory graduate and journalist who became a single mother just a couple of years before the demise of the Soviet Union and the political and economic turbulence that followed the fall of the Iron Curtain. Her wage as a radio journalist wasn't really enough to ...
EDGAR & MICHAEL
September 27, 2019 14:51 - 22 minutes - 31.1 MBHow East Berlin's leading political cabaret tried to get their message through despite strict state censorship... and what happened when the system they were laughing at ceased to exist. For the citizens of the GDR, laughter was often the best medicine when dealing with the absurdities of the political system they lived under. And if you were a resident of East Berlin, there was no better place than Kabarett Distel (meaning 'thorn' in German). The content of Kabarett Distel shows was st...
TYMON
September 20, 2019 14:47 - 18 minutes - 25.6 MBMeet the headstrong musician who's been viciously rebelling against both of the systems he lived under... and created some truly worthwhile art along the way. Tymon Tymanski came of age in the 1980s, probably the bleakest years of the communist regime. Much like teenagers in the West, he turned to punk rock and artistic rebellion as a way of protesting the stagnation of the society he lived in. He met like-minded young people at the University of Gdańsk, played in various bands, and forme...
JACEK
September 13, 2019 12:19 - 24 minutes - 33.2 MBHow a banned singer-songwriter became an unwilling musical hero through his home-copied cassettes. Jacek Kleyff was an increasingly popular topical songwriter in 1970s Poland. But he was unwilling to bend to the demands of the communist state's censorship, so the authorities reacted by banning him from appearing in public, including radio and TV. But he didn't stop recording, and his songs, circulated through the underground on home-made cassettes, became anthems for the Polish democratic...
SIEGBERT
September 06, 2019 13:42 - 24 minutes - 33.5 MBHow an East German cameraman filmed the first major demonstrations in the GDR from the top of a church steeple in Leipzig. A month later, East Germany would effectively cease to exist. Part of our mini-series The Final Curtain. Siegbert Schefke was officially unemployed after being fired from his job as a building engineer. Unofficially, he began to arrange for diplomats to smuggle videotapes from East Germany to be broadcast on West German TV stations. As it happens, most East Germans cou...
WOJCIECH
August 29, 2019 17:07 - 23 minutes - 32.7 MBHow Polish opposition activists began transmitting their own pirate radio and 'hacked' communist-run state TV. Part of our mini-series The Final Curtain. Wojciech Stawiszyński was an opposition activist, who suddenly found himself in charge of running Radio Solidarność, a mobile radio station that would be the voice of the pro-democracy Solidarity movement. Their success depended on a sophisticated game of cat and mouse with the authorities, with each broadcast taking place at a new locati...
CHRIS
August 23, 2019 15:01 - 19 minutes - 27.3 MBHow a photographer from London gave the rest of the world a glimpse of everyday life behind the Iron Curtain. Part of our mini-series The Final Curtain. The Polish-British photographer Chris Niedenthal found himself in the heart of Communist Poland in the 1970s and 80s, documenting both how ordinary people lived, as well as the major political events leading up to the collapse of the Soviet-backed regime. His photographs ended up in major Western periodicals, such as Newsweek, Time, Der ...
ZBIGNIEW
August 23, 2019 15:00 - 25 minutes - 34.5 MBHow a well-known opposition leader evaded capture by the communist authorities for almost five years. Part of our mini-series The Final Curtain. In the early 1980s, Zbigniew Bujak was the head of Solidarity in the Warsaw region, a pro-democratic labour movement that was gaining in strength. So much so, in fact, that the communist leadership declared martial law in December 1981 in order to stop the opposition dead in its tracks. Hundreds of political activists were arrested, including much ...
Announcing: The Final Curtain
August 09, 2019 14:00 - 1 minute - 2.53 MBTHE FINAL CURTAIN: a new series of personal tales from the Eastern Bloc’s demise. Launching August 23rd in the Stories From The Eastern West feed! The year 1989 saw a big change. All of Central and Eastern Europe took a U-turn within less than three years and transformed from the grey land behind the Iron Curtain into several independent, quickly developing, free market democracies. The team behind Stories From The Eastern West is marking this occasion with The Final Curtain, a special ...
CRACKED
February 28, 2019 17:00 - 26 minutes - 36.5 MBFinland + technology = Nokia, doesn’t it? Yes, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Finland is responsible for many technological breakthroughs from the last couple decades, such as the SSH cybersecurity protocol used on over half of the world’s web servers, and Internet Relay Chat, which people born in the 1980s will remember as the first instant messenger. But back in the early 1990s, Finland’s tech scene was mostly just a lot of teenagers pirating software illegally. They would code ...
HUNT
February 14, 2019 16:00 - 21 minutes - 29.9 MBDuring WWII, the Third Reich had a systematic policy of plundering artwork from countries they invaded. In occupied Poland, this took place on a massive scale. Over half a million individual works of art were taken over the course of the war, including countless national treasures. But while some of these works of art were destined for the walls of high-ranking Nazi party officials and the planned Führermuseum, others were marked for destruction. In fact, there was one particular painting ...
TRANSMUTATION
January 31, 2019 15:34 - 22 minutes - 32.3 MBAlchemy – the supposed ancient art of turning everyday objects into gold – is widely believed to be obsolete. Interestingly, however, every bit of this notion is wrong. First of all, as it turns out, alchemy is still being practised today and, according to one of our guests, is doing better than ever. And second of all, it apparently was never actually an art of the physical transmutation of objects, but a very profound blend of philosophy, chemistry, physics and religion. Join us on SFT...
NAKED
January 17, 2019 21:00 - 23 minutes - 35.5 MBThe German Democratic Republic was known for being one of the more politically repressive countries in the former Eastern bloc, with its Stasi secret police keeping a firm grip on any form of dissent. But it is also known for its long tradition of nude bathing – known in Germany as Free Body Culture or FKK. In the mid-1950s, this tradition came under threat as the GDR government tried to ban nude bathing completely. Unexpectedly for a country that had no tolerance for dissent, the East Ger...
Rabbithole Two
January 14, 2019 17:00 - 6 minutes - 13.7 MBIn this bonus episode, you’ll get to hear a song that usually doesn’t leave the thick walls of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Italy. If you want to know more about Grotowski, check out our two-part story about him in the episodes SEARCH and CONTINUATION. Keep up to date with SFTEW by following us on Twitter, Facebook & Instagram. And if you like our show, sign up for our newsletter!
MESMERISED
January 03, 2019 22:00 - 27 minutes - 37.8 MBThe story of a man who mesmerised half a continent... Get it on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Overcast | RSS | Direct download In 1989 the Cold War was coming to an end. Soviet Union and the whole Eastern Bloc were crumbling. There was confusion everywhere. One day, state television channel started showing something really strange. A man, looking like Doctor’s Spock muscly brother, was staring at the camera promising to programme people’s brains and free them f...
CONTINUATION
December 20, 2018 21:00 - 25 minutes - 37.5 MBAfter having to leave Poland, Grotowski continued his ground-breaking work in the United States, before finding a permanent home in Pontedera, Italy. There he began work on Art as Vehicle, the final stage of his work at the newly-established Workcenter. This work, based around songs of tradition and objective movements, arranged into performance structures, is done more or less in secrecy, away from the prying eyes of the media and mainstream theatrical world. In the late 1990s, the Workc...
SEARCH
December 06, 2018 21:00 - 21 minutes - 30.8 MBJerzy Grotowski (1933-1999) undoubtedly had a profound influence on the transformation of contemporary theatre over the last 40 years. Starting out as a young director in the Polish provinces, he soon realised that for theatre to reach its true potential as a communion between actor and spectator and survive in the age of mass entertainment, the actor should attain complete mastery over their craft. His small group of actors committed to intensive daily training sessions to achieve this, ...
SHOETOPIA
November 22, 2018 21:00 - 24 minutes - 34.6 MBThe Czech shoe-maker Tomáš Bat'a was a visionary. A deep believer in capitalism, he dreamt up a unique functionalist city and started building it around his factories in the small town of Zlin. It became more succesful than he could have imagined. Bat’a moved on to redesigning how his workers engaged in relationships, spent free-time and were educated – the very way they lived. It seemed that before WWII, Zlin was a unique place, a sort of... living UTOPIA! Our producer Wojciech travelle...