Marek Edelman - Organising illegal schools for children in the ghetto (57/145) скачать в хорошем качестве

Marek Edelman - Organising illegal schools for children in the ghetto (57/145)

To listen to more of Marek Edelman’s stories, go to the playlist:    • Marek Edelman - Recollecting my parents (1...   Marek Edelman (1919-2009) was the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He had remained in Poland following the Nazi defeat and was active in domestic and international politics while at the same time becoming one of Poland’s leading cardiologists. [Listeners: Anka Grupinska, Joanna Klara Agnieszka Zuchowska, Joanna Szczesna; date recorded: 2003] TRANSCRIPT: It has to be said that when the ghetto was closed off, the vast underground movement was set in motion, and illegal secondary schools were formed for the children - all of this was under cover of this Żytos or something. In the evenings after curfew, readings were held in the courtyards, literary evenings, poetry readings, singing, some kind of vestige of cultural life. There were choirs that sang and gave performances, for example, twice a week the children would put on a play, and other children were brought in. Then the 'corner movement' was started. The parents weren't at home, or there was terrible starvation so in a corner of the courtyard, around 20 or 30 children would gather from the surrounding houses, and then an instructor would go there and it was like a kindergarten, perhaps the children were a bit older, so those that didn't go to school and to those kitchens would get their soup here. The traffic there was enormous. You should have seen those children coming out of the so-called corners, walking down the street singing songs. It made an impression, they were all starving, filthy dirty but somehow they were organised. For example, in those courtyards there was often a bit of garden, well, not exactly a garden but a bit of soil surrounded by a fence or not even fence but divided off with a piece of metal railing, and that's where people sowed carrots, parsley and other things that were added to that soup. So somehow all of this worked. Of course in the meantime there were arrests, beatings, everything was happening, and there was terrible fear yet life, this underground life somehow carried on. Illegal secondary schools were set up. All of the pre-war secondary schools, those that still had pupils in Warsaw as well as the pupils who'd finished primary school and were about to go to secondary school attended these illegal schools. Yes, people had to pay for this because the teachers had nothing to live on, so most people paid, it was a pittance because the teachers were dying of starvation, too, like Wilejkowski who was also a teacher - what did he teach? Mathematics, and he died of starvation, too. So the wages were wretched but this all took place. I didn't have much to do with this but plenty of children who lived in the same building as I did attended these schools. Of course, these were traditional lessons. They were following the same curriculum as they'd had before the war but lessons didn't take place because if people had been rounded up in the street, the children were afraid to go out and so they didn't come to school. But they came and something was being done. It was very important that something could be done, that it wasn't just hunger, that there was more to life than just hunger.