This photo was taken to commemorate the visit of some Chinese educators to Theodor’s school in Chocen. Theodor is standing second from the left, next to his wife, my grandmother Zofia (also a teacher), and the boy between them is my five-year-old dad. 

                                                             Theodor

As a child, I adored my grandfather on my father’s side. My mother’s father was not destined to experience grand-fatherhood: he died of typhus at the age of 40 at  Auschwitz concentration camp, ten years before my birth. Looking back, I see my only living grandfather, Grandpa,  as an elegant older gentleman, clean-shaven and smelling of men’s cologne, with a watch chain draped from his vest pocket.  He used to wear creaking shoes, which made him very special in my eyes. From today’s perspective there was something 19th century about him.  And his name? Oh, his name, Theodor, not very common, impressed me so, that I could not stop myself from sharing it with the whole world. I would announce proudly “My grandpa’s name is Theodor!” to strangers met on a train or in a park, curious for their reaction, which usually was rather disappointing; they would only smile politely, and praise me for being such an outspoken little girl. Obviously the name did not seem extraordinary to them. 

As a young man, in the 1920s and 1930s, Grandpa taught at schools in small Polish towns and villages. He liked classes of small children best. In Chocen, a village in north-central Poland, where he became principal in 1929, he created an exemplary school, which made the village inhabitants and the school authorities in the area proud. The school was once visited by a delegation of Chinese instructors interested in modern education… It’s a delightful story, often recalled by my dad who was a toddler at the time, who knew it from his parents. The story was recorded in detail in the school chronicle kept by Theodor, and the local newspaper wrote an article on the event.

Let me give you the background of the story: in early 1931, in the midst of tumultuous political change in China, the government, under the leadership of Chiang Kai-Shek, had contacted the League of Nations to ask for its help in  modernizing of the country. The League of Nations then sent four experts to China whose goal was to evaluate the Chinese educational system. One of the experts was a Pole named Marian Falski, responsible in his country for primary education. The other three were: Carl Heinrich Becker, a German minister of education in Prussia; the well-known French mathematician, and professor at the Collège de France, Paul Langevin;  and Richard Henry Towney, a British teacher and a specialist on China. A delegation of Chinese instructors visited seven European countries in 1932, Poland among them, to take a closer look at their educational institutions. 

This is the point at which Theodor and his school come into the story. The Polish expert on education, Marian Falski, chose Chocen as a good example of  a modern seven-year village school to show the Chinese delegation. Such schools constituted a novelty in rural Poland, and there were not many of them due to a lack of resources. This school, however, built in a relatively prosperous area, with the help of the aristocratic owners of the village, the Higersbergers, had a small lab for physics and chemistry classes, a workshop for boys’ manual training with all the necessary tools, as well as a properly equipped kitchen for girls’ cookery classes. Whether the Chinese educators approved of what they saw is uncertain, as they remained silent and their faces did not reveal any emotions (as we read in the school chronicle). However, after seeing the school, they expressed a wish to see  how the teachers lived, so my Grandpa invited them to his three-room apartment. Here, at the sight of his library, which, reputedly, amounted to some two thousand volumes, their composure finally cracked. The rest of the visit passed in a more relaxed atmosphere, and the guests spared no praise for the sandwiches prepared by the schoolgirls, and served to them by pupils in the region’s traditional dress. 

I’ve mentioned the aristocratic owners of Chocen and their contribution to the existence of the school. In fact, the school owed its origin to the worthy landowner Aleksander Higersberger, and especially to his daughter Maria, affectionately called Marysienka, who donated two acres of land to the town in 1927 - a  birthday present from her father - to be used as a future school site. The Higersbergers were Polonized Germans whose ancestors settled in the area during the reigns of the Saxon kings in Poland in the mid-18th century. Aleksander Higersberger was a wealthy man; however, the sudden death of his daughter Maria at the age of 23, as well as the global economic crisis made him sell Chocen in 1933, after 40 years of living there and of co-running the sugar factory there. But the school survived tough times and the turmoils of history, and it continues teaching successive generations of children. The Higersberger’s traditional Polish manor house, built around 1884, surrounded by a beautiful park with magnificent oaks, chestnuts, ashes and hornbeams survived too and in good condition. The residents of Chocen take good care of  Marysienka’s grave at the parish cemetery. 

I should now say something about the man who brought the Chinese delegation to my Grandpa’s school. Marian Falski, then forty years old, had a turbulent past. As a young engineer, a graduate from Warsaw University, he was an anarchist and a socialist, fighting against the tsarist regime; he organized school  strikes during the Revolution of 1905, and around the same time participated in destroying a huge portrait of Tsar Nicholas II at a rally at the Technical Institute in Warsaw. His socialist activities led to his arrest and expulsion from the Russian partition of Poland, so he moved to Cracow (in the Austrian partition). There he started his life anew: he enrolled at the university to study psychology and pedagogy, and completed his doctoral thesis on the psychology of reading in 1917, one year before Poland regained its independence. His greatest life achievement was the authoring of the most popular Polish reading primer, that served many generations of young Poles, including myself. 

Even though it has been 60 years since I first went to school, I still remember well not only the smell of the printing ink and the rustle of the stiff, thick pages of my new reading primer, but also its oblong shape, the hard green  cover with a picture on the front of happy rural kids, sitting on a bench in the shade of a large oak tree and reading books. The reading primer starts with the name of a little girl - Ala, then we learn about a dog called As. For the whole school year, we followed Ala and As, Ala’s brother Janek and their friends and pets, in their everyday routines and little adventures, being amazed at the similarity between the lives of the invented children and ours. 

Only recently did I find out that Ala, who seemed to be an invented character, was, in fact, a real girl. She came from a Jewish family of doctors, close friends of Marian Falski, and her name was Alina. Alina Margolis was born in 1922, the same year as my mother. As the first generation of Poles to be born in the free motherland since the late eighteenth century, they were subjected - both at school and at home - to a patriotic upbringing. They sang nationalistic songs and recited nationalistic poems with ardor. Public life in Poland had a nationalistic tone, and the cult of Marshal Pilsudski, the leader of Polish independence, was predominant… This is all understandable considering that for almost one hundred and fifty years, Poland was partitioned by three hostile powers, Prussia, Austria and Russia, and simply did not exist as a state.

Both my mother and Alina Margolis were only seventeen when WWII broke out. Since both my grandfathers joined a conspiracy, their wives and children had to fend for themselves, working for the occupier. Alina shared the fate of other Polish Jews: the horrors of the ghetto, where she became a nurse at a Jewish Hospital. She miraculously survived  the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, and the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, in which she took an active part. After the war, she became a doctor specializing in pediatrics, and married Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, also a doctor, with whom she had two children. All this time she had led a “double life”: the fictional life of the forever young schoolgirl Ala, and the real life of the respected doctor Alina Margolis-Edelman. Anti-Semitism belonged to the painful past, never to be reborn again. Or so it seemed… 

During the turbulent year of 1968 in Poland, Poles of Jewish descent, among them intellectuals, scientists, artists, economists and politicians - including party members - were blamed for causing the social unrest, which, in fact, was manipulated by factions within the Polish Communist Party. Many people lost their jobs solely because they were Jewish. A large group of Poles with Jewish roots was forced to leave Poland. Although Alina’s husband Marek Edelman decided to stay “with all those who perished here” (meaning during WWII), she and the children emigrated to France. True to her calling, she participated in the “Doctors without Borders” expeditions, a French organization funded in 1968 by two French doctors, helping to save the lives and health of people all over the world. A truly remarkable person, she worked on hospital ships helping Vietnamese refugees, and in hospitals in El Salvador, Chad, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where during the Civil War there she helped to create a support center for rape victims. It's only a small part of her noble accomplishments, the list of which is long, varied and impressive. 

(Isn’t it a little strange that recounting the out-of-the-way visit of a pedagogic Chinese delegation to my grandfather’s rural school took me so far in terms of time and place, and even from the mood of the story about my Grandpa, the dedicated teacher, which I initially intended to write? But, as they say, you never can be sure where your story will take you until you finish it.) 

Returning to Theodor’s school, there were more bright moments in its  prewar history. One day in the 1930s, for example, the authorities in the village learned that the Marshal of Poland, General Edward Rydz-Smigły, who was the first person in the line of government rule after the President of the Republic, was to pass through Chocen, and, that he might even stop there for a moment! Feeling honored by this unexpected distinction, the inhabitants decided to show him their respect to the best of their modest possibilities. Therefore, on the appointed day, the village’s mayor and his small entourage, all in solemn dark jackets, lined up expectantly along the town only street; the fire brigade, dressed in uniforms with shiny buttons and dazzling helmets, stood in front of the fire station; and Theodor, surrounded by his pupils, some of them barefoot but all neatly combed specially for the occasion, gathered in front of the school. They all waited patiently, watching the road with bated breath. Finally, they heard, and a moment later saw, a black car looming in the distance: the Marshall's limousine! 

I can imagine their anxiety: the mayor nervously clearing his throat, getting ready to recite the brief greeting that he had been preparing for days; the firefighters standing, no doubt, at attention; the children, who were told to wave their hands cheerfully at the passing car, shuffling their feet and waiting for the right moment to begin. As the story goes, the Marshall's limousine passed the mayor, almost without slowing down, passed the firefighters, and stopped - to everyone’s utmost surprise - in front of the school. The car door opened, and out stepped the Marshal’s aide, carrying a large paper bag which he handed to my astounded grandfather. Then the limousine quickly drove away leaving behind the proverbial trail of dust. What was in the large paper bag? I was hoping you’d ask. Some ten pounds of soft candies. I bet the kids remembered the joy of eating them for a long time. 

Just before WWII Theodor became the principal of another school, in the small town of Kiernozia, famous for being the birthplace “in some dreary manor house full of bats” (as she referred to it in her memoirs) of a Polish countess, Maria Walewska, Napoleon’s Polish mistress, and mother of his illegitimate son, Alexander. 

Legend has it that Maria, then only eighteen years old and already a wife and  mother, caught Napoleon’s eye in 1806 when, on his way to Warsaw, he stopped at a village to change horses. The young countess, dressed simply, in a black hat with a black veil, pushed her way through the crowd and managed to get close to his carriage and exclaim: “Be welcome, a thousand times welcome to our land, Sire!”  Maria had a sweet, childlike face and an air of modesty and melancholy. Napoleon remembered her and requested to see her in Warsaw, intending to start an affair with her.They were introduced later, at a ball. Since Poland had been wiped off the map at the end of the previous century, Polish nationalists had high (but hardly justified) hopes that  Napoleon would liberate Poland from the Russians and the Prussians. To satisfy Napoleon’s fancy, the cunning aristocrats in a way forced Maria into his bed. Call it patriotic adultery. Their son, Alexander, was born in 1809. At the time of her romance with Napoleon, Marie was married to a much older man,  Count Walewski, a wealthy land-owner whom she later divorced. It seems she got really attached to Napoleon. They met secretly in Warsaw, Vienna, Paris, Naples, and on Elba; however, Napoleon never gave Poland the liberty he had promised Maria in exchange for her love. Marie died in Paris in 1817, at thirty-one, having failed to recover from the birth of her third son. A few weeks after her death, her brother asked that her body be brought back to Poland. While her heart remains in the family crypt of her last husband, d'Ornano in Père Lachaise cemetery, Marie’s body now lies in the local church’s crypt at Kiernozia.

As I mentioned before, during WWII Theodor did not teach. In the territories incorporated into the Reich, education in Polish was banned and punishable by death. Being active in counterespionage, Theodor could not also participate in the secret teaching organization, but he let my dad attend clandestine classes, which were organized all around the country. These were dark times.

After the war, Theodor, as always in elegant coats, shoes and hats, in defiance of the modern style favoring workers look, became a school inspector and moved to the city of Lodz. Apart from visiting schools, (a dull occupation in comparison to teaching), he researched the  history of education in Poland. History  was his second vocation. Regardless of how crowded was his schedule was, he always made time to rummage through archives and libraries. Whenever I visited, he was sitting at his huge desk that almost filled his small study. The typewriter's clatter would stop only when somebody knocked at the study door to announce that tea was ready. In his last years of life we had several cordial chats about my travels, interests we had in common, and poetry; Theodor liked reading poems aloud. As the years pass, I realize now what a very remarkable person he really was. He belonged to a more noble, a more worthy generation than mine, and lived up to those values.