Diary Entries

Steinhaus, Hugo

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-21984-4_13

Hugo Steinhaus⁶

Part of the book series: Vita Mathematica ((VM,volume 18))

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Abstract

DECEMBER 20, 1944. Yesterday the post brought news of Janek. Just two days out of hospital, he again came down with paratyphoid fever, and checked himself back in. But now they think it’s diphtheria. He says the inflammation has subsided, and, since his heart and lungs have been affected by the disease, he is thinking of leaving the hospital and going to Kro’scienko1 for the cure. Lidka would then have to go there to look after him, and how would she get there? The weather is below freezing, and the conditions in the unheated train compartments are extremely cramped, with passengers treading on each other’s feet and squabbling over space.

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Notes

1.
Krościenko nad Dunajcem, a village in southern Poland close to the mountains, about 78 km south-east of Kraków.
2.
Celsius.
3.
A city in south-central Poland.
4.
That is, a Russian, or, by extension, a Soviet citizen.
5.
A village about 80 km south of Kraków.
6.
From the Polish underground.
7.
The Third Reich civil and engineering group founded by Fritz Todt in 1933. See earlier footnote.
8.
Adolf Szmosz, the brother of Steinhaus’s wife Stefa. He was a talented engineer educated at the Lwów Polytechnic, and before World War II worked at the Zgoda steel plant in Lwów.
9.
A square in Warsaw functioning as a marketplace from 1867 to 1944, the largest marketplace of pre-war Warsaw.
10.
Since this region had for some time (most of the period 1793–1918) been under Prussian and then German rule, it had a large ethnic German population.
11.
A town in southern Poland, 50 km from Kraków.
12.
A friend of the Igielskis. See earlier.
13.
A village near Gorlice.
14.
Soviet rocket launchers.
15.
Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego, a self-proclaimed interim executive authority in Poland, established in Moscow in July 1944 under Stalin’s control, with its headquarters in Lublin, and the socialist activist Edward Osóbka-Morawski (1909–1997) as its chairman. On December 31, 1944, the PKWN was renamed the “Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland” (Rząd Tymczasowy Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej) with Osóbka-Morawski as Prime Minister, lasting from January to June 1945. He was also prime minister in the next incarnation of the Polish government, namely the “Provisional Government of National Unity”, from June 1945 to 1947.
16.
Władysław Raczkiewicz (1885–1947), president of the Polish Government-in-Exile from 1939 to 1947. At Stalin’s urging, the Allies withdrew their recognition of this as Poland’s official government in February 1945, at the Yalta Conference.
17.
Antoni Hoborski (1879–1940), organizer and first Rector of the Academy of Mining and Metallurgy in Kraków.
18.
Witold Wilkosz was arrested together with other professors in Kraków by the Gestapo in 1939, and later released because of ill health, dying in 1941.
19.
Kazimierz Abramowicz lived from 1889 to 1936.
20.
Alfred Rosenblatt (1880–1947) emigrated to Lima, Peru, in 1936.
21.
Stefan Kempisty (1892–1940) died in a Soviet prison in Wilno.
22.
Aleksander Rajchman actually perished in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1940.
23.
Marian Mojżesz Jacob did not in fact escape to Finland, but perished in Warsaw in 1944.
24.
Arnold Walfisz (1892–1962) remained in Tbilisi for the rest of his life.
25.
Witold Hurewicz (1904–1956), eminent Polish topologist. Took his doctorate in Vienna under Hans Hahn and Karl Menger. Assistant to Brouwer in Amsterdam 1928–1936, after which he went to the US. Considered the discoverer of the higher homotopy groups.
26.
Mieczysław Biernacki (1891–1959), Polish mathematician and chemist. From 1929 associate professor at the University of Poznań, and from 1937 professor. He spent the war in Lublin, where he had been born, working at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University there.
27.
Adolf Lindenbaum (1904–1941), Polish logician and set-theorist. He was murdered by the Nazis at Ponary, near Vilnius (Wilno), in 1941. His wife, Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum, a mathematician and philosopher, perished in Wilno in 1942.
28.
Stefan Bergman (1895–1977), Polish-born American mathematician. Born in Częstochowa, he taught in Tbilisi from 1934, and from there went, via Paris, to the US, where he secured a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His last position was at Stanford University. Worked in the fields of several complex variables, partial differential equations, and applications.
29.
Zygmunt Birnbaum (1903–2000) obtained his doctorate in mathematics from Lwów University in 1929, and studied in G¨ottingen 1929–1930. Worked as a life insurance actuary for the Phoenix Life Insurance Company in Vienna and Lwów. Left for the US in 1937, where he eventually obtained a position at the University of Washington, Seattle. Worked mainly in functional and complex analysis and statistics.
30.
Samuel Eilenberg (1913–1998) obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Warsaw under Borsuk in 1936. Emigrated to the US before the war. Co-founder of category theory with Saunders Mac Lane.
31.
Aleksander Wundheiler (1902–1957), member of the Lwów-Warsaw school of mathematics. Escaped to the US at the beginning of World War II.
32.
Konstanty Sokół-Sokołowski (1906–1940) was a mathematician in Vilnius. Was in a POW camp in Starobielsk, then perished in Kharkiv.
33.
Zygmunt Zalcwasser (1898–1943), professor at the Free Polish University in Warsaw. Perished in Treblinka.
34.
Stefania Braun (1908–1943), a Warsaw mathematician. Circumstances of death unknown.
35.
Salomon Lubelski (1902–1941?), mathematics professor at Białystok 1939–1941. Co-founder, with Arnold Walfisz, of Acta Arithmetica. Died in the Majdanek concentration camp.
36.
Józef Pepis (1919–1941), outstanding logician. Died just after the Germans entered Lwów.
37.
Russian for head of the house.
38.
Possibly a sobriquet.
39.
“Peasants’ Battalions” (Bataliony Chłopskie, BCh) were formed in mid-1940 by the Polish agrarian political party Stronnictwo Ludowe (The People’s Party), and by 1944 had been partially integrated with the AK. They were formally disbanded in September 1945.
40.
Airborne troops, paratroopers.
41.
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), Dutch renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, and theologian. Called “Prince of Humanists” for his enlightened views.
42.
Dishonest officials with access to the cards.
43.
The former name of a rural municipality, now absorbed into the municipality of Gorlice. An oil refinery and a factory manufacturing drilling machines and other tools was established there in the late nineteenth century by the Canadian William Henry MacGarvey.
44.
A town about 40 km north of Kraków.
45.
Short for Flugzeugabwehrkanone, that is, anti-aircraft defense artillery.
46.
“Germany is kaput.”
47.
“tank crewmen”
48.
“Russian soldiers”
49.
Under the auspices of the program called “Lend-Lease”, the US supplied the UK, the USSR, China, and other Allied nations with war mat´eriel from March 1941 to September 1945.
50.
In Chapter 1 it was related how when Steinhaus was still a boy, Klobassa Sr. discovered oil near Jasło and became exceedingly rich.
51.
A village in Krosno County, Subcarpathian Voivodeship, south-eastern Poland.
52.
Superiors, ultimately Stalin.
53.
District police commissioner for Bobowa. Helped locals escape Nazi persecution. See Chapter 12.
54.
A brother of Jan Zaremba, a landowner working in the Polish underground educational enterprise during the war. See above.
55.
The official currency under the Germans. See Chapter 12.
56.
A resort town in Lesser Poland Voivodeship, in southern Poland. Because of the presence of thermal springs and favorable climatic conditions, frequented since the mid-nineteenth century for treatment of respiratory and digestive illnesses.
57.
When the Warsaw Uprising failed, about 22,000 Varsovians fled from Warsaw to Kraków.
58.
The dominant, and aristocratic, family in the spa town Iwonicz during Steinhaus’s childhood. See Chapter 1.
59.
“Voice of the People”
60.
First president of the Polish-Soviet Friendship Society, founded in 1944, a vehicle for organized propaganda events, such as celebrations of the October Revolution, as well as exchange programs, promotion of Soviet culture, etc. Lived from 1885 to 1947.
61.
Stalin.
62.
Construction of this splendid—some would say extravagant—subway system was begun in 1931 as a showpiece of the Soviet system. By 1935 thirteen stations had been completed and linked up. Construction of extensions continues to this day.
63.
“special unit”
64.
Many sources assert rather that the Sonderkommando units were comprised mainly of Jews, forced to aid with the disposal of the bodies of those killed in the gas chambers.
65.
Uman′ (in Polish Humań) is a city in central Ukraine.
66.
The Russian portmanteau word for collective farm.
67.
Michał Rola-Żymierski (1890–1989), Polish communist military commander and Marshal of Poland from 1945 till his death. Returning to Poland from France in 1943, he became deputy commander of the Soviet-backed Gwardia Ludowa (People’s Guard), and then commander of the Armia Ludowa. He subsequently became commander-in-chief of the Polish army fighting alongside the Red Army. From 1946 he was head of the “Commission for State Security”, and was responsible for repressions carried out against former non-communist members of the resistance.
68.
The Yalta Conference of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, at which the re-establishment of the nations of war-torn Europe, especially Germany, was discussed, in fact went from February 4 to February 11, 1945.
69.
Tosia Michałowska was living with the Igielskis, neighbors of the Cieluchs. Her husband had been arrested. See Chapter 12.
70.
A town in central Poland. Two main railroad lines cross there, Łódź–Toruń and Warsaw–Poznań.
71.
A town in the present Lower Silesian Voivodeship in south-western Poland. Prior to World War II it had been part of Germany, and known under the name of Trachenberg.
72.
That is, Soviet soldiers.
73.
A demarcation line between the Second Polish Republic and Bolshevik Russia formally published in 1919 in an Allied Supreme Council declaration in the wake of World War I, but disputed by Poland (George Curzon (1859–1925) was British Foreign Secretary at the time). In the Treaty of Riga ending the Polish-Soviet war of 1919–1921, Poland was conceded about 135,000 km² of land east of the line. At the Teheran Conference it was agreed, and confirmed at Yalta, that post-World War II Poland’s eastern border should, with minor variations, follow the Curzon Line. Stalin successfully resisted Churchill’s proposal that certain parts of East Galicia, including Lwów, be retained as Polish territory. Poland’s territorial losses were compensated for by the incorporation of former German areas to the west. Thus the net effect of the postwar territorial settlement was that Poland as a whole was translated west by some hundreds of kilometers.
74.
Possibly the present-day Bielsko-Biała, a village in southern Poland.
75.
Joanna Guze, Polish writer and translator and friend of Lidka. She had gone off with the departing Soviets as the Germans approached Lwów in June 1941. See Chapter 8
76.
A town in Lublin Province in eastern Poland, situated at the confluence of the Vistula and Kurówka rivers.
77.
Polish lawyer and diplomat. Educated in Lwów. Arrested by the NKVD in Lwów in 1944 and then released. Appointed Governor of Kraków Province in February 1945, and later Polish ambassador to Sweden and then Italy. From 1954 to 1967 director of the Polish State Publishing Institute (Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy). Lived from 1911 to 1977.
78.
Steinhaus’s mother-in-law.
79.
A city in Brandenburg, situated on the river Spree about 125 km southeast of Berlin.
80.
A town on the Bóbr river in western Poland.
81.
Between February 13 and February 15, 1945, a total of 3600 RAF and USAAF planes flew four raids over Dresden, dropping around 4000 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city. The resulting firestorm razed around 39 km² of the city center. Recent estimates put the resulting number of deaths at 25,000.
82.
Presumably a woman of the neighborhood.
83.
A city in Upper Silesia, in southern Poland, near Katowice.
84.
“The Polish Daily”
85.
“The New Epoch”, the main organ of the Democratic Party at the time, publishing articles on politics and culture.
86.
This was an unattributed article printed in the very first issue of Nowa Epoka of January 21, 1945, p. 6, generally critical of the interwar Sanacja government of Poland. Note added by Aleksandra Zgorzelska, editor of the first Polish edition
87.
Jan Stanisław Łoś (1890–1974), landowner and Polish diplomat of the interwar period, professor at the Catholic University of Lublin, and head of the Humanities Faculty of this university 1957–1959.
88.
Aleksander Józef Skrzyński (1882–1931), Polish politician. Prime minister of Poland from 1925 to 1926.
89.
This was Archduke Karl Albrecht of Austria-Teschen (1888–1951), from 1919 to 1949 Karol Olbracht Habsburg-Lotaryński, owner of an estate at Żywiec (a town in southern Poland) who, in spite of his Austrian connections felt himself to be Polish, and enlisted in the Polish army in 1918. On the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, at the age of 51, he once more enlisted in the Polish army. For refusing to sign the German Volksliste he was imprisoned till near the end of the war. After liberation he moved first to Kraków then to Sweden.
90.
Leon Tadeusz Kozłowski (1892–1944), Polish archaeologist and politician. Prime minister of Poland 1934–1935. Served with distinction in the Polish-Soviet war of 1919–1921. Held various posts in the interwar Sanacja government. Arrested by the NKVD in Lwów at the beginning of World War II, he was released two years later and eventually found his way to Germany and was taken to Berlin, where he may or may not have collaborated with the Nazis. In any case in 1943 he was taken to the site of the Katyń massacre as an expert on behalf of the Germans, and is known to have assisted them in their propaganda war with the Soviet Union. He died from wounds received during an Allied air raid on Berlin.
91.
A German town till 1945, it is now in northwestern Poland, and has been re-named Dobiegniew. The POW camp was first established by the Germans in September 1939 for ordinary soldiers and non-commissioned officers, but in May 1940 was re-designated as Oflag II-C, a POW camp for officers. It ceased functioning in January 1945.
92.
A town not far from Lwów, called Sambir in Ukrainian.
93.
This hypothesis turned out to be false; at the time of writing they were safe in Sanok and Rzeszów respectively. Author’s Note
94.
Władysław Jagiełło (Ladislaus II Jagiello) (1362?–1434), King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. Founded a dynastic union of Poland and Lithuania by defeating the knights of the Teutonic Order at Grunwald in 1410. An impressive bronze equestrian monument to him is located in Central Park, New York City. It was sculpted by Stanisław K. Ostrowski (1879–1947) for the Polish pavilion of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and is a replica of a monument in Warsaw which the Germans melted down into bullets after taking Warsaw at the beginning of World War II.
95.
New złoty banknotes were first introduced in late 1944 by the Narodowy Bank Polski (The Polish People’s Bank), in circulation till 1945.
96.
The former Russian Empire contained the largest population of Jews of the diaspora (around five million in the nineteenth century). Anti-Semitic policies and periods of persecution—pogroms—were frequent. Through extensive emigration, especially at the turn of the nineteenth century (to the US) and in the 1980s (to Israel and the US), it has been reduced to something of the order of 300,000.
97.
The level of highschool after the Gymnasium.
98.
At Yalta Stalin agreed to the holding of free elections in the Soviet-occupied states of Eastern Europe, and also that some members of the Polish Government-in-Exile in London would be permitted to join the Lublin government.
99.
After maintaining steadfast neutrality throughout the war, the Grand National Assembly of the Turkish Republic—which in 1923 had succeeded to the Ottoman Empire, Germany’s ally in World War I—voted unanimously to declare war on Germany and Japan on February 23, 1945.
100.
Władysław Anders (1892–1970), Polish general. In 1939 the Polish cavalry brigade he commanded was forced to withdraw before the overwhelming German onslaught. Captured by the Soviets, he was imprisoned in the infamous Moscow Lubyanka, where he was tortured. When Germany invaded the USSR he was freed and appointed commanding general of an army comprised of Poles who had been deported to the USSR in 1939–1941. Only a few hundred thousand of the original million and a half deportees emerged from Siberia alive. Anders managed to transform this half-starved, ragged mob into one of the most feared Allied fighting forces of World War II, undefeated in battle. Anders’ army, together with a sizable contingent of Polish civilians, managed an exodus from the USSR via the Persian Corridor into Iran, Iraq, and Palestine, and then further west, where they fought alongside the Western Allies. One of their most notable battles took place at Monte Cassino, a crucially strategic hill in the mountains south of Rome (crowned with a medieval Benedictine monastery), almost impregnably fortified by the Germans. After attacks on the position by various US, French, British, New Zealand, and Indian divisions all failed to dislodge the Germans, Anders and his troops took the hilltop after seven days of bitter fighting, on May 18, 1944. However, he and his army were betrayed by the Western Allies at Yalta. After the war Anders fled to England where he lived out the rest of his life in exile.
101.
Most of which escaped to Britain.
102.
The Book of Odes, one of the “Five Classics” of ancient China.
103.
Zofia Nałkowska (1884–1954), Polish novelist. Her early novels showed the influence of the Young Poland movement and focused on exploring the feminine psyche, while her later ones were more concerned with social problems.
104.
Compelling Jewish tertiary students to sit in specially designated areas of lecture halls. See Chapter 7
105.
The National Unity Camp (in Polish Obóz Zjednoczenia Narodowego or OZN), a Polish political party founded in 1937 by leaders of the Sanation movement. Its stated aims were to improve national defense and safeguard the 1935 Constitution. It sought to portray Rydz-Śmigły as Piłsudski’s political heir and the “second person in the country” after President Mościcki. Perhaps the point here is that the Government-in-Exile had some continuity with the prewar Ozon government, so might easily have been linked to the passing of the “bench ghetto” law.
106.
Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004), Polish writer, poet, and translator, of Lithuanian background. In Warsaw during World War II, postwar he was appointed cultural attach´e to the Paris embassy of the communist People’s Republic of Poland. In 1951 he defected, ultimately to the US. In 1953 he received the Prix Litt´eraire Europ´een. In 1961 appointed professor of Polish Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. Between 1951 and 1980 his works were banned in Poland by the communist government. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. At last, in 1993, returned to Poland.
107.
Artur Sandauer (1913–1989), Polish essayist, literary critic, and translator. Worked on the staff of the weekly Odrodzenie in Warsaw 1948–1949. Attempted to oppose the doctrine of “social realism” in art. Although never a member of the Communist Party, was a member of the National Council of Culture (Narodowa Rada Kultury), which supported General Jaruzelski in the 1980s.
108.
Jerzy Putrament, Polish writer, poet, publicist, and politician. A communist supporter, after World War II he was by turns diplomat, deputy to the Polish Parliament (1952–1961), and member of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party (1964–1981).
109.
In the sense of a more equitable distribution of land—see below.
110.
A village southeast of Kraków.
111.
Pomerania in Latin. Historical region along the south shore of the Baltic Sea.
112.
Bolesław Bierut (1892–1956), Polish communist leader, NKVD agent, and hard-line Stalinist. President of Poland 1947–1952, Chairman of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party 1948–1956, and Prime Minister of Poland 1952–1954.
113.
Where Stalin pushed continually for full collectivization, with disastrous results for Soviet agriculture—not to mention the millions who starved to death in its initial stages.
114.
Daughter of Steinhaus’s cousin Józef (Dyk) Schoenborn. See e.g. Chapter 2
115.
A town in northern Moravia (in the Czech Republic, as it is now).
116.
The former German name for the regions of Czechoslovakia inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans until the end of World War II.
117.
Drogobich in Ukrainian. A city in the present L′viv Province of western Ukraine.
118.
Dziutka’s sister.
119.
Steinhaus’s friend Stanisław Adamski from Jasło days.
120.
In Tajik Dushanbe, renamed Stalinabad from 1929 to 1961. Capital of Tajikistan.
121.
“The Forge”, a Marxist literary magazine founded in 1945, promoting Social Realism. Jan Kott was its chief editor for a period after the war.
122.
Stanisław Dawidowicz, a professor of engineering in the Częstochowa University of Technology in the 1950s.
123.
Region in southeastern Poland, near Zamość.
124.
In Latin, Lusatia, a border region between Poland and Saxony bounded by the Kwisa and Łaba (Elbe) rivers, originally inhabited by Celts and, following their expulsion, long contended over by Slavs and Germans.
125.
The United Nations Conference on International Organization (April 25–June 26, 1945), an international meeting at which the United Nations Organization was established. It was attended by delegations from 46 countries.
126.
That is, Polish as used by the Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny (The Illustrated Polish Daily).
127.
Felicja, the eldest of the author’s sisters.
128.
n´ee Chwistek.
129.
Muta M¨uller, Felicja’s daughter.
130.
Possibly from the Zakrzewski family of Rozprza—see Chapter 6
131.
Obtained a position as manager in an iron works in Katowice—see earlier.
132.
Short for Donets basse˘ın in Russian. The Donets Basin is a heavily industrialized region of eastern Ukraine. Rich coal deposits were discovered there in the late nineteenth century. The Donets is a river flowing through the region, the largest tributary of the Don.
133.
Even Poles who had declared themselves Volksdeutsche were vouchsafed this right, since for the charge that they betrayed their country—that is, Poland—to stick, they had to be tried in Poland. Author’s Note
134.
Now called Sucha Beskidzka. A town in the far south of Poland.
135.
This seems to be a brother of the more famous Narcyz Wiatr referred to below.
136.
In Polish, Polska Partia Robotnicza or PPR.
137.
A city in south-western Poland, in the region of Silesia, noted for its rich mineral deposits from the Cretaceous period.
138.
In German Rheinpfalz, a region in south-western Germany occupying more than a quarter of the territory of the German federal state of Rheinland-Pfalz.
139.
The island of Iwo Jima was part of the Empire of Japan. Thus the Battle of Iwo Jima (February 19–March 26, 1945) was the first American attack on Japanese home territory.
140.
American troops were welcomed by Czech civilians in Pilsen on April 7, 1945. Prague was liberated from German occupation by the Red Army in May in the last great European battle of World War II.
141.
General Eisenhower, the Allied Supreme Commander, decided to halt the Allied advance—against the urgings of Montgomery, Patton, and Churchill—at the Elbe since postwar zones of occupation of Germany and Berlin had already been agreed to at Yalta, and he wished to spare the troops under him from unnecessary further fighting.
142.
Except for the battles for Prague and Berlin.
143.
China under Chiang Kai-shek was considered an Allied Power during World War II, despite the continuing internecine struggle with the Chinese Communists. Chiang’s regime, the “Kuomintang”, continued to receive “Lend-lease” armaments from the US till their suspension in 1946.
144.
On April 12, 1945.
145.
Town in the Lesser Poland Voivodeship, in the far south of Poland. One of the oldest of Polish towns.
146.
Father of Zbigniew, one of Steinhaus’s students.
147.
On April 5, 1945.
148.
Later, on August 8, 1945, the USSR declared war on Japan, thereby honoring a promise made to the Allies at Yalta.
149.
Between Germany, Italy, and Japan, signed in Berlin on September 27, 1940, explicitly aimed at the Communist International.
150.
A former Lwów University colleague of Steinhaus.
151.
Presumably because Lwów had now become part of the USSR.
152.
Włodzimierz Stanisław Burzyński (1900–1970), Polish professor of engineering. Professor at the Lwów Polytechnic from 1934. In January 1945 he and other professors were arrested by the NKVD. After seven months’ imprisonment, he returned to teaching and research in Lwów, but in July 1946 moved to the Silesian Institute of Technology in Gliwice.
153.
Stanisław Fryze (1885–1964), Polish electrical engineer. Professor at Lwów Polytechnic. Arrested by the NKVD in January 1945, he was forced to work as a coal miner in the Donbass for several months. After his release he returned to Lwów, but left in June 1946 to take up the position of head of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Silesian Institute of Technology in Gliwice.
154.
Sister-in-law of Steinhaus’s wife’s brother. See Chapter 10.
155.
Roman Witold Ingarden (1893–1970), Polish philosopher, working in phenomenology, ontology, and aesthetics. Professor at Lwów University. From 1945 held positions briefly at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and the University of Kraków, from both of which he was banned for his idealism. In 1957 the ban was lifted and he was reappointed to the University of Kraków.
156.
Narcyz Wiatr (noms-de-guerre Zawojna and Władysław Brzoza) (1907–1945), Polish lawyer and populist political activist, member of the agrarian Polish People’s Party. During World War II he led Peasants’ Battalions in the underground resistance movement. After the formation of the communist Lublin government, advised members of his organization against compliance, and himself remained in hiding. However, he was shot by the Myślenice communist secret police in Planty Park in Kraków on April 24, 1945.
157.
In 1996 the Kraków office of the Institute of National Remembrance charged a certain Stanisław P., a former member of the Kraków communist secret police, with participating in Wiatr’s murder. The trial was postponed because of the ill-health of the defendant.
158.
In May 1942, when he held talks with Roosevelt, and in late April 1945, when he spoke with Truman before going on to the conference in San Francisco where Truman bluntly repudiated the Soviet “Eastern Europe-United Nations nexus.”
159.
Edward Reilly Stettinius (1900–1949), US Secretary of State from 1944 to 1945 under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman.
160.
Nazi term for leader of a region of the Reich.
161.
Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970), leader of the Free French Forces June 1940–July 1944. President of the Provisional Government of the French Republic August 20, 1944–January 20, 1946.
162.
According to another source, the number of delegations was 46, and Stalin sent Andre˘ı Gromyko back in Molotov’s place. The main issue leading to Molotov’s replacement was the dispute over whether Argentina should be admitted to membership, strongly supported by other South American delegations but opposed by Molotov, and whether Ukraine and Belarus should be admitted, given that Poland was not represented.
163.
“Literary News”, an extremely influential high quality Polish literary magazine, published in Warsaw between 1924 and 1939.
164.
This was never completed, although Steinhaus returns to the idea several times. Note added by Roman Duda, editor of the second Polish edition
165.
In fact, the surrender was signed at 01:41 on May 7 by Generaloberst Alfred Jodl on behalf of the Wehrmacht and President Karl D¨onitz. The surrender was to take effect at 23:01 on May 8. Considering, in particular, that the USSR was under-represented at Rheims, and not sufficiently forewarned, Stalin demanded that another ceremony be held in Berlin next day—May 9 Moscow time—with Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel officially capitulating to Marshal Georgi˘ı Zhukov in the presence of representatives of the western Allies. Victory Day has since then always been celebrated in Russia on May 9.
166.
Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, was captured on May 21, 1945, and suicided two days later by biting down on a cyanide capsule in a gap between his teeth.
167.
A region of Upper Silesia centered around Opole, transferred from Germany to Poland after World War II.
168.
A tributary of the Vistula in south-eastern Poland.
169.
Possibly the Central Limit Theorem, which states conditions under which the mean of a sufficiently large number of independent random variables will be approximately normally distributed. The theorem is especially important in that it provides justification for using the normal distribution to approximate large sample statistics obtained from controlled experiments.
170.
This was the official surrender organized in Berlin by the Soviets. There was another held earlier in Rheims, France, with the western Allies predominating. See above and below.
171.
This may not be quite accurate. See the relevant footnote above.
172.
The Lernaean Hydra of Greek mythology was a serpent-like chthonic water-beast with many heads, with the interesting peculiarity that for each head cut off it grew two more. It was the second labor of Heracles to kill this beast.
173.
Here in the sense of writers of improbable stories.
174.
Two towns and a district in southern Poland close to the then Czechoslovak border.
175.
In March 1945 sixteen members of the Polish Underground State, operative throughout the German occupation, were lured to Moscow, ostensibly to discuss their eventual inclusion in the Soviet-controlled Provisional Government of Poland. Instead they were imprisoned in the Lubyanka where they were submitted to brutal interrogation and torture. Only after somewhat feeble protests from Washington and London did Stalin admit to the arrests, reassuring his former Allies that the prisoners would receive light sentences. The show trial took place in June 1945, all but one of the victims admitting to alleged “crimes”. Only two of the sixteen survived beyond the next six years.
176.
Which, however, withdrew their recognition of the Government-in-Exile on July 6, 1945.
177.
Anthony Eden, then Foreign Secretary in Churchill’s government.
178.
No. 22, of April 22, 1945. Author’s Note
179.
A former Polish officer sent to a POW camp by the Germans. Husband to Dela, eldest of the Igielski girls. See Chapter 12.
180.
By May 1, 1945, most of Trieste had been captured from the Germans by the Yugoslav Partisans’ 8th Dalmatian Corps, which held it till June 12, when Tito agreed to hand administration of the city over to the British and Americans—but not before many real or imagined opponents of Yugoslav communism in Trieste had been imprisoned or killed. The status of Trieste as a “free territory” was established as of September 1947 by the Paris Peace Treaty, signed in February 1947.
181.
Bornholm island, in the Baltic between Sweden and Poland, had belonged to Denmark since the seventeenth century. During World War II it was taken over first by the Germans and then by the Soviets, who eventually agreed to hand the island back to Denmark in return for suitable concessions.
182.
As in the case of Berlin, Stalin was forced to honor his previous agreements according to which Vienna, after being overrun by the Red Army, was subdivided into five zones, with the four peripheral zones administered separately by Britain, the US, France, and the USSR, and the central zone by a joint Allied Commission. This was the situation till 1955, when the Soviet Union agreed to relinquish their zones of occupation in eastern Austria in return for guarantees of Austria’s permanent neutrality.
183.
The term “Vlasov people” here refers colloquially not only to the soldiers of the former Russian Liberation Army (ROA), or “Vlasov army”, but includes former members of certain military or police units made up of Russians, mainly prisoners-of-war and emigrants, and formed under German auspices.
184.
In Polish, Łemkowie. See below.
185.
Maurycy (Morcio, Moryś) Bloch (1917–1995), a fellow student of Steinhaus’s daughter Lidka. Went to the US in 1938, remaining there.
186.
Town in south-eastern Poland, in the Subcarpathian Voivodeship, formerly, from 1340 to 1772, the Ruthenian Voivodeship.
187.
In the USSR, many such deportations of entire peoples, mostly Muslims, were carried out at Stalin’s behest during and after World War II.
188.
In the USSR (and modern Russia) the word “militia” means the police force. Perhaps this is the appropriate way to interpret the word from this point on, with Poland within the Soviet ambit.
189.
A province in Silesia.
190.
A small region of eastern Europe, now mostly in Ukraine, with smaller subregions in Slovakia and Poland. In Ukraine it is more usually called “Trans-Carpathia” since it is on the opposite side of the Carpathian Mountains from most of Ukraine. A more neutral term is “Carpathian Ruthenia.”
191.
Kazimierz Sosnkowski (1885–1969), Polish independence fighter, politician, and Polish Army general. During World War II he escaped to the West where he held various posts in the Polish Government-in-Exile in London. On the death of Sikorski he became Commander-in-Chief of Polish Armed Forces in the West. He was eventually dismissed because of his criticism of the western Allies for their apparent abandonment of Poland to the Soviets. Lived in Canada from the end of the war.
192.
Wacław Krzeptowski (1897–1945), political leader of a highland people—called Goralenvolk by the Germans—from Podhale, in the Tatra Mountains near the border with Slovakia. Hans Frank, Nazi governor of Poland, allowed Krzeptowski to establish an independent state for this ethnic group in southern Poland, on the grounds that they were racially closer to Aryan, and Krzeptowski reciprocated by attempting unsuccessfully to recruit a “legion” to fight with Germany. After the war he was sentenced to death by the Home Army, and executed.
193.
This is the first mention of this enterprise. It would seem that Steinhaus had at some earlier time contracted to produce a table of logarithms—perhaps in connection with his work as a teacher in the underground school system.
194.
The French version of the paper on the quadratic tariff is: H. Steinhaus, “Sur le probl`eme du tarif ´electrique”, Sprawozdania WTN Seria B, No. 1 (1946), pp. 21–22. The Polish version appeared in the same journal in 1947 (No. 2, pp. 80–81).
195.
Or yellow turnip, a cross between the cabbage and the turnip.
196.
Karl Gebhardt (1897–1948), German medical doctor. Personal physician to Himmler, and one of the chief coordinators and perpetrators of surgical experiments on inmates of the concentration camps at Ravensbr¨uck and Auschwitz. Found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity by a US military tribunal, Gebhardt was sentenced to death. He was hanged at Landsberg Prison, Bavaria, on June 2, 1948.
197.
Dr. Zofia Mączka (1905–1992) was a prisoner in Ravensbr¨uck camp assigned to work as X-ray technician. At the end of the war she testified to and wrote about the horrifically cruel experiments performed in the camp, in particular about experiments where bones were fractured, pieces of bone removed or transplanted, and the periosteum removed.
198.
“special prisoners”
199.
One of them was Countess Zofia Potocka, n´ee Tarnowska (1901–1963), wife of Andrzej Potocki (1900–1939), who fought against the Germans in September 1939, and was murdered by Ukrainian peasants during the retreat of the Polish forces.
200.
Polish historian and art historian. Daughter of Count Karol Lanckoroński, a Polish nobleman from Galicia. Countess Karolina fought in the Polish resistance in World War II. Lived from 1898 to 2002.
201.
“What happens to us here will be repaid to you double.”
202.
The story of Volume 33 of Fundamenta Mathematicae is dramatic. Ready for printing before the Germans invaded, it was ordered destroyed by the German director of the publishing house, but a printer, risking his life, hid the plates. In the summer of 1945, Wacław Sierpiński retrieved them, added a few notes composed during the war—including one by Steinhaus—and, at the beginning of the volume, a list of names of those lost to Polish mathematics, and with the great help of Bronisław Knaster, arranged for its publication. The appearance of this new volume of Fundamenta in December 1945 served as a powerful boost to the low morale of surviving Polish mathematicians, and a demonstration to the world of their still unbroken will to continue. Note added by Roman Duda, editor of the second Polish edition
203.
The Polish Workers’ Party, the Polish communist party active from 1942 to 1948, when it merged with the Polish Socialist Party. See earlier.
204.
From 1939 there was a struggle for independence from the French in Syria, which succeeded in 1945, but not before the French had bombed Damascus.
205.
Iraq’s modern borders were determined by the League of Nations in 1920, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. It was ruled by Britain as the British Mandate of Mesopotamia until 1932, when it gained independence as the Kingdom of Iraq. In 1958 the monarchy was overthrown and the Republic of Iraq proclaimed, ruled by the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party.
206.
Józef Motyka (1900–1984), Polish botanist and lichenologist. During the war he worked in the Lwów Botanical Gardens, returning in 1944 to the region where he had been born and raised to teach in the Gymnasium at Grybów. In 1945 he was made Director of the Department of Plant Geography and Systematics at the newly established University of Maria Curie-Skłodowska in Lublin.
207.
Courses providing technical training.
208.
A former estate close to Lwów.
209.
Haeckel formulated the theory that “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, that is, that the embryological development in any species reflects the species’ evolutionary history. The theory is now largely discredited, though acknowledged as partly accurate.
210.
After World War II, Neumark, the part of the German federal state of Brandenburg east of the Oder-Neisse Line, was transferred to Poland, and its German population expelled.
211.
The expulsions of ethnic Germans from various regions of eastern Europe after World War II took place in three stages: a spontaneous flight before the advancing Red Army (1944–1945), a disorganized mass expulsion by the new rulers of the territories in question immediately following the war, and a putatively more ordered transfer of people following the tripartite Potsdam Agreement of July–August 1945. By 1950 there remained only about 2.5 million ethnic Germans in the regions in question, around 12 % of the pre-war total.
212.
The Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp built in the vicinity of the villages of Mauthausen and Gusen in Upper Austria, 20 km east of Linz. Liberated by soldiers of the US Third Army in May 1945, the last camp to be liberated by the western Allies.
213.
Dolek, Stefa’s brother, had gone to Katowice. See above.
214.
The father of one of Steinhaus’s pupils. See above.
215.
The Third Geneva Convention, adopted in 1929, stipulated conditions of humane treatment of prisoners of war.
216.
Replaced by Władysław Kiernik, after Witos fell ill.
217.
Steinhaus was misinformed here. The show trial of fifteen of the leaders of the wartime Polish underground government lured to Moscow on false pretences began on June 18. See earlier footnote.
218.
Harry Lloyd Hopkins (1890–1946), a close advisor to Roosevelt. One of the architects of the New Deal, and of the Lend Lease aid program in support of the Allies.
219.
Polish statesman, historian, economist, and journalist. From 1945 member of the State National Council and then the Sejm Legislature.
220.
See Chapter 9
221.
This is, in fact, considered part of the ritual of the Russian bathhouse.
222.
The conference was held at Cecilienhof, in Potsdam, home of Crown Prince Wilhelm Hohenzollern, scion of the Prussian royal line, from July 16 to August 2, 1945. The chief participants were Harry Truman, Joseph Stalin, and Churchill, replaced by Clement Attlee when it was learned that Churchill had lost the British general elections. Some of the issues discussed: appropriate punishment of the Nazis; reconstruction of Europe; ensuring future peace; war reparations to the USSR, and indirectly to Poland; expulsion of Germans from territories now established as no longer German; and the recognition of a Provisional Government of National Unity in Poland (and the withdrawal of recognition of the London Government-in-Exile).
223.
Hilary Minc (1905–1974), Polish communist politician, and pro-Soviet Marxist economist. From 1944 to 1956 a member of the Politburo of the PPR (the Polish Workers’ Party, or, from 1948, when it merged with the Polish Socialist Party, the Polish United Workers’ Party).
224.
“Just as back home [in Germany]”
225.
Edvard Beneˇs (1884–1948), leader of the Czechoslovak independence movement and second President of Czechoslovakia. At the end of World War II he returned to the newly reconstituted Czechoslovakia from exile in England, and resumed his post as president. He presided over a coalition government, from 1947 headed by communist leader Klement Gottwald, which, in particular, oversaw the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovak territory. Beneˇs resigned when the communists organized a coup d’´etat in February 1948, a move ratified by the people at the elections of May 1948, thereby aligning Czechoslovakia with the communist bloc.
226.
And also Sachsen-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and Brandenburg, which contains Berlin, from 1949 subdivided into East Berlin and West Berlin.
227.
A breed of horse from the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern area of north-eastern Germany, a tough “warmblood” breed with good physical and mental stamina.
228.
The Percheron is a breed of heavy draft horse, deriving originally from a region of France called “Le Perche.” A breed with great muscular development, and of a determined and willing character.
229.
The Provisional Government of National Unity (Tymczasowy Rząd Jedności Narodowej, TRJN) was officially inaugurated on June 28, 1945 by a decree of the State National Council. It was made up of Polish communists and former members of the Government-in-Exile. The Prime Minister was Osóbka-Morawski, Deputy Prime Ministers Gomułka and Mikołajczyk.
230.
This turned out to be false. Zaolzie was returned to Czechoslovakia.
231.
“To the greater glory of Russia” (Lat.). Compare Ad maiorem Dei gloriam!
232.
Urząd Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego (briefly, UB) (Department of the Security Service), branch of the Ministry of Public Security of Poland (MBP), the Polish communist secret police, intelligence, and counterespionage service operating from 1945 to 1954. Its main goal was the eradication of the anti-communist groupings and the socio-economic base of the wartime Polish Secret State and of the Polish Home Army.
233.
Czesław Wycech (1899–1977), Polish politician and historian. As a member of the Polish Underground Government during World War II, he was responsible for organizing underground education. Minister of Education in the Provisional Government of National Unity 1945–1947.
234.
Mieczysław Thugutt, who had run the Polish Ministry of Internal Affairs in the Government-in-Exile in Stockholm, rejected the offer to head a ministry, and remained abroad. In his place Tadeusz Kapeliński became Minister of Transport and Telegraph.
235.
Free, fair, and democratic.
236.
Narodowe Siły Zbrojne (or NSZ) (National Armed Forces), a Polish anti-Soviet and anti-German paramilitary organization, part of the Polish resistance movement during World War II, later working underground against the postwar Soviet puppet government of Poland. It was associated pre-war with the political camp of National Democracy.
237.
In April 1948 the US launched the European Recovery Program (also called the “Marshall Plan” after American Secretary of State George Marshall), a program of financial support to help rebuild European economies and combat the spread of Soviet-style communism. Aid was offered to the USSR and the countries of the Soviet bloc, but was refused. (An approximately equal amount of aid ($13 billion) was given between the end of the war and the implementation of the plan.) By 1952, when funding ended, the economy of every participating state had surpassed pre-war levels. The plan is thought to have been largely responsible for the total political and economic recovery of postwar western Europe.
238.
General Leopold Okulicki (1898–1946), Polish army general, and the last commander of the anti-German underground Home Army during World War II. He served in the Polish Legions in World War I, and fought in the Polish-Bolshevik War of 1919–1921. In Warsaw during the German siege of that city, he evaded capture and joined an early underground resistance organization. Arrested by the NKVD in 1941, he was imprisoned and tortured in various Soviet prisons. Released after the signing of the Sikorski–Mayski agreement, he eventually became the commander of the 2nd echelon of the underground Polish Home Army. On the Soviet takeover of Poland, he became one of the “Polish sixteen” lured to Moscow under false pretences. Although sentenced to ten years in the Gulag at the Trial of the Sixteen (June 18–21, 1945), he was murdered in the infamous Butyrka Prison in Moscow on December 24, 1946.
239.
One source claims that members of the foreign press and observers from Britain and the US were present. The dates of the trial were chosen carefully to overlap with a conference on the creation of a Soviet-backed Polish puppet government.
240.
Also translated as the “Polish Academy of Learning”.
241.
Mościcki had been forced to resign his office in September 1939, and after a period of internment he was allowed to go to Switzerland, where he remained throughout the war, dying there in 1946.
242.
A lady Steinhaus met in Osiczyna.
243.
Another friend made in Osiczyna.
244.
Tosia was the wife of Witold Otto, in whose house Steinhaus and his wife stayed in Osiczyna. She tended to make their lives difficult there. Elza was her daughter.
245.
Russian for “many”.
246.
Apparently he was.
247.
This final broadcast was actually on July 5. The Polish Government-in-Exile, despite no longer being recognized by Britain or the US as Poland’s legitimate government, maintained a formal existence in London till 1990, when it returned the symbols of the Polish Republic to Lech Wałęsa, the first post-communist president of Poland.
248.
For example, by the end of World War II about six million Poles were living in the US.
249.
Stanisław Kulczyński took part in underground education in Poland during World War II. Postwar, he was active in the university and polytechnic in Wrocław.
250.
This may be Tadeusz Lehr-Spławiński (1891–1965), Polish linguist specializing in Slavic, Baltic, and Celtic languages. Taught in Lwów 1922–1929 and in Kraków 1929–1962. During World War II he was incarcerated for several months in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Rector of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków 1945–1946.
251.
Possibly Mieczysław Dobromęski, public prosecutor in a criminal court in Katowice after the war.
252.
A former city gate and now one of the chief historical symbols of Berlin and Germany. It is the monumental entry to Unter den Linden, the boulevard lined with lime trees which formerly led to the city palace of the Prussian monarchs. The Reichstag is one block to the north.
253.
A German chemical industry conglomerate, formed in 1925 when a number of companies were merged. The company collaborated closely with the Nazis during World War II. It held the patent for the pesticide Zyklon B used in the concentration camp gas chambers, and owned over 40 % of the company that manufactured it. Thirteen of the 24 directors were sentenced to prison terms by a US military tribunal (the 1947–1948 “IG Farben Trial”), but some of these were eventually reinstated as leaders of the postwar companies that split off from IG Farben.
254.
Two iron boxes containing gold coins valued at $10,000 were found near the villa “Schloss Fuschl”, owned by Ribbentrop. It is conjectured that much more Nazi treasure still lies hidden in Austrian lakes and mountain fastnesses.
255.
Grzegorz Krochmalny was Steinhaus’s assumed name during most of the war.
256.
The capital of the West Pomeranian Voivodeship, on the Baltic Sea, in north-western Poland. Poland’s largest seaport. Dates from the eighth century. Belonging to Prussia since the early eighteenth century—in German it was called Stettin—it was transferred to Poland after World War II, and the German population expelled.
257.
Stalin.
258.
Zdenˇek Fierlinger (1891–1976), Czech politician. Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia from 1944 to 1946, at first in the London-based exiled government, and then in liberated Czechoslovakia. Between 1946 and 1948 he was leader of the Czech Social Democratic Party, and chief proponent of unification of this party with the Communists. In 1948 became a member of the Central Committee of the unified Czechoslovak Communist Party.
259.
That is, Czechoslovakia and Ukraine.
260.
Rola-Żymierski.
261.
Bronisław Knaster.
262.
Assistant to Laska.
263.
Romuald Traugutt (1826–1864), Polish general and war hero, best known for his leadership of the “January Uprising” against Russia 1863–1864. He was sentenced to death and hanged on August 5, 1864, by the then Russian rulers of north-eastern Poland.
264.
The river Nysa Łużycka (Lausitzer Neisse in German, Lusatian Neisse in English) is a tributary of the Oder, lying mostly well to the west of the Oder. The postwar Polish border with Germany lies along the Oder–Nysa Łużycka system. Wrocław (Breslau in German) is situated on the Oder, but upstream from its junction with the Nysa Łużycka.
265.
The Paris Peace Conference, July 29–October 15, 1946, aimed at finalising peace settlements with Italy, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary, and Finland.
266.
Many of the inmates worked in a nearby rock-quarry, where they were forced to carry rough-hewn blocks of stone of up to 50 kg weight up 186 “steps of death.”
267.
Franz Ziereis fled with his wife in May 1945, but was discovered in the mountains of Upper Austria and wounded while trying to escape. He was returned to Mauthausen, where he died.
268.
The high-school leaving examination, qualifying the student to enter university.
269.
Zygmunt had spent the war in an unspecified prison. His wife Tosia had found refuge with the Igielskis, neighbors of the Cieluchs.
270.
In German, Waldenburg, a city in Lower Silesia.
271.
Zbigniew (Zbyszek) Pająk was one of Steinhaus’s students.
272.
Szczecinek is a town in Middle Pomerania, northwestern Poland. The castle and town were built in 1310 on the model of Szczecin, which is about 150 km to the west, on the Baltic Sea, at the mouth of the Oder.
273.
Ancient Polish city in northern Poland, on the Vistula.
274.
“¨Uber die Fehlerwahrscheinlichkeit einer Summe von Dezimalzahlen”
275.
Stanisław Loria, Polish physicist from Lwów. Founded the Department of Physics at the University of Wrocław in 1945, and was vice-Rector till 1946. Moved to Poznań in 1951.
276.
After the war, Otto Nikod´ym taught at the Polytechnic in Kraków. He emigrated in 1946, moving to the US in 1948.
277.
Described in Chapter 8
278.
Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender on August 15, 1945, so this was indeed just a rumor.
279.
Mykola Bazhan (1904–1983), Ukrainian poet, writer, and translator, and Soviet Ukrainian political figure. Deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR 1943–1948, deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and head of the Writers’ Union of Ukraine 1953–1959.
280.
A widowed daughter of the Cieluchs.
281.
Short for Aleksander.
282.
A Jewish socialist organization founded in Vilnius in 1897 aimed in particular at overthrowing regimes encouraging anti-Semitism, and promoting the creation of a Jewish proletariat. During World War II the Bund went underground, taking part in ghetto revolts and in partisan activity. The Bundist representative in the Government-in-Exile in London committed suicide in protest at Allied inaction in helping the Jews. The Bund continued to function in Poland after the war till 1949, when it was repressed by the Stalinist Polish government.
283.
Poale Zion (Workers of Zion), a socialist Jewish workers’ organization, was founded in 1901, when the Bund rejected Zionism, with centers in various cities of the Russian Empire. It later split into leftist and rightist halves, which were permitted to function as political parties in postwar Poland until they were disbanded in February 1950.
284.
The weekly Tygodnik Powszechny was—and still is—a Roman Catholic magazine, established in 1945 under the auspices of Cardinal Adam Stefan Sapieha. In communist Poland it was the one magazine allowed to some extent to express views critical of the ruling regime.
285.
Arkadiusz Henryk Piekara (1904–1989), Polish physicist. Imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau, he was freed in 1940, and spent the rest of the war working in a nitrogen plant in Mościce. After the war he held academic positions in Kraków, Gdańsk, Poznań, and Warsaw. The Polish title of the article in question was “Indeterminizm panuje w świecie atomów”.
286.
Stating that certain pairs of physical properties of a system—such as momentum and position of an electron—cannot both be simultaneously determined to arbitrarily high precision. First published by Werner Heisenberg in 1927, it is not a statement about experimental limitations, but a fundamental physical law postulating an intrinsic “fuzziness” at the quantum level, where probabilistic estimates are the best one can expect.
287.
The anecdote, doubtless apocryphal, is as follows: Denis Diderot, editor of the great Encyclop´edie, was visiting St. Petersburg at the invitation of Catherine the Great, empress of Russia. Alarmed by the Frenchman’s arguments for atheism, the Empress appealed to the devout Euler, then doing his second stint at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Euler advanced towards Diderot and said in a tone of complete seriousness: “Sir, $\frac{a+b^{n}} {n} = x$; hence God exists. Reply!”—striking Diderot dumb, so the story goes.
288.
This would seem to go against the general view of the meaning of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
289.
Probably a sarcastic reference to Steinhaus’s fresh appointment to the Academy.
290.
Members of the Provisional Government of National Unity. See earlier.
291.
Quotation from Mickiewicz’ Pan Tadeusz, become a proverb. Since Pociej is a count and Maciej (Matthew) a commoner, presumably the sense is that one should avoid being beholden to the great and powerful.
292.
Leopold Infeld (1898–1968), Polish physicist. He was a docent at the University of Lwów (1930–1933), and then worked at Cambridge University (1933–1934), Princeton University (where he collaborated with Einstein), and the University of Toronto, Canada (1938–1950), returning to Poland in 1950, where he became a professor at Warsaw University. Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
293.
Julian Stawiński (1904–1973), Polish lawyer, translator from English and Russian, and editor of anthologies of science fiction and fantasy. After a brief period overseas after World War II, he returned to Poland in 1947.
294.
A town in Lower Silesia on the Nysa Łużycka.
295.
Actually just that part of this city on the eastern side of the Oder, now called Słubice.
296.
The Polish “y” is pronounced like an English “i” as in “gill”, but “harder” or “darker”, that is, further back in the mouth, the way New Zealanders pronounce it. Steinhaus’s original play on the words “Neisse” and “Nysa” was obscure.
297.
US forces found a vast treasure hidden in the Kaiseroda salt mines near Merkers, Germany in April 1945. However, the fate of Nazi gold transferred to various overseas institutions during the war remains cloaked in mystery.
298.
Stanisław Kot (1885–1975), Polish historian and politician. A member of the Polish Government-in-Exile during World War II. Left Poland again in 1947. Tadeusz Romer (1894–1978), Polish diplomat and politician. Worked in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs between the wars, becoming Minister in the Polish Government-in-Exile (1943–1944). After the war he settled in Canada (so did not, after all, return to Poland). Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski (1888–1974), Polish politician and economist. Interned in Romania 1939–1945, he returned to Poland after the war. Henryk Leon Strasburger (1887–1951), Polish politician. Member of the Polish Government-in-Exile during World War II. He was summoned back to Poland after the war, but decided to remain in London. August Hlond (1881–1948), Polish cardinal. For a time the primate of Poland. Became archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw in 1946. Forced German officeholders in former German territories to resign their posts in favor of Poles in 1945. Voiced intolerant views of Jews in Poland. Karol Estreicher Jr. (1906–1984), Polish art historian. Director of the museum of Jagiellonian University 1951–1976. Involved in reclaiming Polish works of art looted by the Nazis during World War II.
299.
The Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp was a forced labor camp built by the SS in Płaszów, a southern suburb of Kraków. It was built over two Jewish cemeteries in the summer of 1942.
300.
Oranienburg concentration camp was one of the first detention facilities built by the Nazis after coming to power in 1933. It held mainly political opponents of the Nazis from the Berlin area. In July 1934, when the SA was suppressed, it was closed and replaced by the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
301.
Józef Schreier (1908–1943), teacher in a Gymnasium in Drohobycz. Did serious mathematical research.
302.
Michał Kerner (1902–1943), teacher in a Gymnasium in Warsaw. Did serious mathematical research. Died during the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto.
303.
The world’s oldest large-scale film studio, located in Potsdam-Babelsberg, and founded in 1912. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel were shot there, as well as over a thousand films made between 1939 and 1945—for example, Leni Riefenstahl’s propagandistic Triumph of the Will.
304.
Abraham Halevi Fraenkel (1891–1965), Israeli logician and set theorist, born and educated in Germany, moved to Palestine in 1929. An early Zionist. The first Dean of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The Zermelo–Fraenkel system of axioms for set theory is now standard.
305.
Monografie Matematyczne, a publishing venture begun in Lwów in 1932. The first volume was written by Banach.
306.
A political organization founded, with Stalin’s connivance, in the USSR in 1943 by Polish communists. Between 1944 and 1946 it was involved in resettling Poles from the USSR in Poland.
307.
The Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów was renamed after the Ukrainian poet Ivan Yakovych Franko from January 1940 to June 1941, and then from 1945 on.
308.
Various sources put the blast equivalent at from 13,000 to 16,000 tonnes of TNT.
309.
That is, Emperor Hirohito.
310.
Needed in connection with applications for certain kinds of employment.
311.
See Chapter 7
312.
An organization formed to deal with the difficulties of Poles expelled from Poland or victims of World War II.
313.
Perhaps a reference to the activities of the ONR in the period 1936–1939 described in Chapter 7
314.
In fact he was tried in Nuremberg, where he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity on October 1, 1946, and sentenced to death.
315.
Marian Hemar (born Jan Maria Hescheles) (1901–1972), Polish-Jewish poet, journalist, and songwriter. Called “the bard of Lwów and the troubador of the London emigration.” Participated in the defense of Lwów in the Polish-Ukrainian War and Polish-Soviet War (1918–1921). On the outbreak of World War II he fled Warsaw, eventually reaching the Middle East, where he signed up in the Polish Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade. He settled in England, continuing to be popular in Poland with his weekly radio program broadcast by Radio Free Europe.
316.
See earlier footnotes. The point here is that these organizations were right-wing, nationalistic, and tending to anti-Semitism.
317.
“[Department of] Management of Lands”
318.
A village about 3 km north-east of Jasło.
319.
“Krochmalny has died, Steinhaus is born!”
320.
The Japanese instrument of surrender was signed on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.
321.
James Francis (“Jimmy”) Byrnes (1882–1972), American statesman. US Secretary of State under Truman from July 3, 1945 to January 21, 1947, he was involved in several postwar peace conferences, taking a firm stand against the Soviet Union.
322.
Ernest Bevin (1881–1951), British trade union leader and Labour politician. Minister of Labour in the wartime coalition government, and Foreign Secretary in the postwar Labour Government.
323.
In 1931 Manchuria, part of northeastern China, was occupied by the Japanese, who set up the deposed Qing emperor of China as puppet emperor of “Manchukuo”, which they used as a base for their invasion of the rest of China. After the war the Communist Chinese took over Manchuria from the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek (whose Kuomintang government had been an ally of the West throughout the war) with Soviet approval. The region then served as a communist staging ground for the Chinese Civil War, the communists under Mao emerging victorious in 1949.
324.
Alina Dawidowicz, daughter of Olga Chwistkowa.
325.
Daughter of Alina.
326.
Alina’s husband.
327.
Leonard Zgliński, husband of Steinhaus’s sister Irena.
328.
Daughter of the Cieluchs.
329.
Natalia Gałczyńska (1908–1976), writer and translator. Wife of the Polish poet Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński (1905–1953).
330.
A Bavarian town on the edge of the Alps, about 70 km south of Munich.
331.
An acquaintance.

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Wroclaw, Poland
Hugo Steinhaus

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Hugo Steinhaus
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Dept. Mathematics & Statistics, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Robert G. Burns
Wrocław, Poland
Irena Szymaniec
The Hugo Steinhaus Center, Wrocław University of Technology (WUT), Wrocław, Poland
Aleksander Weron

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Steinhaus, H. (2015). Diary Entries. 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_13

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