174 KULTURA
- The mother of Stanislaw Chrzanowski, an official of the 'Jerzy' Mine, teaches in
her house on Wesota Street; - A certain Wozniczek, the son of a workman at the Sosnowiec Company's
Machine Factory, teaches in a house belonging to the company; - The daughters of an official of the same company called Wieruszowski are hold-
ing lessons; - There's a Jewish School in the house of Szulim Lubelski - teacher unknown;
- The daughter of a guard on the Warsaw-Vienna Railway called Filak teaches in
Duda's house. (Niwka lies in the Police District of Zabkowice.)
There are other schools which I have been unable to discover.
In some of the schools, e.g. in Rusek's, Goralska's, or in that of the Drozdowska sisters,
a considerable number of children, up to fifty at a time, are taught in two shifts...^10
The First World War brought the cultural conflict to a sharp conclusion.
Henceforth the Powers were driven to make cultural overtures to the Poles in the
hope of winning their political support. In 1916, the Regency Council in
Warsaw authorized its Ministry of Education to reorganize schools and univer-
sity on Polish lines. This brought the former Congress Kingdom into line with
Austrian practices in Galicia. This cultural triumph, at the end of half a century
of struggle, did not in itself bring national independence; but it made a great dif-
ference to the temper of the new Polish Republic when independence was real-
ized only two years later.
In the cultural field, the first experience of Independence between 1918 and
1939 brought many disappointments. The crushing rate of illiteracy, and the
disaffection of many ethnic minorities unable or unwilling to communicate in
Polish, meant that the work of the cultural missionaries was far from complete.
Indeed, the state educators frequently viewed themselves as the heirs and suc-
cessors of the patriotic pioneers of the Partition period. In the Second World
War, cultural warfare was joined in its most intense form. Systematic attempts
were made to eradicate Polish culture, not merely by proscribing it in public in
the manner of former Prussian and Russian policies, but by killing and dispers-
ing its leaders and teachers. The Polish reaction was instinctive. The printing of
Polish books, the teaching of Polish children, the organization of Polish univer-
sity courses, and the reading of Polish literature, was carried on in secret - in
the underground, in all the occupied cities, in the forest refuges of the partisans,
in emigre groups in London, Jerusalem, or Tashkent, even in the concentration
camps. In 1945, as a prize for untold sacrifices, the attachment of the survivors
to their native culture was stronger than ever before. The labours of two cen-
turies have been vindicated. Stanislaw-August, and all those devoted men and
women who followed in his footsteps, would have had cause to rejoice.
By 1945, the corpus of Polish mass culture, as distinct from phenomena
emanating from narrow social groups was composed of at least four main over-