7.4.1 “Many of us did not follow Wrona.”
—Michał Markiewicz, student Our school, 2017.
From Wrona ‘s earliest classes, the communist slant of his teaching was clear and he made no secret of it. When one of us asked what a Pole ‘s position would be in the event of war with Russia, his answer was formal: a war against Russia was unimaginable since the bourgeois republic had been replaced by a People ‘s Republic, etc.
I was in my first year of Maths-Physics at the high school at the time, and my room at the Hôtel du Parc adjoined his. We often heard Wrona muttering and ranting like a drunken man. In fact, I don ‘t think he was drunk. He was unhappy, he had no friends, and none of the teachers would have anything to do with him. From the words coming through the partition, we understood that he was lamenting the fact that the students seemed to be unaware of the reality of pre-war bourgeois Poland
Wrona ‘s presence indicated that something was going to change at Villard, but we had no idea what. Everyone had their theories, but we didn ‘t talk about them, either amongst ourselves or with the teachers, who seemed to be frozen in the uncertainty of their own decisions, so oppressive was Wrona ‘s presence. The end of the year was approaching, and I don ‘t remember being informed that I would have to do my second and final year of high school in Paris, where the school was to be transferred. There was always this heavy, suffocating atmosphere.
A comrade who was more committed than the others, having decided not to return to Poland, informed me of the “probable” creation of a pre-baccalaureate course at the La Courtine camp, where the British army had grouped all the Poles who had presented themselves to them in the final months of the war and who had not been integrated into a fighting unit: prisoners of war, political or labour deportees liberated by the advance of the Allied forces, ex-servicemen who had taken refuge in France, etc. Steeped in Villard ‘s patriotic and anti-Bolshevik culture, many of us still felt that we were “at war” and did not follow Wrona, but this was done on an individual basis, without any mutual agreement.
Having left Villard, it would necessary to find a way to get to the military camp at La Courtine, also known as the Larzac camp. For the 1946 school holidays, I joined my sisters, who made up most of my family and who were nurses at the Polish military hospital in Aix-les-Bains at the time. From there, in September, I made my way to La Courtine, disguising myself as a soldier and using fake papers. I was surprised to find six classmates there, including one girl! I cannot really say how many students were on these courses, but there must have been roughly eighty of us, including about thirty from Villard.
The school curriculum seemed to be serious and the teachers competent. Our baccalaureate diplomas received at the end of the year were signed by Jadwiga Aleksandrowicz, Zygmunt Zaleski and Wacław Godlewski. Next to their signatures, the latter two had added their title of Headmaster of the Polish high school in Villard-de-Lans!
