Lech Makaruk
Class 4
Mikołaj Kopernik Public High and Junior School in Toruń
14 June 1946
How I studied during the occupation
During the occupation I studied in a town named Biała Podlaska in the Lublin region.
I was attending the legal Public Polish Trade School, where the junior high school program, except history and Latin, was taught under the guise of vocational subjects. The school was located in a private building, which was not adapted to its new purpose. In the school, there were four to six groups, each of which consisted of around forty students (the number of groups was limited by the Germans). The lecturers there were pre-war junior school teachers. Some of them were locals, others were resettled from western Poland. Many students were from the countryside, while the others were the children of the intelligentsia, merchants, and laborers. All student and teachers alike were Polish, and no snitching had ever happened there. Two roundups were carried out at the school though, and more than ten students were sent to Germany for forced labor. I studied there from September 1941 to July 1944. I passed the so-called prep course and then graduated after two years of trade school. I studied Latin and history with one of that school’s teachers along with my friend. That way I completed the full course of study of two junior high school years.
We used pre-war textbooks. The District Commission for Clandestine Teaching was supplying the books to us and especially to those who could not study at the trade school and studied at the secret classes. These textbooks were bought with the money donated by the community.