My first recollection of discomfort with strange, unknown ideas is connected to the First Communion. The religious life in my family consisted of the three children being sent to church every Sunday morning. Our parents joined us at church only one time during the year for the midnight mass called Pasterka on Christmas Eve. I really enjoyed Pasterkas due to solemn atmosphere and wonderful music. A typical mass on Sunday was conducted in Latin and I am not sure even the priest understood what he was saying or singing. I simply followed other people in kneeling, making the sign of cross, and such. My mother taught me a simple prayer in Polish that I recited whenever she reminded me to do so. I hate to admit it but I do not remember that prayer anymore.
At about the age of six I was told by my friends of a great uplifting occasion to visit our local church during weekdays. That was right before Easter when so-called Rekolekcje took place. On the way back from a bakery I decided to stop for a few minutes to hear what the priest was saying in Polish. His main objective was to illustrate the difference between the fate of sinful people contrasted with that of virtuous people. Here is how it went: in a certain village there was a murderer with only two fingers on his left hand Ð the other three were chopped off. That murderer killed a few sinful families but, when he got to a house of a virtuous family and hid behind furniture waiting for nightfall to attack them, Jesus guided the father to see the two fingers sticking out from behind the drawer and the killer was caught and arrested. For the next few days, right before going to sleep, I was checking the drawers to see if there are any fingers sticking out.
One of the classes during the first year of grammar school was religion (subsequently those classes were moved to a local church) during which we got prepared for our First Communion. The main part of it was confessing to our sins. Well, all of that did not make much sense to me. In my family the most serious crime was bothering siblings, fighting with other children on the yard in front of our apartment building, or similar childhood problems. All of that was handled either by our mother pleading with us not to do it anymore or by our father if the pleading did not lead to desired results. The priest who took confessions during the First Communion wanted me to confess to some sins so that I achieve the next step towards salvation. Somehow whatever my parents already handled did not qualify for a sin. We groped for a while to reach some consensus but it was going very slow and the priest was getting tired as he had a bunch of other children to process, children waiting behind me in the line. 'OK, did you steal anything from your parents?' 'Like what?' 'Some money perhaps?' Hmm, I could detect his unhappiness with the moron who could not confess quickly to sins despite of a year of training, so I decided that admitting to stealing 50 cents from my mother could get me off the hook. OK, the holy man was very happy to hear it and, as a punishment, I was asked to say 'Holy Mother full of Forgiveness save me from Damnation' three times while kneeling before the altar. My mother was the sweetest person on earth and why would I need to steal anything from her? If she had something and I needed it, I would get it from her. Interestingly, I never went to a confession again. I am curious which sin is worse: stealing 50 cents from my mother or lying about it. Perhaps that is covered the first day of orientation to purgatory via breakaway group discussions.
I continued religious education for a few more years. In the fourth grade we got a new priest who decided to instill some discipline. He had a very novel idea. One of us, Jasio Ocytko, was put in a pew behind all the children during class and his job was to record every bad deed we did while being taught. The holy man was very organized. He did not want Jasio to waste time while describing our sins - that way some of them might go unrecorded. Instead, there was some encoding of the most common sins and Jasio simply put some numbers by our names if an infraction was spotted. I failed that class and I had to make it up during summer by studying the Testaments with my mother. I passed an oral test (I was asked to name a few apostles) but during the next year I stopped attending religious classes altogether and, somehow, my mother was not vigilant enough and let it happen.
At high-school I realized that all students (with the exception of Janusz Dziurka whose father was a Party member) planned to attend religion class at a different church (there were only two churches in my town), so I decided to join them. During the first class one of my eventual best friends, Tadek Gardziel, answered mistakenly 'present' when my name was called, so, just for fun, I answered 'present' when his name was called. And thus, for the whole year, we switched roles. There were no tests and only attendance was required so who cares which of us is which.
I was hoping that religious classes would be different from the regular ones and that I could interact with the priest by asking questions. And indeed, both Tadek and I did make an effort to start discussions with the priest although it was obvious he did not enjoy them. During the last day of classes we were supposed to get certificates, a very serious event, so we agreed with Tadek to stop the switch. However, a quite strange event occurred. When I got up from my bench to accept the certificate the priest got very agitated and warned me that if I am not Jerzy Dydak, then this is a very serious matter. Even when I showed him my school ID, he did not believe me. He was set to expose us and did not anticipate our move. It was quite dramatic and comic at the same time. I think I did not get the certificate after all. Later on I was told that one of girls squealed on us during confession and the priest was asking my colleagues if I could be a spy sent by the secret police.
The next time I met him was during the funeral of my grandfather a few years later. He recognized me, asked if the person being buried is indeed my relative, and he looked over my parents very carefully.
My first grade in high-school began on an odd note as well. I was put in a German class of Helena Olenska whom we called Cebula (onion) due to her shape. She was a tough character. The first day she jumped on me immediately as I was reaching for the textbook. We were repeating after her Ich habe, du hast, and so on over and over. The textbooks were supposed to be neatly placed in the corner of our desks. I wanted to make sure that I understand the whole sequence well (I cannot learn much without seeing it in print) when she warned me that here nobody will put up with my antics. OK, so that is the way learning occurs at high-school! Quite interesting! Cebula called my mother immediately and gave me a lecture in front of her on how my brother Krzysztof will be written in gold letters in the history of our school and I better start following his steps. There was no arguing with her Ð it would only make things worse. But it was all very strange because I had this very plan of trying to match my brother on my own! Krzys was the smartest of the three kids and I would love to accomplish what he did in school. That is why I wanted to make sure I am repeating the right words! OK, so this woman was a bit off it seemed. A few more times my mother was called to school for various 'infractions' of similar kind but I got the best GPA the first semester in our class, so she eased up a bit eventually.
In the beginning of the second semester an evaluator came to watch Cebula in class. One has to know that she used to be a Latin teacher and that language was removed from school curriculum recently as it helped the Church recruit priests. So Cebula had to switch to another field and she chose German. The evaluator sat in a bench in the rear of the classroom and Cebula was essentially shaking like a leaf. I have never seen an adult so frightened before. What was going on? Cebula called on Marta Gil to ask questions about various objects in our room and my job was to say their name in German and give a short description. OK, what is a big deal? So we did spend with Marta about 10 minutes on such conversation during which Cebula calmed down and everything went fine from then on. Soon I noticed a change in her attitude about me. She looked proud and my mother was hearing only praises during end of semester conferences with her. I think she was a very decent person and my only complaint, other than the fact she messed up Tadek Gardziel's case, is that she stopped harassing me so completely that she never asked me any questions again. As a result I did not learn German well enough and all I was doing is passing written tests. I had other classes to worry about, so once a teacher put me on his/her 'A' list, I stopped paying attention to the particular subject (that did not apply to math or physics). For some strange reason in our high-school mostly 'C' students were called to answer questions and their life was miserable. It was commonly known that, in some subjects (history would be a good example), 'C' students knew material much better than 'A' students. Very rarely a 'B' student was promoted to the 'A' list. I remember Kazek Gajdek doing that. His father was a 'petty bourgeois' selling vegetables on a stand. Such pedigree did not qualify Kazek for any special treatment in socialistic Poland. Kazek helped his father during summers and was the only one among us with pocket change. I think he climbed to the 'A' list in the middle of junior year despite being one of the smartest people in my class right from the beginning. Essentially, the teachers talked among themselves on who is who and it was very difficult to get promoted or demoted once the label got stuck. Also, the teachers knew how to make a mediocre student look good. All children of teachers (not necessarily teaching in our school) were on the 'A' or 'B' lists to help them getting accepted at a university. The problem was that, later on, they were failing at colleges in large numbers as they were not used to strenuous studying.
I was not the only child in my family having problems at our high-school. Not only my mother was called to explain my sister's behavior, it reached the level of my father getting involved. That was unheard of in my family. At that time I was not aware of the reasons why my two-years older sister had so many problems. Logic was not something one could use either to explain what was going on or to get out of a predicament. Looking back, a few students were singled out for some reason and then crushed to make the rest of us quiet. In my class the first victim was Agnieszka Cygan, a peasant daughter from a nearby village. Somehow she did not get along with a physics teacher, the sister of a former principal Pietrzykowski, who simply asked us to memorize the textbook. I am not sure if Agnieszka caught her on something incorrectly said or what. Anyhow, she got so much pressure from the physics cretin that she snapped and indicated her disdain by shrugging her shoulders. Asked where she is from she replied 'From a neighborhood of Debica' which rhymes in Polish ('Z okolicy Debicy') and that made us all laugh (I guess to relieve the tension). The result was that Agnieszka was gone and we never saw her again. The second victim was Tadek Gardziel, another independent thinker in our class. Again, I do not know the origins of his conflict with Piotr Rybka, our chemistry teacher. Anyhow, Tadek was repeatedly put down and made fun of by Rybka. He failed chemistry in the junior year that resulted in him repeating the whole school year. Additional problem was that our class was the last one with 11 years of schooling. Younger kids were switched to K-12 system and Tadek had to commute by train to the city of Rzeszow about thirty miles from Debica. Rybka was the favorite teacher of my brother and was credited with starting our school's successes in national Olympiads. My brother was the first winner of any Olympiad (in chemistry) in our school. To me Rybka had a bully side - he did try to force me to participate in the Chemistry Olympiad. I did participate in the Chemistry Olympiad in my junior year with sub-par result on my standards and I decided to try the Physics Olympiad in the senior year instead. That resulted in getting a 'C' from Rybka at the end of semester and a lot of verbal needles but I ignored him.
Years later I learned from my sister what her problem was. Namely, Mrs.Gawrys, the homeroom teacher of a class consisting exclusively of girls, had a paranoidal fear of one of them getting pregnant. My own teachers were quite normal by comparison. Olga Sidorowicz would walk into the classroom exclaiming 'those stinking girls' and asking boys to open the windows. She had one helpful advice to girls: do not let boys pat you and lead to a ditch (poklepac i do rowu). Ours was the best academic Liceum miles around. None of us could relate to what she was talking about. I do not know of anybody kissing in that school. I do not know of anybody claiming to have kissed anybody for romantic reasons while attending that school. Not all of our teachers were of that 'caliber'. My mother clearly differentiated between 'prior-to-war' teachers and 'post-war' teachers. Her high-school years were among the happiest in her life. I had only a few 'prior-to-war' teachers. One of them was Ms.Janda who taught me literature in the first grade. Excellent teacher who asked us to read and then discuss in class what we read. Unfortunately, she retired and was replaced by Professor Sidorowicz who asked us to read books, then read essays of college professors about those books, memorize them and regurgitate in class. The more fancy words one used the better. A typical example is Professor Sidorowicz getting high on her own hot air exhaust and beginning a class by saying 'Ever since the invention of metals lighter than the air, mankind was released from chains tying it to the Earth'. Somebody kindly pointed out that there are no metals lighter than the air to which the Goddess of Knowledge replied in bewilderment 'How do planes fly then?'.
Going back to Mrs.Gawrys: she asked my sister to report if there were any 'sexual orgies' on the banks of Wisloka River that involved her classmates. Well, my sister did not know what orgies were but she understood the request as of being a spy and she reacted very badly to it. It resulted in a few provocations and public humiliations. On the last day of my sophomore year, the day of handing out certificates and diplomas, the principal was publicly berating my sister in one sentence and praising me in the next one without bothering to say our first names (in our school first names were used only by students). Andrzej Mol, a PE 'teacher' made a point of congratulating my sister on the side.
I was the best math student in my class almost right from the beginning of Liceum. Yet, in the beginning of my senior year I got an F for homework. Homework was graded by visual inspection; a teacher asked us to put open notebooks on our desks and was strolling briskly while checking if homework was done. That way the only grade applicable was F or no grade at all. In the summer of 1968 I got the first prize in the International Math Olympiad in Moscow. Also, I learned all the high-school material on my own in the summer of 66. I did not feel like doing mundane problems assigned to all the students, so I skipped that particular homework hoping that it would not be discovered. Well, I was unlucky. My teacher, Professor Gwozdz, looked at me and said 'Dydak, what is going on? You are not doing homework! It means F!'. What could I say? The whole class was very amused that my turn came to get F. Luckily, Mr.Gwozdz reflected on the situation and, a day later, asked me to stop attending math classes altogether. I am sure he consulted the principal as I think it was totally illegal to allow a student to play hooky and give him A for that. Too bad he did not get this idea a year earlier.
There were several 'progressive' organizations our teachers were forcing us to be members of. One subtle threat was that we would not be admitted to a university without a record of belonging to a 'civic' youth organization. The one the principal wanted us to belong to was the Union of Socialist Youth. However, clever Cebula took advantage of the fact that there were a few children of peasants in our class and organized a chapter of the Union of Country Youth. Yes, I was a happy member of that fantastic organization. Cebula collected yearly dues and that was it. No meetings, nothing! A great organization! I did pay a small price for going country later on. While at the University of Warsaw, a guy showed up in my dorm requesting to attend a 'voluntary work' at a farm outside of Warsaw. Incidentally, my roommate was also a member of Country Youth as his parents were teachers in a small village. Out of curiosity we took part at that 'voluntary work' to see firsthand how chaotic and crazy it was. The second time the 'organizer' showed up we collectively advised him to take a hike. Collective decisions are the best. That was the foundation of People's Republic of Poland as we were told in high-school 'civic' classes. I think the 'organizer' understood the power of the will of the people and never approached us again.
I graduated from the Liceum of Debica in 1969 as valedictorian. During my 'educational experience' there I won the Polish Math Olympiad three times, I got the first prize at the International Math Olympiad in Moscow, and I got the second prize in the International Math Olympiad in Romania (Vladimir Drinfeld got the first prize). Technically, there were two students with straight A's who should have been the first ones to receive the diplomas but success at Olympiads was the game, not getting A's, so I was the show horse picked by the principal Galas. In 1999 I was invited to be a member of the Honorary Committee to celebrate hundredth anniversary of Liceum. I was torn whether to accept the invitation or not. To a naked eye I am a good example of how successful the Liceum was academically. But I failed to appreciate the other, perhaps more important mission of the Liceum: maintaining knowingly or unknowingly the culture of fear and intimidation. I did get from my sister a book written by a teacher Aneta Kwolek describing the glorious hundred years of the Liceum. It contains speeches of my peers, so I can see who displayed symptoms of the Stockholm Syndrome and who learned sufficiently well to transfer the leadership qualities to future generations.