objective was forgotten and the director sought to turn the school into an ordinary Polish educational institution associated with the sanacja.546 At the beginning of 1937, I started working in two schools for Jewish girls, attended by pupils from the more affluent circles of the petty bourgeoisie (hardly assimilated, in general). I also taught in one of the major schools for Jewish boys which was attended by the children of the wealthy bourgeoisie, who wanted to maintain their national tradition.547 I am now teaching clandestine classes to all these groups of young people.
The issue of the spiritual attitude of young people has been of interest to me for a long time. In order to make reasonably accurate observations, I tried to get in touch with my male and female pupils outside of school, and largely succeeded. Needless to say, I sometimes met with obstacles, and in some cases there was mutual animosity, which I will mention later. This latter issue is related to [2] problems discussed herein.
I
It was relatively easy to gain the trust of young people in the above-mentioned Polish school. I was a very young teacher and found my job as an educator fascinating. The young people, with whom I came into contact there, were also fairly close to me in terms of background and cultural environment. I would like to raise the issue of their attitude to the principle existential problems.
Boys who attended this school were mostly children of wealthy parents who sought very intensively to ensure that their children had appropriate social positions or achieved social advancement. Secondary school, and afterwards, higher education were to be a prelude to that. The vast majority of my Jewish pupils could not imagine a future without graduating from a university. It should be noted that most boys treated learning as nothing more than a way to attain a comfortable position in life. Ideally, they wanted to be well-connected lawyers, engineers, or economists. No one was interested in less well-paid occupations. Only individual pupils considered studying the humanities or natural sciences, fields which did not guarantee adequate income. These
