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ABOUT THIS PROJECT
Centropa’s AudioWalks take you on a journey through the Jewish history of Central and Eastern Europe.

Use our multimedia maps, and explore the family pictures, archival material, and personal stories of 21 Jewish Holocaust survivors to get a unique insight into Europe’s rich Jewish heritage, and to discover sites of Jewish life in towns in Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania.

Jan Tarnowski School on Mickiewicza 16 in Tarnów

15. Public school

Element 340
Ul. Mickiewicza 16, Tarnów
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Most of Tarnów’s Jewish students attended public primary schools. Gizela Fudem, who was enrolled in the Beys Yaakov religious school, also attended a public school. Probably due to the proximity of the family home, her parents decided to send Gizela to the school at Mickiewicza 16, in front of which we are standing. The building was completed in 1896, and from that moment it housed schools of various profiles: from boys’ high schools to women’s seminaries. Today, it houses one of the best high schools in the Małopolska region. 

Gizela Fudem, who studied there in the late 1920s and early 1930s, recalls:

It so happened that we lived almost opposite the school building, which housed two schools: one named after Słowacki and the other named after Queen Jadwiga, which I attended. I had to walk around the building to get there because the entrance was on the side. I was not yet six years old when I started going to this school, which my parents chose because my sister had already gone there (…) Most of the teachers in the public school were Polish. Only one Jewish woman, Mrs. Taubeles, taught religion. These classes were held separately for all Jews from both schools. And religion for non-Jews was taught by a priest. I didn’t really experience antisemitism there; maybe sometimes something unpleasant happened. There were teachers who bothered us from time to time, but it usually went hand in hand with the fact that a girl studied poorly, or that she came from a neglected house, and then she was teased also because of being Jewish. There was no antagonism between the girls. Usually there weren’t any great friendships either. It’s just that there were about 30 of us there, so naturally all my friends were Jewish.

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