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I attended a school which seemed quite ordinary to me at the time, but now it seems strange. In Lodz, at 11 Sienkiewicza Street. I remember it very well, it was school number 131. A school for Jewish children, but it did not have only Jewish teachers. You could say that the Jewishness of this school was limited to two things:
no classes on Saturdays, and Jewish religion lessons, but nobody studied for those, because we all knew that you had a guaranteed 5 [highest grade] for behavior and for religion. I don’t remember anything from religion lessons I attended in this period.
We were being educated in the spirit of patriotism, and this really spoke to me. You had to stand up at attention in front of the eagle [White Eagle – Poland’s national symbol], and of course I remember till this day all the legion songs [6] and the Polish national anthem. We were taught all the patriotic, military and folk songs.
Pilsudski’s [7] funeral – this must have been the one pre-war event that made the strongest impression on me! The mourning was just terrible! I have no doubts that my parents felt very deeply about it as well. At school we all wore 4 stars on our berets, it was the school’s symbol. So you had to sew black crepe around the stars, and all year long we wore mourning ribbons.
They showed the film from Pilsudski’s funeral, and we would go to see it, the whole class would go to the theater to see it. I also remember the little poems I recited on Pilsudski’s name-day:
We are both called Jozio - you and I.
All of Poland knows you well,
But nobody knows me yet,
‘Cause I am just a little kid.
But when I grow up big and strong,
In the army with you I’ll go
We always celebrated Pilsudski’s name-day [19th March], and all these anniversaries, the Polish uprisings [In the 123 year period of Poland’s occupation there were three uprisings for independence, all failed: the Kosciuszko Uprising in 1794, the November Uprising in 1830 and the January Uprising in 1863].
My year was not yet co-educational. I believe co-education was introduced about two or three years before the war. By 1939, when I had completed seven years of elementary school, the first three classes were, I think, mixed. It sometimes happened at school that the boys would talk in Yiddish during the break – it never happened before that, with only girls around. And they would be punished for it. They would sit in ‘jail’ – it meant they were made to stay after school for an extra hour or more. This was a rule made by the school principal, a Jewish woman.
I don’t know how it worked in other schools. [Editor’s note: We have not been able to establish whether a similar ban, and punishments for its breaking, existed in other Jewish schools. In general, Jewish teachers did attach enormous importance to their students’ ability to speak proper Polish. Nonetheless, it appears that the strict ban on Yiddish was an individual idea of the principal of the school attended by Mrs. Najduchowska]. On Saturdays we had no school, instead we went on Sundays.
I can’t say which subjects I liked. I could tell you which teachers I liked. I did not enjoy school. I mean, I did not like studying, but I did like my school friends a lot. I was close with many girls. In my class there were 50 girls; four of them survived. Ewa Parzeczewska lives in Canada; Jadzia Rubinstein and Hanka Fiszman live in Israel, and I am the fourth.
My sister and I – neither of us was a good student. I always judged myself like this: that I was dull, stupid... But now I sometimes think it was not so much a question of my stupidity, but rather of those conditions.
no classes on Saturdays, and Jewish religion lessons, but nobody studied for those, because we all knew that you had a guaranteed 5 [highest grade] for behavior and for religion. I don’t remember anything from religion lessons I attended in this period.
We were being educated in the spirit of patriotism, and this really spoke to me. You had to stand up at attention in front of the eagle [White Eagle – Poland’s national symbol], and of course I remember till this day all the legion songs [6] and the Polish national anthem. We were taught all the patriotic, military and folk songs.
Pilsudski’s [7] funeral – this must have been the one pre-war event that made the strongest impression on me! The mourning was just terrible! I have no doubts that my parents felt very deeply about it as well. At school we all wore 4 stars on our berets, it was the school’s symbol. So you had to sew black crepe around the stars, and all year long we wore mourning ribbons.
They showed the film from Pilsudski’s funeral, and we would go to see it, the whole class would go to the theater to see it. I also remember the little poems I recited on Pilsudski’s name-day:
We are both called Jozio - you and I.
All of Poland knows you well,
But nobody knows me yet,
‘Cause I am just a little kid.
But when I grow up big and strong,
In the army with you I’ll go
We always celebrated Pilsudski’s name-day [19th March], and all these anniversaries, the Polish uprisings [In the 123 year period of Poland’s occupation there were three uprisings for independence, all failed: the Kosciuszko Uprising in 1794, the November Uprising in 1830 and the January Uprising in 1863].
My year was not yet co-educational. I believe co-education was introduced about two or three years before the war. By 1939, when I had completed seven years of elementary school, the first three classes were, I think, mixed. It sometimes happened at school that the boys would talk in Yiddish during the break – it never happened before that, with only girls around. And they would be punished for it. They would sit in ‘jail’ – it meant they were made to stay after school for an extra hour or more. This was a rule made by the school principal, a Jewish woman.
I don’t know how it worked in other schools. [Editor’s note: We have not been able to establish whether a similar ban, and punishments for its breaking, existed in other Jewish schools. In general, Jewish teachers did attach enormous importance to their students’ ability to speak proper Polish. Nonetheless, it appears that the strict ban on Yiddish was an individual idea of the principal of the school attended by Mrs. Najduchowska]. On Saturdays we had no school, instead we went on Sundays.
I can’t say which subjects I liked. I could tell you which teachers I liked. I did not enjoy school. I mean, I did not like studying, but I did like my school friends a lot. I was close with many girls. In my class there were 50 girls; four of them survived. Ewa Parzeczewska lives in Canada; Jadzia Rubinstein and Hanka Fiszman live in Israel, and I am the fourth.
My sister and I – neither of us was a good student. I always judged myself like this: that I was dull, stupid... But now I sometimes think it was not so much a question of my stupidity, but rather of those conditions.
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Interview
Halina Najduchowska
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