Word: lubliners
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...universities in Poland, none is held in higher esteem among true scholars-and none is in a sadder state of repair-than the Catholic University of Lublin. Its run-down main building still bears the pockmarks left by World War II shells. Its students live five to a room, and the thin stew they get for lunch could well stand more meat. But as all Poles know, there is one thing that Lublin has in abundance. "Throughout all the difficult years." says the rector, Father Marian Rechowicz, "we survived on spirit...
...only private university in the Communist world (it is under the direct management of the Bishop of Lublin) not only kept itself alive, it also kept alive the last vestiges of real intellectual freedom in Poland. When it reopened its doors in 1944 after the Nazis had used it for a barracks and a hospital, students flocked to it from all over the country, and many of Poland's leading scholars joined its faculty. The Communists never dared shut it down, consoled themselves with the fact that one partially free university was good for propaganda value in the outside...
Despised Ghetto. By 1950, hundreds of students had learned what it means to be interrogated by the secret police. Lublin graduates found it increasingly hard to find jobs, and the faculty found it almost impossible to get their research published. The government closed the law school and the department of education. It imprisoned four professors, barred three more from teaching, in 1951 sent popular Father Antony Slomkowski, then rector, to jail. "We were," says Rector Rechowicz, "a ghetto, an isolated despised ghetto that was allowed not to live but to exist...
...spite of all the pressures. Lublin never really surrendered to the Red regime. It taught Greek, Latin, French, German and English-but not a word of Russian. It was for a time the only university to offer sociology, the only place to teach economics that was not, as one professor puts it, "all class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat." Though cautious, many professors found ways to get around the Communists...
Young Father Wyszynski joined the resistance, was assigned by his bishop to underground work in Warsaw and youth work in Lublin. In 1946 he became bishop of Lublin. The Nazis had imprisoned some 40% of Poland's priests and half of the prisoners had died or had been killed, but the church quickly recovered strength. By 1948, the Communists decided to move in and take over. They were just beginning to bring pressure on the nation's youth when Bishop Wyszynski was appointed archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw, and hence Primate of Poland to succeed the late Cardinal...