Tajne komplety — Pigoń and the Jagiellonian seal

Polish higher education is banned in the Generalgouvernement from the Frank ordinance of 18 October 1939: "Polish schools above the elementary primary level are closed permanently." The Jagiellonian (Krakow), Warsaw, Lwów, Wilno, and Poznań universities are closed. The Sonderaktion Krakau of 6 November 1939 decapitates the Jagiellonian University: 184 professors arrested and deported to Sachsenhausen.

But the Polish academics react. From November 1939, while half the Jagiellonian teaching body is in concentration camp, the survivors — notably the professor of literature Stanisław Pigoń (54, returned safe and sound because he was in the Tatras on 6 November), the philosopher Roman Ingarden, the Slavicist Tadeusz Lehr-Spławiński — organize the tajne komplety ("secret classes"): courses given clandestinely in private flats, in groups of 6-12 students. An initiative that spreads rapidly to Warsaw, Lwów, Vilnius, Poznań.

Security measures are imperative: rotation of flats, surveillance by underground-state cells, false papers for the teachers, false identity cards as workers or apprentices for the students (the Wehrmacht does not check young workers). The decisive question remains how to sanction the studies. Should genuine diplomas be issued, sealed in the name of the closed universities — an irreplaceable written proof but a fatal weapon in Gestapo hands —, or should one settle for a memorized validation to be reconstituted after the war, or suspend all examinations until liberation?