The Radical Nationalist Camp was an extreme fascist right wing group.
Their boys would run around with knuckle dusters and sticks hunting down Jews.
That was their political programme, to kick Jews out of Poland
by beating them and making life impossible for them.
Their programme included expelling [Jews] from the universities hence the ghetto in the school benches
meaning Jewish students had to sit on the left while Aryans sat on the right.
Except that not all of the Aryans agreed to sit on the right,
and that's why some of them remained standing during their lectures and many of the professors did the same.
In a word, there was a very unpleasant ferment at these universities.
And then the war broke out.
Before it broke out, there was already a tense atmosphere
which you could say was also an aspect of my political education,
and a friend of my father's, who was a legionnaire,
invited us all to Kraków for the anniversary of the mobilisation of the corps.
My father vaguely supported the Piłsudski camp,
but that's the most accurate description – he was vaguely supportive.
I saw all those ceremonies, the parades. There was a real sense of excitement in Kraków,
although it was already long after Beck's speech and people knew war was coming.
In my stupidity, I was pleasantly anticipating what was coming.
This, too, was an aspect of my political education and so finally, war arrived.
September 1st.
I spent that entire period in Warsaw at home in Ochota
where at one point the German tanks came very close, but they were repelled.
There were bombings and a terrible bitterness when it became apparent that Warsaw was capitulating.
So then we entered the period of occupation,
and all the while I and everyone of my generation was convinced
that the Polish Military Organisation – POW – would be created just as it had been during the First World War.
So now something similar would be created, and we weren't far wrong.
This was how we more or less hit on what really began to happen,
except that a lot of time passed before I joined this underground movement myself.
Meanwhile, I was attending clandestine lessons.
These clandestine classes were a wonderful thing because the groups weren't large
so, in a word, the teacher had quality contact with the pupils
and the relationship with the teacher was incredible
since we were conspiring against the Germans all together.
We got on well with the teachers. There was always one who was more popular
and another less, but this created a great atmosphere.
At the same time I have to say that the Germans, the Gestapo,
weren't hunting us down – these clandestine classes – with any great zeal
for the simple reason that they were being kept busy by a military resistance which was growing stronger,
and they were more concerned with that.
So just attending these classes wasn't especially dangerous in itself
except that we had to walk along streets where the Germans rounded people up,
and the older we got, the likelier it became that if they caught us, something bad would happen.
For example, we could have been deported o Germany to labour camps, or something like that.