Abstract
The Ottos had not prepared for our arrival. Mrs. Otto was in bed. In the sitting room we encountered a tenant by the name of Halina Szpondrowska, whose husband was on active duty in a Canadian armored detachment. Before the war he had been chief of military intelligence in Silesia, had then been taken prisoner by the Soviets, escaped, and somehow reached Canada. They had two sons, the elder of whom, Staś, had graduated from high school during the Soviet occupation, while the younger, Andrzej, was just eight years old. She herself had fled to Osiczyna with her sons during the Soviet occupation because, as the wife of a former officer of the Polish army, they would certainly have deported her. Little Andrzej was so well trained that he never spoke about his father, and when asked at school about his father’s occupation, said he was a “railroad man”.
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Notes
- 1.
Westerplatte is a peninsula in Gdańsk (in 1939 outside the city proper), at the mouth of an estuary of the Vistula delta on the Baltic Coast. The Battle of Westerplatte was the first European battle of World War II. The defense of the peninsula from September 1 to September 7, 1939, by fewer than 200 Polish soldiers of the Military Transit Depot against a much stronger German force became a symbol of Polish resistance to the German invasion.
- 2.
Leon Zielony had been an officer in Piłsudski’s Legions, and, refusing to heed the advice to hide given by a fellow Legionnaire, or to assume a false name and origins, perished with a group of people of advanced age liquidated in the Lwów ghetto.
- 3.
Adolf Beck (1863–1942), Polish physiologist. Professor at Lwów University 1895–1935, and Rector in the academic year 1912/13.
- 4.
“General Government”, the German name for the Polish territory under German rule during World War II. The districts of eastern Galicia were added in August 1941.
- 5.
Possibly Dezydery Szymkiewicz (1885–1948), Polish botanist and forestry expert.
- 6.
Possibly Austrian four-ducat gold coins.
- 7.
A Czech town on the river Olza, which now forms a segment of the border with Poland.
- 8.
A region of Silesia now in the Czech Republic, in dispute between Poland and Czechoslovakia during the interwar period. “Zaolzie” means in Polish “land beyond the Olza”.
- 9.
The Sokol (in Polish, Sokół, meaning “Falcon”) movement is an international youth sports and gymnastics organization aimed at providing moral and intellectual, as well as physical, training for youth. Founded in Prague in 1862.
- 10.
Respectively, Defense Police (with the widest range of duties), Security Police, Criminal Police (who took over in, for example, a murder case after initial action had been taken by the Schutzpolizei), Military Police, SS (Protection Squadron) Police (specially formed to implement Nazi ideology, this branch was, under Heinrich Himmler’s command, responsible for a great many of the “crimes against humanity” of World War II), Special Police (set up by Hans Frank and operating in the Generalgouvernement from 1940 to 1944), Secret State Police, military equivalent of the Schutzpolizei, and so on.
- 11.
“to this area”
- 12.
“Eastern railroad workers”
- 13.
“German Post East”
- 14.
Jozef Tiso (1887–1947), Slovak priest and clerofascist leader of the Slovak State from 1939 to 1945. After the war he was hanged for his treasonable activities in support of Nazism.
- 15.
Hans Michael Frank (1900–1946), German lawyer, from 1939 to 1945 Governor-General of that part of occupied Poland not directly incorporated into the German Reich. One of his first operations as Governor-General was the so-called AB Action aimed at destroying Polish culture, during which more than 30,000 Polish intellectuals and members of the upper classes were arrested, over 7000 of whom were subsequently massacred. He also oversaw the segregation of Jews into ghettos and the use of Polish civilians as forced labor.
- 16.
Those who had won the Knight’s Cross for bravery.
- 17.
Called the “Lublin Concentration Camp” in Nazi documents, operational 1941–1944. It was situated in a quarter of Lublin called Majdan Tatarski, whence the name Majdanek. Although intended as a forced labor camp, over 78,000 people died there, of which some 59,000 were Jews.
- 18.
Extermination camp south of Bełżec, a village just off the Lublin–Lwów railroad, operational from March 1942 to late June 1943. It is estimated that over this period about 600,000 people, mainly Jews, were murdered there. The number of Poles killed there for hiding Jews is estimated at 1500.
- 19.
A green leaf vegetable resembling spinach.
- 20.
Anna May Wong (1905–1961), Chinese-American actress and film star. First Asian American to become an international star.
- 21.
Henri-Louis Bergson (1859–1941), French philosopher. In particular, he viewed immediate experience and intuition as more significant that rationalism and science for understanding reality. His most widely known work was Creative Evolution, in which he examined evolution from a general philosophical point of view. Nobel laureate for literature in 1927.
- 22.
“Man the maker (of things)”
- 23.
“Man the wise”
- 24.
Rzeszów and Tarnopol lie respectively west and east of Lwów at about the same distance ( ≈ 130 km) from it. Tarnopol—Ternopil in Ukrainian—is now in Ukraine.
- 25.
Member of the railroad security personnel.
- 26.
“Get away!”
- 27.
That is, in that region of Poland occupied by the Germans since September 1939. Przemyśl lies on the San River, which formed part of the agreed boundary between the Soviet- and German-controlled regions of Poland from September 1939 to June 1941.
- 28.
The battles of Narvik, Norway, were fought from April 9 to June 8, 1940, over control of Narvik’s ice-free port. The naval battle was fought in the Ofotfjord between the British Royal Navy and the German Kriegsmarine, and the two-month land campaign by Norwegian, French, British, and Polish troops against German and Austrian ones.
- 29.
After the Third Partition of Poland in 1795, many Polish officers, soldiers, and volunteers left Poland and formed “Polish legions” in support of Napoleon, assuming that he would come to Poland’s aid against the usurping nations. During the Napoleonic wars they saw combat in the West Indies, Italy, and Egypt, and fought alongside the French army in the invasion of Russia in 1812. In 1801 Napoleon sent a large French and Polish contingent to Santo Domingo to topple the rebel black leader Toussaint L’Ouverture. By 1803 the French and Polish troops had been defeated—most dying of dengue fever—and an independent state of Haiti established.
- 30.
Marek Kac.
- 31.
Kac was actually at Cornell University from 1939 to 1961.
- 32.
“I see you, Roger, you recognize my voice, and you, Paul, and you, Maurice. You know well that I speak the truth. The Germans are men like you, they have sisters and wives, mothers and sons; why get yourself killed and why kill them, why?”
- 33.
“No one summoned me here. I came by myself.”
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Steinhaus, H. (2015). Osiczyna. In: Burns, R., Szymaniec, I., Weron, A. (eds) Mathematician for All Seasons. Vita Mathematica, vol 18. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21984-4_11
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