Studying in the Warsaw Ghetto

In the autumn of 1941, in the Warsaw Ghetto, declared schooling for Jewish children comes to an end: from the age of ten they are conscripted into labour, and the occupier bans open education. For a young woman who dreams of higher studies (philosophy, medicine, the sciences), an intellectual future seems walled off, in an overcrowded space where hundreds of thousands are packed behind a wall, left to typhus and an organised famine.

Yet the ban gives rise to an underground education system. Former teachers organise komplety, small clandestine study circles meeting in apartments, sometimes under cover of soup kitchens for children. They teach the primary and secondary curricula, and for the most advanced a university level. Studying becomes an act of moral resistance against an occupier bent on reducing the Jews to pure labour power.

The most striking example is the clandestine medical school. As early as 1940, the Germans authorise "sanitary courses to combat epidemics", justified by the typhus outbreak; from May 1941 to July 1942, these courses cover a genuine medical curriculum modelled on the European one. But the cost is crushing: many students study on an empty stomach, without a ration card, under the constant threat of the round-up and deportation that would strike the ghetto en masse in the summer of 1942.