News

The exhibition ‘There where we are standing, the Sun shines. The School of Younger Female Volunteers (1942–1948)’ is the latest proposal from the Museum - a result of cooperation with the Pan Tadeusz Museum, a branch of the Ossoliński National Institute. The opening is scheduled for 12 March in Opole.

The School of Younger Female Volunteers was established on 20 May 1942. A similar initiative was taken earlier for boys - while the Polish Armed Forces were still being organised in the USSR, General Władysław Anders issued an order in September 1941 to establish military schools for juniors. The idea was to provide an all-round education combining the school curriculum with preparation for combat and upbringing in a patriotic and religious spirit. The most important thing, however, was that an opportunity was created for young people who had experienced hunger, violence, gulags, imprisonment and hard labour to recover, receive an education and have a chance of successful future after the war.

Out of the more than 1,000 female students of the School of Younger Female Volunteers, most came from the Polish Borderlands, and nearly a third had lost their parents. Later, they were joined by adolescent female soldiers of the Home Army, who, after their liberation from German prisoner-of-war camps, found themselves under the protection of the Polish Armed Forces in the West. The school continued to operate until April 1948, regardless of dynamically changing circumstances, which the exhibition illustrates very well by reconstructing in an interesting way the journey that the teachers and their charges took from the Soviet Union through the British Mandate of Palestine to England.

You are cordially invited to the opening of the exhibition: 12 March, 1 p.m., building of the Museum at 3 Minorytów Street, Opole.

Invitation to ‘There where we are standing, the Sun shines. The School of Younger Female Volunteers 1942–1948)’.

Zaproszenie - „Tam, gdzie stoimy, świeci słońce. Szkoła Młodszych Ochotniczek (1942–1948)”