Free The Testimony by Halina Wagowska Page B

malnutrition. They had acute staff shortages, due to the six-year backlog in training new doctors and nurses.
    Community leaders and teachers were in very short supply, not only through a training backlog but also because many had been selected for incarceration during German rule, their high standing making them potential leaders of uprisings or of groups of freedom fighters. Engineers too were decimated in this way, because of their ability to sabotage installations.
    Thus the city struggled to restore normal functioning, with a greatly diminished number of service providers. Education presented a particular difficulty. There were many young people whose schooling had been interrupted for six years. One school in Lodz set out to close this gap, and offered what was, in fact, a crash course. In two-and-a-half years, a concentrated syllabus covered subjects from Grade Four to Year 12, capped by a matriculation exam. Classes took up to ten hours each day, six days a week, and there was a lot of homework. The crash course catered for students from age sixteen upwards. It also provided for some mature-age students who could not aspire to matriculation level before the war. Now, in socialist Poland, there was positive discrimination towards these former underdogs, and support for their education.
    The few available teachers distributed assignments on each subject, and those who came top of the class were obliged to tutor those who came last. This peer-tutoring system, born not of pedagogical wisdom but of necessity, had a lot to recommend it. The tutors had to keep ahead in their subjects to teach well, learned to meet the needs of others and often developed an ambition that their pupils should do well. This system of teaching and the mixed-age classes were regarded as a type of social experiment and the school attracted attention and favourable comments among educators in Europe.
    I came to Lodz from Gdansk in September 1945 and, for the next three years, like the city, I tried to rebuild a normal life. Normal did not mean a return to the prewar order of things, for that is rarely possible after wars or revolutions. A new Poland was emerging, with its systems, institutions, social structures and mores profoundly changed.
    One can only speculate on the effects of the loss of (very good) parents who were a source of affection, guidance and security; of nearly six years enduring hatred, indignities and hunger; of the absence of any form of beauty; of the loss of normal education—school and life—during years vital to intellectual development; and of gross undernourishment in years vital for physical development. Where growth is natural, there was regression.
    There is no doubt my values and attitudes became very different, to the point where fitting into normal society was, at first, very difficult. (To this day, I have an impatience for small talk and inconsequential matters.)
    My personal experience of normal had been a very sheltered and carefree childhood, ordered and supervised by protective parents. But I was fifteen now, retarded in normal development by the war years. The coping skills and mechanisms I had developed in prisons were useless now.
    I was bewildered by the demands and complexity of freedom: the necessity to make decisions and choices, to plan my time. Managing the money given to me by the Red Cross and the UNRRA, and shopping for basics were a new experience. Every minor problem seemed gigantic. I felt like an idiot and a pest always asking for help and advice. There must have been many others who shared my bewilderment.
    At first, freedom was so demanding that the end of hunger and fear, and the fact of one’s survival, were not celebrated. There was also the onset of survivor’s guilt. The explosions of joy we imagined in camp when we said ‘if we survive’ did not occur.
    It was Judith Winograd, my friend from Litzmannstadt Ghetto, who found me registered in Gdansk and sent a note saying that she and