Objects

Vademecum Roche calendar for 1939 and 3 school notebooks of Stanisław Gustaw Kramsztyk

It is part of the collection:

Staś received the "Roche" Vademecum calendar from his father, Stefan Kramsztyk (1877–1943), who was a well-known internal medicine doctor and pediatrician. He was also a clerk at the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare on several occasions. today, the position of "a clerk for population policy and race hygiene." The calendar, as an advertising product of the "Roche" company, is provided with, among other things, a drug dosage table or information about the company's products (composition, properties and operation, indications). The handbook, however, was able to adapt the product to his own needs. the genealogy of royal families (the genealogical table of the kings of Great Britain) and heraldry (with drawings). All these examples testify to both the broad interests of Stas Kramsztyk and his artistic talent.

The POLIN Museum collections also include three notebooks formerly belonging to Stanisław Gustaw Kramsztyk (Latin, Polish and history). Staś probably ran them while in a sanatorium in Otwock, where he was treated for tuberculosis. Although they were recorded in 1939, shortly after the start of World War II, they look completely as if their owner was a contemporary 16-year-old. Looking at Stas Kramsztyk's notebooks, we realize that the children looking at us from black and white photographs were no different from us. Just as they would scribble on the margins and covers, make notes unrelated to the lesson or forget to take a math notebook with them, which forced them to write equations in a Latin notebook.

Staś Kramsztyk did not manage to write too many pages in the notebook in which he kept notes while studying history. However, the content is enough to see with what care the boy kept the notebook and what material they were processing at the moment. Lessons about Ancient Greece and Alexander the Great's conquests bring to mind our own experiences, emotions, and school dreams. They also make you ask yourself questions about the feelings of schoolchildren (of whom Staś Kramsztyk is a representative) at the beginning of World War II. Were the teenagers of the time fully aware of the impending danger? Was they paralyzed by fear? Or maybe young and inexperienced people saw war as a kind of adventure, downplaying the threat?

Thanks to the notes contained in the notebook for the Polish language kept by Stas Kramsztyk, we can find out what content was undertaken by teachers when discussing individual readings by young people in October 1939. Looking at the notes made by the owner of the notebook on Bolesław Prus's "Doll", we can see, among other things, that the teacher took up with his students the problem of women's emancipation in reading. Another of the works of Bolesław Prus discussed by Stanisław Kramsztyk was "The Pharaoh", the form of which can also be found in the notebook. On the cardboard cover we can also see scraps written hastily in pencil in the notation of the four pedestrian letters of the Greek alphabet (α alpha, β beta, γ gamma, ∆ δ> delta). We know from the calendar in which Staś kept his personal notes and sketches that learning different alphabets was one of the boy's passions. In addition to Greek, he also practiced Egyptian (pictographic) and cuneiform script.

Marta Frączkiewicz

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Information about the object
Author/creator
Kramsztyk, Stanisław Gustaw (1923-1941)
Object type
diaristic material
Time of creation / dating
20th century
Created place
Warszawa (mazovian province) Otwock (Mazowieckie Province)
Technique
printing
drawing
manual script
Material
paper
synthetic material
graphite
ink
Keywords
Copyright status
the object is not protected by copyright law
Owner
POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
Identification number
MPOLIN-A9.2.1