Daily Life in Nazi-Occupied Europe by Harold J. Goldberg

Author:Harold J. Goldberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2019-09-29T16:00:00+00:00

Immediately 150 faculty members were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Part of a plan to remove the intellectual leadership and elite from Poland, this action on November 6, 1939, just two months after the invasion, signaled the end of Polish educational independence. By arresting all the male professors, the Germans sent a message of threat and fear throughout Poland.

In order to fight these restrictions on education, the Polish resistance ran their own schools. Former teachers removed by the Nazis taught classes at great risk, but despite the hardships involved, the “Secret Teaching Organization” was able to educate more than a million elementary school students, 100,000 high school students, and 10,000 university students. After the war, the Polish government accepted these wartime diplomas in honor of the resistance to the Nazis.

For Polish Jews, the Nazi assault on education was more direct and brutal. Quickly after the invasion, schools were closed and Yiddish books destroyed, teachers fired, students ordered to wear a star on their clothes so they could be identified, and families forced out of apartments to allow German officers to move in. Rabbis were regularly abused or treated with disrespect, stopped on the street and made to cut off their beard or publicly deface their own holy books or religious objects. Soon all Jews were confined in a ghetto;* shortly thereafter they were sent to a concentration camp.

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