Alina Fiszgrund in her school uniform

This is me dressed in my school uniform. The photo was taken in Wloclawek, probably in 1931. It survived because I gave it to one of my schoolfriend's. I didn't go to elementary school, I had a teacher at home. That was a frequent practice those days, still popular when I was young, that people took a teacher. The teacher taught you, and at the end of the school year you took an exam at the public school and either you passed the year or you didn't. That's what it was like. Then I successfully passed entry exams to a school in Wloclawek. I went to gymnasium there, because my father wanted to buy a pharmacy in Wloclawek. Wloclawek was a nice town, situated on the Vistula, observant of traditions. There was even a Jewish gymnasium there, a coeducational one, but I went to a public one, the Maria Konopnicka Gymnasium. On Stodolna Street, near the Vistula. I went there for two years, to a French-language class. This photo must have been taken about a year before the Jedrzejewicz reforms [Janusz Jedrzejewicz, 1931-1934 minister of education, author of 1932 school system reform], because the uniform has the sailor collar. The reform abandoned the sailor collars and introduced the so-called Slowacki collars instead. The pre-reform gymnasium had eight grades, and the reform introduced a four-grade gymnasium and a two-year high school, while the former first and second grades were made part of a five-grade [Editor's note: in fact six-grade] elementary school. I went to gymnasium about two years before that reform.