Education in Poland during World War II

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As a reaction to the closure and censorship of Polish schools by the German occupiers , resistance among teachers led to the creation of extensive underground educational activities.

history

The closure of the Polish universities began with the arrest of the professors of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow by the Gestapo on November 6, 1939. As a result, all universities and grammar schools in the Generalgouvernement were closed.

Only elementary and vocational schools remained open, in which teaching was carried out at a low level and according to a restricted curriculum. History of Poland , Polish literature, and geography were removed from the curriculum. In the same year the Tajna Organizacja Nauczycielska (Secret Teachers' Organization, TON) was formed, which organized secret teaching in the Polish language. TON received financial support through payments from the UK Government and donations from the students' families. Lessons were usually held in small groups in private apartments and in the ghetto .

University-level teaching started with some delay, but was quickly organized. In February 1940, some of the professors were released from prison, including Mieczysław Malewski , who, in agreement with the underground leadership , started work at the Institute for German Ostarbeit in order to compile a dictionary of Polish words that had been taken from German. This gave him access to the university library and the books that were needed for the illegal seminars. Malewski succeeded in gradually bringing in more professors in order to build up one faculty after another. Former lecturers and professors from the University of Warsaw , the Free Polish University , the Medical School , the Warsaw School of Economics and the Polish Conservatory of Music took part in the lessons .

After the National Socialists dissolved the universities with the occupation of Poland in 1939, the Secret University of Warsaw ( Tajny Uniwersytet Warszawski ) existed in the Polish underground from 1939 to 1944 . The Secret University cooperated with the University of the Western Areas .

The secret instruction was ruthlessly opposed by the occupiers, and the teachers involved always worked at risk of death.

In 1942, 1.5 million students attended the underground primary school system. In 1944 the secondary school system covered 100,000 people and university courses were attended by 10,000 students (for comparison: around 30,000 students were enrolled in Poland in 1938/39). Over 90,000 secondary school students attended underground lessons, which were given by nearly 6,000 teachers between 1943 and 1944 in the four districts of the Generalgouvernement. Overall, every third child received some kind of education through the underground organizations during the time of the General Government. Among the youth aged for secondary school, that number grew to around 70%.

Study periods and academic degrees at the underground universities were recognized after the end of the war.

Uniwersytet Ziem Zachodnich

The University of the Western Regions (Polish Uniwersytet Ziem Zachodnich , UZZ) recruited mainly from professors from the University of Poznan , who had been removed from their posts by the National Socialists. There were 17 departments including a faculty of medicine and surgery. The university was mainly active in Warsaw, but had branches in Kielce , Jędrzejów , Częstochowa and Milanówek . It was founded in October 1940 on the initiative of the Education Department of the Polish Underground State . The university came to an end with the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

Historical background

In Poland there is a tradition of secret teaching with which one opposes the policies of the occupying power and efficiently evades state control. The first secret lessons took place after the third partition of Poland , when teaching in Polish was banned in the areas occupied by Prussia and Russia, while the multi-ethnic state of Austria promoted Polish teaching . During this period, Polish educators and intellectuals organized secret lessons in the Polish language, which took place in private rooms.

During the Kulturkampf in Germany, Prussian school policy followed the same restrictive line. In 1873, schooling in Polish was banned in the formerly Polish areas, with the exception of religious education. From 1906 religion also had to be taught in German. So Polish continued to be taught in secret.

After the brief period of independence from 1918 to 1939, Poland was once again divided - between Germany and the Soviet Union. Since the Polish language was either banned in both zones (Silesia, Pomerania) or discriminated against as inferior, an underground movement reorganized itself to ensure the continued existence of the Polish language and culture. There were secret schools where classes were held in the Polish language and there were publishers illegally publishing Polish printed matter. After the Second World War and the expulsion of the German population from the East German areas , the use of the German language in public was forbidden east of the Oder-Neisse line . With that, the lessons there took place in Polish.

During the communist regime in the 1970s and 1980s there was a resurgence of the illegal "flying university", where u. a. the later Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki taught.

swell

Knowledge of the participants and the conditions under which classes were held at the Warsaw Secret University mostly comes from memoirs or interviews with the survivors. In view of the illegality of the company, the sources on the organization, the activities and the participants of the Secret University Warsaw are incomplete. One of the most important sources is Anka Grupińska's project “Records from the Jewish World in Poland” ( Zapisywanie świata żydowskiego w Polsce ), which was initiated in 2006 by the Museum of the History of Polish Jews , and in which she conducted interviews with Polish Jews of all generations has evaluated.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ewa Bukowska: Illegal schools in Poland in the years 1939–1945
  2. ↑ German National Library: Uniwersytet Warszawski
  3. ↑ Adam Redzik: Polish Universities During the Second World War. Encuentros de Historia Comparada Hispano-Polaca / Spotkania poświęcone historii porównawczej hiszpańsko-polskiej
  4. ↑ Ryszard Czekajowski: Tajna edukacja cywilna w latach wojenno-okupacyjnych Polski 1939-1945.
  5. ^ Stefan Korboński: Polskie państwo podziemne: przewodnik po Podziemiu z lat 1939–1945. Wydawnictwo Nasza Przyszłość, Bydgoszcz 1975, p. 56.
  6. ↑ Stanisław Salmonowicz: Polskie Państwo Podziemne. Warsaw 1994, p. 213.
  7. ↑ Christine S. Parker: History of Education Reform in Post-Communism Poland, 1989–1999: Historical and Contemporary Effects on Educational Transition ( Memento of September 28, 2003 in the Internet Archive )
  8. ^ Polish language periods. New Polish period, 18th century - 1945.
  9. ↑ Bavarian State Center for Political Education: In Search of the Silesian Kingdom of Heaven ( Memento from October 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  10. ^ Franz-Josef Sehr : Professor from Poland in Beselich annually for decades . In: Yearbook for the Limburg-Weilburg district 2020 . The district committee of the district of Limburg-Weilburg, Limburg-Weilburg 2019, ISBN 3-927006-57-2 , p. 223-228 .
  11. ↑ POLIN; Museum of the history of polish jews. ( Memento of October 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on September 30, 2014.

Remarks

  1. ↑ Wikipedia has an article on Free Polish University .
  2. ↑ The English Wikipedia has an article on the University of the Western Regions .