The Children’s Documentary Texts and World War II

The aim of this article is to describe a unique collection of the wartime memories of Polish children who wrote about their dramatic experiences in the years 1945–1946Footnote 1. The texts were written as part of school duties, but owing to the issues experienced by the young people, they are characterized by a moving authenticity and contain many personal, and sometimes intimate, descriptions of experiences. The article will analyse these wartime memories, which consist of two independently created collections. The first is a collection of 99 texts written by pupils from Greater Poland schools between May and September 1945. The second contains over 1,200 texts by school pupils from the south-eastern part of Poland (Kielce region), written in the second half of 1946 as part of a competition announced by the Ministry of Education (Iwanicka, Dubas, 1983). For reasons that are difficult to determine today, the essays were not sent, and were finally deposited in the State Archives in Kielce. The themes of the essays in both cases were imposed on the pupils by the organisers of writing down war memories. It should be added that the Greater Poland and Kielce collections contain drawings thematically related to war memories. However, these will not be analysed in the article, although they constitute an important supplement to the childhood experiences.

The school essays about World War II have features of those documentary texts of which the best known example is diaries by teenage Jews locked up in ghettos in various parts of Europe. It is an important and extensive corpus of texts that provides a wealth of information about the fate of individual young people who were victims of the Holocaust. The image of the war captured in texts of a documentary nature, such as journals, diaries, and memories, seems to be well researched (e.g. Bettelheim 1985; Dwork 1991; Zapruder 2002; Kowalska-Leder 2009; Isaacs 2003; Douglas, Poletti 2016). According to Kate Douglas and Anna Poletti, the value of the texts, which are the authentic voices of young people who survived the nightmare of war and became its victims, lies primarily in their moral meaning: “Such texts are positioned as important books: having important educative or didactic functions, but also political significance: readers, particularly young readers, will benefit from reading these texts and taking up the role of second-person witnesses to experiences described within.” (Douglas, Poletti 2016, 90). Contrary to literature for children and young people presenting war, including human suffering, in a manner consistent with specific aesthetic patterns (e.g. realism, fantasy, psychologism), documentary texts by young authors are characterized by the directness of the presented events and experiences, as well as by expression and, often, a confessional tone. These issues were discussed by Philippe Lejeune, among others, who analysed Anne Frank’s Journal. He argued that the text of the adolescent Dutch girl is situated between a document and literature, but also pointed to the fact that the author had proved her extraordinary writing skills: “Anne is a young girl, an amateur writer, or rather a Sunday writer, who was made by circumstances, without her knowledge, although Anne undoubtedly wanted it herself, into a great writer, and her work attracted millions of readers.“ (Lejeune 2010, p. 224). Against this background, war memories, in the form of a school essay, constitute an interesting example of a statement which, as I will try to prove, is distinguished, on the one hand, by authenticity and a confessional tone, and, on the other hand, by features of an official text, implementing, to some extent, the characteristics of a short story about real events.

Children’s Private Written Forms

The school essays described in this article were written by children and adolescents who were between 10 and 16 years of age. These pupils, in many cases burdened with tragic experiences, mental and physical injuries, wrote down their memories almost on the spot, in school conditions, from the perspective of the victim. Along with the systematic liberation of Poland (from January 1944 to April 1945), the school, owing to its institutional goals, began to create conditions for the child to tell his or her story, however painful (Mauersberg 1974; Kosiński 2006). This is not to praise the Polish post-war education system, subordinated to the power exercised by the communists, but it is precisely thanks to certain school conditions that young people were able to describe their war traumas in the form of an essay. Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski in the “Introduction” to Aaron Elster’s Memories drew attention to the fact that those who had survived the Holocaust had a need to tell about their experiences in order, not only to bear witness to the cruelty experienced, but also in order to try to organize their own world, “shattered” by war (Elster 2014). Reading the pupils’ wartime memories shows that the form of a school essay may also have played a therapeutic role.

Unlike the historical narrative, the pupils’ stories have the value of an expressive statement with a clearly marked author’s perspective. Owing to the fact that they were created just after the war (Wróblewski 2021)Footnote 2, they did not take the form of memories or diary, but rather of a moving account of a recently ended ordeal. In this sense, they contain a large dose of authenticity and truth about what happened in the years 1939–1945 in the occupied territories in Poland. In a way, the stories written down can be called this kind of microhistoric testimony (Domańska 2005, p. 23) which includes, in the words of Walter Benjamin, “small” events:

“A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past-which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l’ordre du jour — and that day is Judgment Day.” (Benjamin, 1996, p. 414).

“Little chroniclers” reveal to the reader tragic events that were temporarily close to them and, at the same time, left a painful mark on their psyche. Although pupils wrote about them in school conditions, they shared what was private and, intimate, which is why the issue of artistry, in the sense in which we use it in literary studies, is not a key issue here, although there are texts with artistic value. It is more important to treat them as evidence of the traumatic experiences of people who, in the face of an armed conflict, are as vulnerable as the elderly, the disabled, and the sick. Therefore, it can be assumed that they fall within the area of forms that Kate Douglas and Anne Poletti called life writing: “Life writing, an umbrella term for non-fiction literary texts, has a long history dating back to the Greeks and Romans, and beyond Western culture. A multitude of forms from oral traditions through to the ‘apologia’, the ‘confession’, the ‘life’, and more well-known forms such as ‘biography’ and diary have each shaped contemporary forms of life writing.” (Douglas, Poletti 2016, p. 11).

The authors divided the vast area of life writing, distinguishing private written forms from public literary forms. The first group consists of texts written by young people with the need to express in words everything that is experienced. Thus, we can include here journals, diaries, memories, letters, as well as all the forms present on the Internet today, such as blogs, posts in social media, and fan fiction. According to Douglas and Poletti, the common feature of private written forms is that they are not written with the intention of being made public and in most cases do not reach a wider audience. Public literary forms, on the other hand, are characterized by clear aesthetic features and, owing to their artistic value, find their way into public space on the same terms as a literary work written by an adult author. Douglas and Poletti put the youthful works of writers such as Arthur Rimbaud, John Keats, and Wilfred Owen in this area: “Like the more localised forms of life writing outlined above, young writers have been engaged in public, literary forms of life writing for centuries. The corpus of texts is expansive; we offer some notable examples in this section. For instance, historically, much of the life writing by young people has been assumed to belong to other prominent genres – for instance, poetry – and not labelled as autobiography.” (Douglas, Poletti 2016, p. 19).

Some of the school texts discussed bear the characteristics of private written forms, as the young authors describe their own experiences, sparing no details about specific events which they participated in. Here are some examples of opening sentences:

“It happened in 1942, in the month of September, on the 12th, in the town of Wierzbnik. On the market square, where a gallows was made for Polish people. On September 12, that is on Sunday before the Holy Mass. the market square was surrounded by German gendarmes, Polish police, and undercover agents.“ (p. 133) Footnote 3

“It was in September 1939, when the Germans entered Skaryszew, and motorized columns preceded by tanks left for the road that leads to Kobylany. After the withdrawal of the Polish troops, I went with my aunt to the garden from where there was a view of the road to Radom.“ (p. 207).

“The memorable day of November 12, 1943. The day was a sad one, there were pools of water in the street. At five o’clock in the morning, my mother got up to spin linen. Someone knocked on the door, my mum looked at the window - gendarmes were standing by the door.“ (p. 208).

The purpose of writing war memories was related to the fulfilment of the duty of compulsory education, which does not exclude other intentions of the authors. Therefore, they are partially included in the area of public literary forms. It is not so much their artistic value, as in the case of Rimbaud’s poetry, that determines this, but their functioning in the public space, which is school. Their literary value should be conventionally understood as a more or less successful implementation of the genre: features of the text, usually in the form of a short story. Nevertheless, some wartime memories have certain aesthetic values, and their young authors consciously use means of artistic expression, such as symbols, metaphors, and/or comparisons. Here is one example:

“It was on Saturday and Sunday, 23 and 24 October 1943. The days were beautiful, sunny, characteristic of Polish golden autumn. Nobody thought these days would be days of judgment, despair, and tears. It was on that fateful Saturday, when the sun was lowering to the west, that the news broke and passed through the village like an angel of death. It was passed from mouth to mouth that someone had killed a German and that they would shoot us over the graves or burn us alive in our houses. The news went like a hurricane and torn people’s hearts, squeezing tears from their eyes.“ (p. 168).

Topics of School Essays

Many details of acts of terror by the occupiers speak for the historical truthfulness of the texts under discussion. In the corpus of several hundred essays from Greater Poland and over twelve hundred from the Kielce region, recurring motifs can be distinguished, which I list in order of frequency of their appearance in the texts:

  1. 1.

    Arrest and deportation of the father (or another close relative) to a camp, longing for him, and waiting for his return.

  2. 2.

    Revenge (e.g. mass executions, burning houses or barns together with people) taken by German soldiers against a group of inhabitants for helping the partisans.

  3. 3.

    Incidental participation in acts of military terror, such as shooting, hanging, round-ups, burning people accused of collaborating with partisans, and public torture.

  4. 4.

    An image of an unwavering, brave partisan (sometimes the name of the organization he represents, e.g. AK [Home Army], BCh [Polish Peasants’ Battalions], appears).

  5. 5.

    Secret teaching and the noble attitude of the teacher, more broadly of the intelligentsia.

  6. 6.

    Hunger.

  7. 7.

    The Warsaw Uprising as a symbol of the Poles’ resistance to the bestiality of the Nazis.

  8. 8.

    Compulsory manual labour (e.g. digging trenches, harvesting crops) after school (this applies to essays from schools in Greater Poland).

  9. 9.

    Violence of German teachers against Polish pupils (this applies to essays from schools in Greater Poland).

  10. 10.

    Russians and the Red Army as liberators.

  11. 11.

    The image of the evil Pole collaborating with the Nazis.

Pupils’ war memories constitute a large and qualitatively diverse corpus that can be divided, on the basis of content, into two parts. The first is a collection of statements on topics directly related to the personal experiences of young people: “The most memorable moment for me during the German occupation”, “My memories from the occupation”, and “Memories of secret teaching”. The second one consists of essays containing mainly general reflections on the Second World War, although also here most pupils wrote, as is hardly surprising, about their own experiences related to the cruelty of the occupiers, both towards the civilian population, as well as soldiers, Warsaw insurgents, and partisans: “What the mass graves talk about”, “About the martyrdom of the mother and the child during the German occupation”.

When the matter of the content of the analysed essays is presented in general terms, it should be said that local events and those directly related to the more or less tragic fate of their authors’ parents, elder siblings, relatives, neighbours, friends, and colleagues dominated in them. Less space is devoted in them to matters of national compass, which may have been the result of the teacher’s educational activities. Almost all the texts have appropriate titles, which are a fairly faithful reflection of the topics formulated by the education authorities. The pupils also provided their first and last names, grade, sometimes the name of the school or town, and the date of the essay. A small part (17) of the texts from the Greater Poland collection contains teachers’ remarks and comments that can be treated as traces of typical pedagogical work. At the same time, however, their function in the context of the war dramas recorded by young people is a sign that clearly distorts the main message. A few comments are perfunctory and limited to praise of the type “Very good content”. Below I note the most extensive and, at the same time, interesting, testimony to the teacher-pupil dialogue, the basis of which was doing the exercise on “My experiences of the occupation”: “Your experience is interesting and tough, but the story is full of spelling mistakes. Avoid words of German origin. Satisfactory.“ (p. 100), “The tragedy of a child: she lost her father during the deportation, and her mother was in the camp and there was no information about her. The child returned to the ashes of the family home after long wanderings and losing her parents.“ (p. 101), “Be careful with hyphenation! You have made a lot of spelling mistakes in the story, the content was quite interesting. Good. (p. 102).

In the case of the Kielce collection, there are no teachers’ comments, while some of the essays from there bear traces of corrections (concerning punctuation and spelling) by the teacher, who probably collected texts from the pupils and then sent them to the board of education via the school management. The quoted praises and reprimands formulated by a teacher from one of Poznań’s schools reveal yet another characteristic of these memories. First of all, they are evidence of the level of fulfilment of a school assignment, which was confirmed by a grade. Despite the fact that children and adolescents shared their tragic experiences, confirmed by a written text, often in the form of a confession, the educators fulfilled their daily professional duty. They must have been aware that they were reading texts that were to some extent intimate, containing fearful details from the wartime lives of young people, but, at the same time, the comments from the Greater Poland collection quoted as the examples leave no doubts about the attitude of the teachers to their pupils’ works. The experienced war drama, though not fully understood by young people, was submitted to the teachers’ evaluation in order to check their ability to write with grammatical accuracy in Polish.

We are, therefore, dealing here with incompatible areas of two different human experiences. The first relates to the war trauma of young people, while the other results from the professional duty undertaken by the teacher. The grade given by the teacher concerns, first of all, the way in which a pupil carries out a school assignment, including linguistic correctness and the ability to compose stories about real events. Sometimes the educator casually commented on the authentic experiences presented by the pupil, although it is difficult to determine to what extent the content determined the final grade. Did the detail and length of the war memories affect it? If so, to what extent? The questions must be left unanswered, although it is worth formulating them to make one aware of the circumstances in which the texts were written.

Structure of School Essays

The analysed essays are to some extent similar in structure to the written accounts of Jewish children, which were first published in the book Children accuse from 1947 (Hochberg-Mariańska, Grüss, 1947; Orzeł 2014). The similarity relates primarily to the attitude of the author of an essay to the described incidents, but also to the way of presenting his or her own experiences. The frankness and directness of the young authors in describing the harm suffered at the hands of the occupiers links many essays with the statements of Jewish children, even though the school conditions and the set of topics imposed by the educational authorities could limit the freedom of expression. In the “Introduction” to the book Children accuse, Maria Hochberg-Mariańska stated: “Children giving testimony are sincere and simple. Their memories, collected for the most part as early as 1945, have a tone of freshly experienced pain or hope. In preparing these testimonies for publication, we were guided by concern to fully preserve these impressions, i.e. the authenticity of the childhood experiences ”(Hochberg-Mariańska 1947, pp. 24–25). The same is true of the majority of the school texts, especially those in which the authors write about their dramatic experiences related to the Nazi occupation such as public executions, burning villages with their inhabitants, round-ups, arresting parents, and deportation to the depths of the Third Reich, the physical violence of the Nazis against children, and repressions related to the discovery of a secret teaching place.

The essays do not have a uniform structure, and the same topic was dealt with by young people in different ways. Nevertheless, they are characterized by features typical of school texts, such as the official tone of statement, relatively correct stylistics, and usually a closed, three-part structure. The last element does not apply to short textsFootnote 4. The aforementioned properties do not contradict the directness, honesty, and intimacy of the pupils’ statements, because the young people smoothly moved between the official and the confiding, even familiar styles, between a narrative subordinated to the structure of a written story and a spoken narrative, which should be classified as oral history (Nkala, David 2015). It is true that the discussed texts have the material form of a handwritten essay, but, at the same time, bear the features of an oral narrative, which is related to the circumstances of their creation and the writing skills of the many pupils who, during the war, occasionally learned their mother tongue either at home or as part of secret teaching.

“In the stories told long ago, the war probably played an important role, just as it did and still does in informal family, neighbourly, and any other conversations about the past. Both of these types of narrative are sometimes called oral history. Sometimes, understanding it in rather extreme ways, the term is also used to refer to collections of written accounts of the past, created on “commission”. Those ordering them, or rather invoking these sources are researchers of social life, i.e. usually social historians or sociologists” (Filipkowski 2006, p. 13).

The discussed texts were commissioned by the Polish educational authorities and, apart from the corpus of the Greater Poland collection, which is relatively small in number, have never been examined in terms of children’s experiences related to the war. However, this does not change the fact that we are dealing with valuable material. Moreover, many essays are distinguished by their ornamental, sometimes poetic language and high artistic expression. The analysed texts are a record of the experience of young Poles who in 1939 were from 4 to 14 years old, who therefore, more or less consciously experienced the warfare, and then the Nazi occupationFootnote 5. Though their credibility as witnesses and participants may not be equated with mature people who have more experience and more extensive general knowledge, it does not diminish the importance of the pupils’ war memories in historical, sociological, literary, and cultural studies.

Political Context and The Holocaust

Reading the extensive corpus of essays confirms the belief that the perspective of describing the war, limited by age and therefore by experience, does not weaken their documentary value. They are the voice of a generation whose childhood fell in the period 1939–1945, and, at the same time, its members, girls and boys, were able to break the barrier of silence and talk about their own experiences in a more or less successful way. School circumstances and the fact that the writing of essays was related to a nationwide campaign supervised by the ministry (this does not apply to the 99 texts from Greater Poland, created between May and September 1945 on the initiative of regional education authorities), determine the method of research proceedings. Metaphorically it could be put in such a way that we are dealing with personal documents “contaminated” by the conditions under which they were created. Reading these essays makes us aware of the fact that writing them, although it was not necessarily the rule, was usually preceded by a lesson or a series of lessons. First, therefore, young people talked about their experiences related to the period 1939–1945, and then wrote them down (or presented them in the form of drawings), making it possible to treat the discussed texts as an (auto)record of oral history. It could be assumed that teachers may have modelled the image of pupils’ wartime experiences; however, I do not think that the activities of the teacher were indoctrination or ideological persuasion aimed at persuading young people to accept “official” arguments, approved by the then authorities about the course of World War II: “The authorities imposed on society narratives and interpretations of historical figures and events in accordance with their own interests, although usually untrue, while at the same time they created blank spots, displaced inconvenient content from public discussion, using the means of mass communication it controlled, the education system [. .]” (Kwiatkowski 2010, pp. 13–14).

It is, therefore, worth noting these places of “contamination”. In almost all the essays, pupils attribute a positive role to the USSR and the Red Army in military operations (Grudzińska-Gross, Gross 1985)Footnote 6. They taboo the hostility of many Poles, including children, towards Jews, and attribute the Katyn massacre to the Nazis. These are the most conspicuous “contaminated” places, and do not necessarily corroborate the true experiences of all the authors. For example, in several texts there is information about Poles who denounced their neighbours who helped the partisans and gave away the hiding places of Jews to the navy blue police (Polnische Polizei im Generalgouvernement) to the Germans or Nazis. While the young people’s knowledge about the Katyn massacre could be derived from official accounts, the behaviour of the Red Army soldiers towards the civilian population, including women, was difficult to hide or ignore. Only a few essays contain information that could indicate fear, greater or lesser, of the Red Army. One of the pupils of State Primary School No. 11 in Poznań, who lived near Vilnius in 1939, describes his attitude towards Soviet soldiers as follows:

“In 1939, in September, we saw the first troops of the Russian army. At that time, I was living in the town of Braslaw about 100 km from Vilnius. For the time being “the comrades” terrified me, but with time I stopped being afraid of them. The little town’s population, as well as some soldiers, were afraid of attacks from the sky, i.e. a raid by German planes and gas missiles dropped from them. The Soviets made gongs to sound the alarm in the event of danger.“ (p. 98).

The record of children’s war experiences, in the form of school essays is, despite the “contamination”, a valuable source of information about the everyday life of young Poles between 1939 and 1945 and how they experienced the war trauma. The tabooing of and leaving of things unsaid in the analysed texts make it possible to understand the complexity of relations between Poles and Jews, but also within local communities. We know from the accounts of Jewish children that their Polish peers committed physical and verbal aggression towards them, and that they were able to resort to blackmail in order to obtain something valuable from them. Some young Poles betrayed basic moral principles, perhaps because they themselves felt threatened and depraved by the war, but also because they repeated after their relatives, possibly unknowingly, anti-Semitic patterns firmly established in the Polish provinces (Engelking, Grabowski, 2018; Grochowski 2019).

“Although it may be difficult for many to accept, the historical evidence collected in the book leaves no doubt in this matter: significant, largely determinable and identifiable, groups of the Polish population took part in the liquidation actions, and then in the period 1942–1945 contributed directly or indirectly to the deaths of thousands of Jews seeking help on the Aryan side. […] Finally, it is necessary to emphasize the prevalence of anti-Semitic behaviour and the massiveness of aggression directed against Jews, which attitudes did not diminish with the passage of time. On the contrary, at the very end of the war, when partisan activities intensified, the number of murders of Jews increased. These crimes did not end with the departure of the Germans; in each of the areas we examined, Holocaust survivors were murdered.“ (Engelking, Grabowski, 2018, pp. 41–42).

The view of the Holocaust present in the essays is characterized, on the one hand, by sincere compassion, and on the other, by the child authors’ perception of a certain community of experiences. One of the pupils of the State Primary School in Dąbrowa near Kielce described her most moving wartime events as follows:

“The most memorable moment for me during the occupation was as follows: In 1939, I saw with my own eyes how the Germans called a Jewish woman with a child and one of them hit the child with a rifle butt. The child fell from her hands and got killed. The Jewish woman fainted immediately and the German shot her dead. And the second moment I remember. A Polish child was walking through the town. A German called the child over and slapped the child on the cheek. The child fell to the pavement. He killed the child. Such a Kraut killed an innocent Polish child.“ (p. 172).

The children, however, were aware that the fate of Jews was far more tragic than theirs, as evidenced by the ghettos observed on a daily basis. Sometimes they secretly sneaked into them for reasons only they knew. Apart from the fact that they themselves experienced violence on the part of the Nazis, in the event of the extermination of Jews they found themselves in a role which, following Raul Hilberg, could be called the role of a “bystander” (Hilberg 2007; Koprowska 2018; Sendyka 2019). The relevance of this concept in relation to young people “looking” at the suffering and death of Jews can also be justified by the fact that in many essays there is a motive of their incidental participation in scenes of violence and death directed against Jews. For example, in a story by a boy living in Kielce, the following description of his “visit” in the ghetto appeared:

“There was a ghetto in our street on the other side of it. Jews were not allowed to leave it under penalty of death. Once we played army in the ghetto, until German cars arrived and the Germans posted their guards. I looked around and saw that I was alone at the wires fencing the ghetto. A terrible slaughter began inside the ghetto. A German was standing by the wires with a gun pointed at me.“ (pp. 187–188).

“War Imaginarium”

Following the topic of the Holocaust proposed by Sławomir Buryła, it is worth noting that also in the texts under discussion there is a regularity in the presented events and characters, which in a broader perspective create the “war imaginarium”:

“The topic of the Holocaust, although to a large extent well-developed (actually quite early because in the first post-war years), is still in statu nascendi. Its life is relatively short, which differs from other topoi of culture. The vast majority of them are rooted in the distant past, sometimes in a centuries-old tradition. The monstrous reality of the Final Solution gave birth to many of the Holocaust loci communes. It also constitutes the basic, and sometimes only point of reference.“ (2016, pp. 54–55).

The “war imaginarium” presented in this article, however, is not fully an original children’s code of communicating their own experiences related to World War II. This is obvious, because in their essays, young people often unconsciously repeated the topoi they may have heard in stories told by adults (e.g. a cruel German, a brave partisan, a burning barn, torturing prisoners, mass murder, forced labour, secret teaching, a brave teacher).

One should also mention the expression and strong emotions that are present in almost all texts written by pupils from schools in both Greater Poland and the Kielce region. In particular, the authors of the essays entitled “What do the mass graves tell us” emphasized, on the one hand, grief for the killed soldiers and civilians, and, on the other hand, a constant element of their statements was the verbalised hatred of “barbarian Germans”, sometimes also called “wild Germans”. The first of the terms appears so often in the texts that they could be considered a kind of community assessment or a kind of idiomatic expression very strongly associated, not only with the Nazis, but with Germans in general. The author of the essay under the title “My memory of the German crime” begins her story about the tragic experiences related to the course of World War II in September and October in Volhynia in the following way, typical of many essaysFootnote 7: “There is no man in Poland who has not had any memories of cruel German crimes. Every young child knows the German and his actions very well. I have a lot of memories from the days of the occupation, and if I wanted to describe it all, I wouldn’t have enough paper” (p. 36). In addition to negative emotions, also directed at Ukrainians, many essays, especially those written by pupils from rural schools, end with a straightforward declaration of love for a free, though “tormented”, homeland: “The Poles endured all these torments and hardships proudly and perseveringly, and no one was able to tear the Polish spirit away from them. Our hot love for our Homeland made it possible for us to endure everything that was the most terrible and cruel. It made us look forward to the moment when we could breathe in freedom deeply” (p. 36).

War as an “extraordinary experience” in the essays has one more repeatable feature; namely, it indicates the durability of material, mental, and physical losses. Most of the pupils drew attention to the negative effects of the war and occupation in their texts. Permanent motives include death or a long and serious illness of a father, mother, or elder brother, loss of property as a result of resettlement and seizure by German families, burning down the house or farm as a result of military actions either in 1939 or in 1945. Some of the essays resulting from the implementation of the topic “Remembrance of German Crimes” contain information on the mass executions of Polish, and sometimes Jewish, people. A pupil of State Primary School No. 6 in Starachowice presented several such events, sparing no details about the course of the murder and the number of people killed.

“They murdered people cruelly. They burned villages, and when people fled from the fire, they shot at them; those that they failed to kill were bitten to death by dogs, and they threw small children into the fire. In the parish of Trzczów [Tczów] they herded 90 people in front of the church, stripped them naked, laid them in a row, trampled on them and beat them with rifles, while the dogs tore off bits of their flesh. They dug one large grave, put them next to it, and killed them all. In the city of Radom, they invented a gallows for Poles. Four or up to seven people a day were hanged on it. This went on for three months. Behind Skaryszew, they brought 24 Poles from various villages and put them under rifles. Poles saw death above them. One of them shouted: “Let’s run away, brothers! 10 of them escaped and 14 were killed. For one German, when he got killed in the village of Ranachów, 50 Poles died in Karolin. In Kazanów, 25 Poles suffered a shameful death. They were buried together with 25 Jews. They put Poles on the bottom and Jews on top, they herded people from villages to Ciepielów where they killed 3 to 6 people a day. Then they burned everyone in the graves with electricity.” (pp. 134–135).

The cited register of war crimes remembered by a teenager, which were possibly the subject of conversations among his peers and loved ones, is devoid of author’s assessment of events, including condemnation directed at the Nazis. Instead, we have an accumulation of facts that resemble a reporter’s narrative. In turn, the authors of the essays, describing their experiences related to teaching in German schools in Greater Poland, presented its low level and the use of physical violence by the Germans as a negative effect (Orzechowski 2017).

“During the German times, I went to school. In a German school, we only learned arithmetic up to a hundred, and to write and read in German. We did not study religion, history, or geography at all. I remember that during the break, German children would throw stones or sticks at us. When the teachers saw it, they were only too happy about it. We didn’t go to school to learn something, but to go to work. We went to work at the manor. In spring we used to go out to the grain fields to pick up the weeds. We had to pick potatoes all autumn. In winter, we also went to school very little because there was no fuel for us.“ (p. 269).

On the other hand, in the case of participants in the secret teaching conducted in various parts of occupied Poland (Krasuski 1977), very often young people wrote about the fear for their own, teacher’s, and parents’ lives accompanying each lesson. Some of them realized that unsystematic learning, carried out under constant tension, could not bring good results, although it was the only form of activity which allowed “no time to be wasted”.

“The occupiers of Poland not only oppressed Poles, but they also refused to let them learn. In some villages and towns there were schools, while in others there were none, and still in other schools they herded pupils by force and taught them everything in German. They were ordered to pray in German, and those who did not want [to do it - a note made by a teacher] were beaten cruelly. Wherever the Polish school was located, it was forbidden to teach geography or Polish history, and it was forbidden to even talk about Poland. Teachers and professors disguised themselves as farmers, because the Germans were taking [them - a note made by a teacher] to the camps. They went to the countryside and taught children somewhere in hiding. There were no higher schools at all. The youth studied in secret, not wanting to waste any time. The Germans investigated secret teaching and when they tracked a teacher down, they took him or her to the camps, and murdered and killed the children.“ (pp. 273–274).

Those essays in which pupils report bodily discomforts caused either by a specific event or by the conditions in which they spent a large part of the war years are exceptions. For example, a pupil of State Primary School No. 2 in Starachowice described the physiological reaction of his younger sister to the German soldiers’ intruding into their home as follows:

“The most memorable moments for me date back to the arrest of my brother and then my father, which can be pictured as follows. On February 13, 1941, at around 2 p.m., several “Nazi thugs” slammed into our flat, arresting my eldest brother, Zygmunt, on charges of conspiratorial activity, and taking him to Auschwitz. It is difficult to describe what sorrows this intrusion and arrest caused. I will only mention that my sister, who was 13 years old at the time, suffered from a strong nervous shock and lost all her hair on the head, which, despite medical treatments, has not completely grown back.“ (pp. 195–196).

Conclusion

War trauma caused various negative effects in the child’s psyche, as understood by Anna Freud and Dorothy T. Burlingham (Freud, Burlingham, 1943) as well as Leszek Bandura in his doctoral dissertation of 1950 (Bandura 2004). It can be assumed that young Poles’ writing down their wartime experiences was a way, perhaps not fully realized by them, of coping with their dramatic experiences. Almost all the texts were written in careful handwriting, which proves the serious attitude of the young authors to the school assignment. But at the same time, most of the essays are characterized by stylistic “roughness” as well as compositional unsteadiness, which shows not only the level of the text-creating skills of young people, but also their mental condition. The main theme of all the texts is violence, cruelty, and the accompanying fear for oneself and for loved ones. The process of recalling the war and occupation written in the form of a school essay could be treated as an attempt to self-reflect on one’s own, life, if only just begun. The way young Poles “brood over” their own fate, althoughformalizedtosomeextent, is a confession related to their current emotional state in its nature. A good commentary on what they experienced during World War II may be the sentence ending one of the war memories: “When I was a child, I wasn’t a child, my childhood was stolen from me.“ (p. 72).