The Flying University: the secret school that taught Marie Curie

For 123 years, from 1795 to 1918, Poland wasn't on the map. Russia, Prussia and Austria had split it between them. In the Russian part, which included Warsaw, a group of women built a university that had no building, no permission and no fixed address. It ran for twenty years, and one of its students went on to win two Nobel Prizes.

Why a university had to hide

Poles rose against Russian rule twice in the 19th century, in 1830 and in 1863, and lost both times. After each defeat the rules got tighter. By 1865 the last of the Polish kingdom's autonomy was gone. Teaching the Polish language, Polish history or the Catholic religion ranged from difficult to illegal.

For women it was worse. The University of Warsaw had opened in 1816 and had never admitted them. A Polish woman who wanted a degree had two choices: go abroad, usually to Paris or Switzerland, or go without.

In 1882 a third option appeared. Small groups of women in Warsaw began pooling a few rubles each to pay a professor to teach them in somebody's living room.

The teacher who was fired for teaching Polish

Jadwiga Szczawińska was born in Warsaw in 1864. Her father worked in the administration of the police department, which makes what she did next even better. She finished school in 1880 with the gold medal for her class and became a teacher. She was then dismissed from her school for teaching Polish against the Russification rules.

So she taught girls privately at home, and in 1885, aged twenty, she pulled the scattered study circles into a single organisation with one programme, one set of standards and one cash box. It was open to men too, but most students were women. Warsaw gave it a nickname: Uniwersytet Latający, the Flying University.

How you run a university in secret

Classes met in private flats, belonging to students or professors, and the address kept changing so the tsarist police couldn't pin it down. Women arrived one at a time or in pairs, never as a group, so the neighbours and the street patrols saw nothing unusual. The organisers told each professor where to go. Now and then, a policeman was paid to look the other way.

It cost two to four rubles a month. The money paid the lecturers and also built a secret library.

And it was a real education. A full course took five to six years, with eight to eleven hours of teaching a week, in four areas: natural sciences, social sciences, pedagogy, and philology with history. The lecturers were some of the best Polish academics of the day. Several had lost their university posts when the Russian authorities closed or Russified Polish institutions, so the country's best professors were available and angry.

The row, and the raid

It wasn't a fairy tale. Szczawińska ran the board with a firm hand. She wanted graduates to stay on and teach, and she wanted students trained as social activists, not only as teachers. Others wanted the places to go to new students. Her critics called her a despot, and in the 1889–90 term a group walked out and set up a rival school.

In 1894 the tsarist police raided the home she shared with her husband, the psychologist Jan Władysław Dawid, who lectured on the courses. Both were arrested and held for a week in the Tenth Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel, the prison the empire kept for political cases. The university carried on.

The governess who became Marie Curie

One of the students was Maria Skłodowska. She and her sister Bronisława had made a deal: Maria would work as a governess and send money so Bronisława could study medicine in Paris, and then Bronisława would help her in turn. While she waited, Maria studied with the Flying University.

She left for Paris in 1891, enrolled at the Sorbonne and became Marie Curie. In 1898, when she and Pierre found a new element, she named it polonium, after a country that officially no longer existed.

She wasn't the only name on the register. Janusz Korczak, the doctor and children's author who later walked into Treblinka with the orphans he refused to leave, studied there. So did the novelist Zofia Nałkowska.

Out in the open

The revolution of 1905 loosened the empire's grip, and in 1905–06 the Flying University was allowed to register legally as the Society of Science Courses. Szczawińska stepped back from its board. When Poland returned to the map in 1918, the society became the Free Polish University, a private university in Warsaw. Its branch in Łódź later became the foundation of the University of Łódź.

Szczawińska did not see independence. In her last twenty years she also founded a public reading room in Warsaw, collected about 6,000 donated books for it within months, and kept it open until one in the morning so that workers could use it after their shifts. She died in 1910, aged 45, exhausted and in a deep depression. She is buried at Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw.

The name comes back

When Nazi Germany occupied Poland and banned university-level study for Poles, people who had taught on the old courses went back to teaching in secret.

Then, in 1977, dissidents in communist Poland started giving uncensored lectures in private flats. They called it the Flying University. The people behind it included Jacek Kuroń, Adam Michnik and Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who twelve years later became the first non-communist prime minister. In Kraków, a cardinal called Karol Wojtyła lent them church halls. A year later he became Pope John Paul II.

By the end of the first year they had held 120 lectures. The police response was rough: Kuroń was thrown down a staircase and his flat was wrecked. Martial law in 1981 shut the lectures down. Eight years after that, several of the lecturers were running the country.

I think about this story when people ask me why Poles are so stubborn about education. For a long time, learning was the one form of resistance nobody could confiscate.