ABSTRACT
The "gentry" theme was obsessively raised wherever there was a potential challenge to the hegemony of the new state. The political attack on the gentry affected individuals in a variety of ways. The PZPR (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza; Polish United Workers' Party) focused on a few particular areas: trials against the gentry, a debasing of the church, a program of educational discrimination, and the use of public ridicule. Trials served as a public display of the absolute control of the ruling party over all forms of social and political activity. All trials against gentry's personnel have in common a skillful manipulation of powerfully evocative images. These images are stacked on top of each other like building blocks while any one of them hardly matters, the wall is hard to ignore. To an extent, the two overlapped: the gentry were historically linked to Catholicism and to the church hierarchy.
