Abstract
DECEMBER 9, 1962. The Cuban crisis has been relegated to the past, the Soviet fleet having removed from Cuba not only the missiles but also the bombers stationed there, as confirmed by American observers. As evidence for the change in the political weather one has only to consider the unanimous vote of approval in the UN for the proposal that should general disarmament take place the money saved from expenditure on arms must be spent on “peaceful aims”. Now although general disarmament would appear to be some way off, and in any case it is difficult to imagine expenses other than those on either peaceful or warlike aims, at least this cheap demonstration has a certain positive propaganda value.
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Notes
- 1.
“deadpan”
- 2.
Held in St. Peter’s Basilica from October 11, 1962 to December 8, 1965, opened under Pope John XXIII and closed under Pope Paul VI. It addressed relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the modern world.
- 3.
Member of the Polish government involved in an official capacity with catholicism in Poland. See Chapter 4 of Volume 2.
- 4.
The Elliot 803, a small, medium speed digital computer manufactured by the British company Elliot Brothers in the 1960s.
- 5.
Stefan Paszkowski, Polish mathematician. Later became one of the first professors of computer science in Poland.
- 6.
Turoszów Coal Basin is a coal-field in the province of Lower Silesia, southwestern Poland. It contains the largest deposit of brown coal in Lower Silesia. Two open-cast mines (Turów I and Turów II) and a thermoelectric power plant operate there near the town of Bogatynia.
- 7.
The silo-based three-stage Minuteman solid-propellant missile became America’s standard ICBM from 1962. The original “Minutemen” were select men of the American colonial partisan militia during the American revolutionary war against Britain. The name derived from their mobility and rapid deployability.
- 8.
Despite its fertile grain-growing regions, the USSR imported colossal amounts of wheat throughout the 1960s. They continued importing large amounts of wheat till the end of the 1980s. (President Carter imposed a brief embargo on exports of wheat to the USSR following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.)
- 9.
Viktor Platonovich Nekrasov (1911–1987), Russian writer, journalist, and editor. Fought in the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, later writing a book based on his war experiences titled In the Trenches of Stalingrad. Wrote the travelogue Both Sides of the Ocean, recounting his experiences visiting Italy and the US in 1957 and 1960. After long protesting what he saw as the post-Khrushchov Soviet government’s gradual restoration of Stalinism beginning in 1964, emigrated to France in 1974.
- 10.
This was the film “How to Be Loved”, directed by Wojciech Jerzy Has (1925–2000), Polish film director, producer, and screenwriter.
- 11.
An organic compound (formerly known as “carbolic acid”) present in coal tar. Its present uses depend on its being converted to plastics or related materials.
- 12.
A form of carbon, usually derived from charcoal, that has been processed to make it extremely porous.
- 13.
Józef Kożuchowski, professor of electrical engineering at the Wrocław Polytechnic.
- 14.
The Franco-German Friendship Treaty of January 22, 1963, by which de Gaulle sought to end the FRG’s military dependence on the US, and replace NATO by a general European defense arrangement with France providing nuclear deterrence.
- 15.
“The gods travel fast”, modified from the original line “Die Todten reiten schnell” (“The dead travel fast”) of the poem Lenore by the German poet Gottfried August Bürger (1747–1794)—meaning here that events come thick and fast.
- 16.
Following Stalin’s death his body was embalmed and placed alongside Lenin in Lenin’s Mausoleum on Red Square. Then at the 22nd Party Congress in October 1961, Khrushchov decreed that Stalin’s remains should be removed from Lenin’s tomb, Stalin’s crimes being such that the display of his body as a great figure of Soviet communism was inappropriate. The body was buried without fanfare in an unmarked grave against the Kremlin walls.
- 17.
That is, the integrated self-regulating biological community.
- 18.
This is a reference to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1797 poem, based on a folktale.
- 19.
Polish writer. Long time supporter of the “Third Camp” of revolutionary socialism. Left Poland for Israel in 1960, where he remained except for the period 1964–1969, when he was at the University of California at Berkeley. Characterized as “an instinctual rebel and declared enemy of oppression and injustice”, campaigning in particular for the human rights of Palestinians. Lived from 1929 to 1995. Steinhaus notes that he was from Jedlicz, where his father worked as an engineer in the local oil refinery.
- 20.
These two opposing factions were formed at the inception of Gomułka’s government, each named after the locations where they held their early meetings, namely the Palace of Natolin near Warsaw and Puławska Street in Warsaw. The Natolins were mainly ethno-nationalist, communist officials from the army and state security, while the Puławy faction included Jewish communists and members of the old intelligentsia.
- 21.
“There is a third choice”, used here instead of the more common tertium non datur (“there is no third choice or way”), also used to refer to the logical “law of the excluded middle”.
- 22.
Linguistics professor at the Jagiellonian University. Husband to Barbara Zglińska, the author’s niece.
- 23.
The International Balzan Prize Foundation awards four monetary prizes annually to individuals or organizations for outstanding achievements in the humanities, natural sciences, and culture, as well as for peace endeavors. The prize is financed from assets acquired by the Italian multimillionaire Eugenio Balzan (1874–1953), on instructions from his daughter Angela Lina Balzan. The awards date from 1961, with four prizes being awarded annually since 1978.
- 24.
Eminent Russian mathematician. See Chapter 4 of Volume 2.
- 25.
“The News”, the most important Soviet daily after Pravda. As they were wont to say back in the USSR: “There is no news in ‘The Truth’, and no truth in ‘The News’.”
- 26.
Ilya Grigorievich Ehrenburg (1891–1967), Soviet writer, journalist, translator, poet, and cultural figure. Published over a hundred titles, including works on World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II. His novel The Thaw is about the period of liberalization following the death of Stalin. Collaborated on The Black Book, a work detailing genocide perpetrated against Soviet Jewry by the Nazis.
- 27.
Reprinted in the author’s Między duchem a materią pośredniczy matematyka (Between Spirit and Matter There Exists Mathematics), Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warszawa–Wrocław 2000, pp. 221–224.
- 28.
“Symbol”
- 29.
Exchange of rubles for dollars at black market rates, and purchase from foreign visitors of ball-point pens and jeans, for example, were also common “economic crimes” in the 1960s and later.
- 30.
In 1962 Khrushchov visited an exhibition of modernist art in the Moscow Manezh, where he characterized work of Ernst Neizvestnyĭ as “dog shit”. Neizvestnyĭ was stripped of official status as an artist and lost his studio. In the early 1960s Khrushchov revived the philistinism of the Stalinist years, a tradition which would end only with the collapse of the USSR.
- 31.
Julian Polan-Haraschin (1912–1984), Polish lawyer and army officer. As deputy chairman of the Kraków Military District Court from 1946 to 1951, he passed more than sixty death sentences on former AK soldiers. He was appointed judge in 1958, and employed in the Law Faculty of Jagiellonian University till 1962. Imprisoned for bribery in the early 1960s, upon his release he worked as a paid government informer, reporting on the Catholic Curia and Seminary of Kraków, and those cooperating with Radio Free Europe.
- 32.
An Offizierslager, that is, a POW camp for officers.
- 33.
The Polish term for the police was then “militia”, in imitation of the Soviet term.
- 34.
A famous mental institution outside Warsaw.
- 35.
Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinskiĭ (1877–1926), member of the early Soviet leadership. Prominent member of both the Polish and Russian revolutionary movements. First director of the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka (later renamed successively OGPU, NKVD, KGB, and, in its post-Soviet Russian incarnation, MVD and, most recently, FSB) notorious for its methods of torture and summary execution.
- 36.
“For Victory”
- 37.
One of two government factions. See above.
- 38.
Witold Jedlicki, Polish writer. See above.
- 39.
“in hope”, that is, “aspiring” or “future”.
- 40.
Harold Davenport (1907–1969), English mathematician. Known for his extensive contributions to number theory.
- 41.
From 1948 British governments followed a policy of allowing relatively easy immigration from countries of the British Commonwealth of Nations. The 1958 “Notting Hill riots” were in effect a racially motivated protest against this policy.
- 42.
Nephew of Antoni Łomnicki. See Chapter 7 of Volume 1 and Chapter 4 of Volume 2.
- 43.
William Legge (1881–1958), 7th Earl of Dartmouth, had been a Conservative politician.
- 44.
Although till a short while ago Barbara, daughter of an earl, filled the dignified post of “master of the hounds”. Steinhaus’s Note (See also Chapter 4 of Volume 2.)
- 45.
Known as “Blenheim Palace”, it was a gift from Queen Anne and a grateful nation to John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, following his victory at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. Winston Churchill was born there in 1874.
- 46.
Henryk Michał Barycz (1901–1994), Polish historian and archivist, professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and chief archivist there 1934–1950 and 1955–1963.
- 47.
Fourteenth century philosopher, theologian, and reformer of the Kraków Academy, who completed the building of a parish school in Jasło, among other things.
- 48.
Polish geologist, ecologist, paleontologist, and social activist. Investigated the geological structure of the Tatra Mountains. Doctor honoris causa of the University of Mining and Metallurgy in Kraków (1960) and the Kraków University of Technology (1970). Lived from 1889 to 1972.
- 49.
William Averell Harriman (1891–1986), US Democratic Party politician. Businessman and diplomat. Quintin McGarel Hogg, Baron Hailsham of St. Marylebone (1907–2001), British conservative politician. Lord President of the Council in the governments of Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home 1960–1964.
- 50.
That is, secret service official.
- 51.
The same source informs us that death sentences were carried out in the cells by UB men delivering a pistol shot point blank. For each such execution they were paid fifty złotys. Steinhaus’s Note.
- 52.
“The gods travel fast”. See earlier footnote.
- 53.
A highly fatal form of smallpox characterized by cutaneous hemorrhaging.
- 54.
Bolesław Iwaszkiewicz (1902–1983), Polish mathematician. Habilitated at the Wrocław Polytechnic. Author of school textbooks. Mayor of Wrocław 1958–1969.
- 55.
“The People’s Observer”, the official newspaper of the Nazi party from 1920 to 1945.
- 56.
William Lawrence Shirer (1904–1993), American journalist, war correspondent, and historian. Best known for his work The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a history of Nazi Germany published in 1960.
- 57.
Franz Halder (1884–1972), German general and Supreme High Command Chief of General Staff from 1938 to 1942, when he was dismissed after frequent disagreements with Hitler.
- 58.
Walther von Brauchitsch (1881–1948), German field marshal and commander-in-chief of the German army in the early years of World War II.
- 59.
Witold Marian Gombrowicz (1904–1969), Polish novelist. His works are characterized by deep psychological analysis, a sense of paradox and absurdity, and an anti-nationalist flavor. Happening to be in Argentina at the outbreak of World War II, he remained there till 1963, often living in penury. In 1963, having been awarded a scholarship by the Ford Foundation, he returned to Europe, first to West Berlin and then to France, where he settled.
- 60.
Modern estimates do indeed put the number of Polish deaths caused by the war at over five million, very predominantly civilian.
- 61.
David Dean Rusk (1909–1994), US Secretary of State from 1961 to 1969 under presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
- 62.
Polish poet and writer. See Chapter 7 of Volume 1 and Chapter 4 of Volume 2.
- 63.
In late 1963 the head of the KGB V. Y. Semichastnyĭ authorized the arrest of Frederick Barghoorn, a professor at Yale University on a visit to the USSR. Semichastnyĭ was hoping that by charging Barghoorn as a spy, he would be able to engineer a swap: Barghoorn for Igor′ Ivanov, arrested a little earlier for espionage by the FBI. Under pressure from President Kennedy, Barghoorn was released.
- 64.
In Słowo Polskie, Issue XIX 273 (5747), November 18, 1963.
- 65.
The centralized Soviet press agency.
- 66.
That is, the Soviet version according to which Barghoorn was really a spy, and the Radio Free Europe version that it was a KGB provocation.
- 67.
John Ernst Steinbeck (1902–1968), American writer. Best known for his novels The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and East of Eden (1952), and the novella Of Mice and Men (1937). Many of his writings concern the working class, unemployed, and social underclass. He joined the communist-leaning League of American Writers in 1935. Nobel laureate for literature in 1962.
- 68.
It seems Oswald was in fact not investigated in any significant way by US authorities following his return from the USSR.
- 69.
Austrian writer, poet, etc. See Chapter 4 of Volume 1.
- 70.
Stanisław Gładysz (1920–2001), Polish mathematician. Later professor at the Wrocław Polytechnic. Director of the Institute of Mathematics of the Polytechnic 1974–1981.
- 71.
The day of the “revelation of God the Son in the infant Jesus Christ”, traditionally celebrated on January 6.
- 72.
Walter Ulbricht (1893–1973), German communist politician. Played a leading role in the creation of the Weimar-era Communist party of Germany. Spent the years of Nazi rule in the USSR. First Secretary of the East German Socialist Unity Party 1950–1971. East German head of state 1960–1973.
- 73.
A town in central Poland, in the Łódź Voivodeship. It has the largest coal-fuelled thermal power plant in Europe.
- 74.
One of the author’s nicknames for Władysław Gomułka.
- 75.
A fellow student of the author’s at the Jasło Gymnasium. See Chapter 2 of Volume 1.
- 76.
“greater power”
- 77.
“maximal power”
- 78.
Polish short story writer and novelist. See also Chapter 4 of Volume 2.
- 79.
Julian Perkal, professor at Wrocław University.
- 80.
Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. Best known for his three-volume history Main Currents of Marxism, according to which the totalitarian cruelty of Stalinism was not an aberration but a logical end product of Marxism. Chair of the Department of the History of Philosophy at Warsaw University 1959–1968. On being removed from his position in 1968, he emigrated to the West. He was associated principally with Oxford University, England, from 1972 to 1991. Lived from 1927 to 2009.
- 81.
Polish sociologist, socialist, essayist, and mountaineer. Participated in the Warsaw Uprising. Initially a member of the post-war Polish communist party, he subsequently joined the democratic opposition. Interned for his support of the Solidarity movement in 1981, he was soon released because of ill health. Lived from 1919 to 1988.
- 82.
A village lying to the west of Warsaw, noted for its resort, hospital, and schools for the blind, run partly by Franciscan friars. Several famous Polish writers and artists—among them Antoni Słonimski—are buried in the village cemetery.
- 83.
Primate of Poland at the time. See above.
- 84.
Clearly, Gomułka was angry over the cardinal’s fraternizing with Party members.
- 85.
Halina Bortnowska (b. 1931), Polish philosopher, journalist, and human rights activist. Editor and managing editor of the monthly Znak from 1961 to 1983. She was a co-founder of the Helsinki Foundation of Human Rights and its president 2007–2012.
- 86.
Andrzej Kijowski (1928–1985), Polish writer, screenwriter, essayist, and literary critic. After composing a resolution against censorship on behalf of the Polish Writers’ Union, he was removed from his position as literary director of Warsaw’s Drama Theater in 1968. Interned for a short time in the early 1980s during the period of Martial Law.
- 87.
Znak, No. 112, October 1963. Steinhaus’s Note
- 88.
Franciszek Longchamps de Bérier, Polish lawyer. At Wrocław University from 1946 to 1949 and again from 1956. See also Chapter 4 of Volume 2.
- 89.
“case closed”
- 90.
Mikhail Andreevich Suslov (1902–1982), Soviet anti-reformist cold war statesman. Second Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1965. Led hard-line opposition to Khrushchov’s revisionist policies. After Khrushchov’s ouster in 1964, he pushed for the establishment of a collective leadership as opposed to one-man rule.
- 91.
On March 10, 1964, a US Air Force RB-66 Destroyer based in France was shot down over East Germany by Soviet MiG-21 fighters. All three crew members parachuted to safety, and were released several days later.
- 92.
Polish economist of Marxian persuasion, social critic, and human rights advocate. Lived from 1888 to 1986.
- 93.
Kazimierz Wyka (1910–1975), Polish historian and literary critic. Professor at the Jagiellonian University.
- 94.
Stanisław Pigoń (1885–1968), historian of Polish literature and editor. Professor at the Stefan Batory University in Wilno and at the Jagiellonian University.
- 95.
Jerzy Turowicz (1912–1999), leading Polish Catholic journalist and editor post-World War II.
- 96.
Stanisław “Cat” Mackiewicz (1896–1966), conservative Polish writer, journalist, and monarchist.
- 97.
Trofim Kichko, Iudaizm bez prikras (“Judaism without Embellishment”), Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Kiev, 1963. This was an anti-Semitic book illustrated with caricatures depicting Jewish people in a stereotypical and prejudiced manner.
- 98.
“The Attacker” was a weekly anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic tabloid-format Nazi newspaper published by Julius Streicher from 1923 to the end of World War II, with brief suspensions before 1933 due to legal problems.
- 99.
A town in present-day Belarus. It was occupied by German troops from 1941 to 1944. Of the total population of 30,000, 27,000 were Jews, most of whom were killed after being deported from the Pińsk ghetto in late 1942.
- 100.
Professor at the Medical Academy in Wrocław.
- 101.
These charges were additional to the murder of his second wife, presumably.
- 102.
Title derived from the Taíno for the pre-Columbian chiefs of tribes in the Bahamas and Greater Antilles. The Spanish subsequently used the word to refer to leaders of other indigenous tribes in Central and South America.
- 103.
Possibly Bolesław Gleichgewicht. See Chapter 4 of Volume 2.
- 104.
Aleksander Gieysztor (1916–1999), Polish historian and medievalist.
- 105.
None of the writers among the thirty-four signed the letter to The Times, and of the professors, Estreicher, Ossowska, Falski, Kotarbiński, and Pigoń also refused to sign it. Steinhaus’s Note
- 106.
Mieczysław Moczar (1913–1986), Polish communist politician. For his active role in the communist underground during World War II, he became known as “the leader of Poland’s partisans”. Minister of the Interior 1964–1968, in which post he intensified police activity, and a member of the Central Committee of Poland’s communist party 1965–1981. Initiated an anti-Semitic campaign in 1968 in connection with student protests.
- 107.
In Polish “Wielki Krzyż”. The author comments that the powers-that-be write “Krzyż Wielki”, thereby demonstrating a certain lack of literacy.
- 108.
And therefore to the treasury.
- 109.
The last Days of Mankind, a “tragedy in five acts with prologue and epilogue” written from 1915 to 1922 in response to World War I, and consisting of more than 200 loosely connected scenes based on actual events—a catalogue of the inhumanities and absurdities of war.
- 110.
Witold Jan Doroszewski (1899–1976), Polish linguist. Editor of the complete Dictionary of the Polish Language, published over the period 1958–1969.
- 111.
Palmiro Togliatti (1893–1964), Italian politician. Leader of the Italian Communist Party from 1927 until his death. Spent much of the period from 1926 to the end of World War II in the Soviet Union.
- 112.
Franz Lehár (1870–1948), Austro-Hungarian composer, best known for his operettas, especially The Merry Widow. His relations with the Nazi regime during World War II were uneasy.
- 113.
Franz von Suppé (1819–1895), Austrian composer of operettas.
- 114.
There was a military-style band led by one Thaddeus Wroński, which also played in America in the early 20th century.
- 115.
The doctor who was actually in charge of Bierut’s care in Moscow was Professor Mieczysław Fejgin, chief internist of the Infirmary of the Ministry of Health of the Polish People’s Republic. His signature also was on Bierut’s death certificate, as well as those of two Soviet doctors. However, Fejgin, despite his insistence, was not permitted to be present at the post-mortem examination.
- 116.
Teodor Feliks Widy-Wirski (1907–1982), Polish doctor, librarian, and communist politician. Imprisoned on fabricated charges 1952–1954. Deputy Minister of Health and Welfare 1961–1964. Director of the Central Medical Library in Warsaw 1971–1981.
- 117.
A palace in Warsaw built at the end of the 17th century, and bought by General Ludwik Michał Pac in 1825. It is now occupied by the Ministry of Health.
- 118.
“happy he who has possession”
- 119.
The president’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known unofficially as the Warren Commission, was established by President Johnson on November 29, 1963. It concluded that Oswald acted alone in the killing, and that Ruby likewise acted alone in killing Oswald, findings which subsequently proved controversial.
- 120.
First rector of the new university; see earlier. The speech in question was delivered in 1946.
- 121.
Anna Kowalska, Figle pamięci, Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, Warszawa 1963.
- 122.
Address (originally Papal) to the city (originally Rome) and to the world. Here the phrase is being used ironically with reference to Poland.
- 123.
Since the inauguration of the Polish University and Polytechnic in Wrocław, and therefore also Kulczyński’s speech, took place on June 9, 1946, in fact only eighteen years had passed since that event.
- 124.
The names of the victims of the Lwów massacre were later inscribed on plaques attached to the base of the monument. Note added by Roman Duda, editor of the second Polish edition
- 125.
That is, the Soviet leadership.
- 126.
In several academic buildings in Poland there are now plaques listing the names of the thirty-nine murdered professors and family-members. They can be seen, e.g., in the building of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, in the main building of Wrocław University, and in Wrocław Polytechnic. In 2011 a memorial was erected on Wóleckie Hills at the site of the murders.
- 127.
On the Trail of Smętek is a collection of reports written by Wańkowicz during a journey by kayak and car across German East Prussia in 1935. The book shows the life and problems of the Polish minority in Germany, especially the growing conflicts between the Polish and German populations.
- 128.
The three-volume Battle of Monte Cassino is an account of the battle in which Wańkowicz took part as a war correspondent attached to the Polish Second Corps in May 1944. It was translated into English, French and Italian immediately after the war, but in Poland it was published (under the title Monte Cassino) only in 1958, in a censored and abridged version.
- 129.
A former doctoral student of the author’s. See above.
- 130.
Later General Secretary.
- 131.
This was the first multi-manned space flight. The spacecraft was called Voskhod I, launched on October 12, 1964, and returning to earth in Kazakhstan on October 13.
- 132.
This took place at Wrocław University on October 29, 1964.
- 133.
Mstislav Vsevolodovich Keldysh (1911–1978), outstanding Soviet applied mathematician and physicist. One of the key figures behind the Soviet space program. President of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party 1961–1978.
- 134.
He also gave out, I think, that the world’s main new invention is the modern computer, which will radically affect the future of our planet. Steinhaus’s Note
- 135.
Piosenka prawdę ci powie, by Agnieszka Osiecka, directed by J. Wyszomirski, with guest performances by members of the Państwowy Teatr Powszechny w Łodzi (Public State Theater in Łódź) on October 23, 1964.
- 136.
Agnieszka Osiecka (1936–1997), Polish poet, writer, song-writer, and playwright. Considered a Polish cultural icon.
- 137.
A café and cabaret at 8 Moniuszko Street in Warsaw, destroyed in 1944.
- 138.
“She’s drunk a lot today”, popular Polish song from the 1930s.
- 139.
Soviet spy of Polish origin, a sleeper, who worked in the US with her husband Alexander Sokolov (b. 1919) from late 1958 to late 1963. Pretending to remarry—although they had met and married earlier in Germany—they took the aliases Robert and Ann Baltch. Detected as spies by the FBI in May 1964, they were arrested in July, tried and found guilty in September, and swapped for two Americans being held in a Soviet prison.
- 140.
Russian for “tomorrow”.
- 141.
That is, from the comportment of the Soviets in that half of Poland they took over in September 1939.
- 142.
The peasant pseudo-agronomist who flourished under Stalin. See Chapter 4 of Volume 2.
- 143.
Which produced weapons and much else for Hitler.
- 144.
One of the author’s nicknames for Gomułka.
- 145.
Jerzy Battek (1927–1991), Polish mathematician. Director of the Computing Center of the Wrocław Polytechnic.
- 146.
Adam Rybarski (1930–2001), mathematics professor at Wrocław University.
- 147.
Launched on November 28, 1964, Mariner 4 flew by Mars on July 14, 1965, returning the first pictures of the Martian surface.
- 148.
This was Zond 2, launched on November 30, 1964. After a mid-course manoeuver, communication with the spacecraft was lost in May 1965.
- 149.
Mariner 3, launched on November 5, 1964, failed to attain a Mars trajectory.
- 150.
In fact, the GDR had always claimed Berlin in its entirety as the capital of the “reunified” state they had in view for the future and considered its eastern sector as a provisional seat of government. Perhaps it was a report of the move of the GDR government to the Stadthaus in Berlin in 1961 that caught Steinhaus’s attention.
- 151.
Karl Heinrich Lübke (1894–1972), President of the Federal Republic of Germany 1959–1969.
- 152.
Aleksander Lech Godlewski (1905–1975), Polish anthropologist. Famous for his study of the indigenous people of Australia and Oceania. Moved from Warsaw to take up a position at Wrocław University in 1961. Called “Poland’s Margaret Mead”.
- 153.
Later anthropological research has tended to show that life among the Polynesians was as strife-ridden as in any human society. This is one source of the relatively recent disagreement between those sociologists adhering to the “Standard Social Science Model” according to which human beings are born with brains like “blank slates” which are then completely moulded by the culture they are raised in, and cognitive scientists, whose research has shown that on the contrary human brains are thoroughly pre-programmed from birth to respond to appropriate stimuli, so that different human cultures cannot differ in really fundamental ways.
- 154.
A restaurant, perhaps.
- 155.
In fact there were significant parts of the political spectrum in West Germany—led by the Vertriebenenverbände (“Associations of Displaced Persons”)—who refused to recognize the (then and now) effective borders of Poland, Czechoslovakia and the USSR, insisting on territorial rights of “Germany” as defined by the borders of, e.g., 1937. FRG parliaments therefore avoided accepting the borders agreed to by the four victorious powers at Potsdam in 1945 as lawful and definitive—even after the Warsaw Treaty signed in 1970 by Willy Brandt. In fact the Oder-Neisse border was officially recognized by Germany only in 1990. However, Steinhaus’s scepticism was founded on what most people in Poland were convinced of in 1965, namely that the propaganda press (which was their only source of information apart from Radio Free Europe) was not to be believed.
- 156.
“if I may be forgiven for speaking out”
- 157.
That is, the cover-up of the truth of the Katyń massacre.
- 158.
Another nickname for Gomułka.
- 159.
“before the world”
- 160.
The air attack on North Vietnam lasted from March 2, 1965 till November 1, 1968. Called “Operation Rolling Thunder”, it involved the 7th US Air Force, the Air Force of the Republic of Vietnam, the US Navy, and the CIA’s Air America.
- 161.
Nikolaĭ Ivanovich Bukharin (1888–1938), Russian Marxist, Bolshevik revolutionary, and Soviet politician. Member of the Politburo (1924–1929) and the Central Committee (1917–1937), editor-in-chief of Pravda (1918–1929), Izvestiya (1934–1936), and author of several notable works on communism. By the late 1930s he had come to oppose many of Stalin’s policies, becoming in consequence a prominent victim of the latter’s “Moscow Trials” in which several Old Bolsheviks were purged.
- 162.
So some of Bukharin’s contribution must have been posthumous—through his written works, presumably.
- 163.
Piotr Jaroszewicz (1909–1992), Polish communist. Deputy Minister of Defense 1945–1950, Deputy Prime Minister of the People’s Republic of Poland 1952–1970, and Premier 1970–1980.
- 164.
Léon Motchane (1900–1990), French mathematician of Russian origin. Left Russia in 1918. Founded the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques at Bures-sur-Yvette in 1958.
- 165.
In Moscow at that time it was common knowledge that one should have cash on hand to pay off a policeman should one be stopped.
- 166.
Note that the word “socialism” tends to have a less extreme meaning in the West.
- 167.
Similar elections were held regularly in the USSR—not free elections as the western democracies understand them but votes of approval for those in office. The results, as published in Pravda, invariably gave 99.9 % approval ratings to those favored by the ruling clique and the Party.
- 168.
Perhaps because Piasecki had been a prominent nationalist between the wars. See Chapter 4 of Volume 2.
- 169.
Poland’s flag is half white and half red.
- 170.
Now the Kuyavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship.
- 171.
Famous American physicist. Best known for the Michelson–Morley experiment showing the non-existence of the luminiferous ether. The author met him when a Ph.D. student in Göttingen. See Chapter 4 of Volume 1.
- 172.
In 1907.
- 173.
At that time Strzelno and Toruń, towns in northern Poland, would have been under Prussian rule.
- 174.
Possibly Philipp von Bismarck (1913–2007), one of the first conservative German politicians to advocate an accommodation with Poland and recognition of its present-day borders.
- 175.
The West German chancellor at the time, Ludwig Erhard, was pursuing the possibility of reunifying Germany. Perhaps von Bismarck was an emissary sent to explore Polish attitudes to reunification, using West German recognition of the Oder-Neisse Line as a sop.
- 176.
Meaning that it is extraordinary.
- 177.
Walter Gentz was governor (Kreishauptmann) of the Jasło district from 1940 till near the end of the war. On September 13, 1944 he ordered the evacuation of all citizens from Jasło, allowing each a single suitcase of belongings to take with them. A special unit of soldiers then methodically looted the town, sending all valuables to Germany. They then destroyed and burnt almost all buildings in the town. This action ended on December 15, 1944, a month before the arrival of the Red Army.
- 178.
Since the Germans had razed the town.
- 179.
Now an industrial plant producing building materials, especially plastics.
- 180.
When on the verge of sleep some people experience strange and very vivid sensations known as “hypnagogic hallucinations”.
- 181.
In Search of Lost Time, the title of Proust’s great novel.
- 182.
Academic high school.
- 183.
The Indo-Pakistan War of 1965 was the culmination of skirmishes taking place between April and September of 1965. This became known as the Second Kashmir War, fought over the disputed region of Kashmir, the first having been fought in 1947, immediately after partition.
- 184.
Essentially since the end of World War II, first against the French, and then the Americans.
- 185.
A dig at the Polish Union of Youth (ZMP). The acronym might also have stood for Związek Młodzieży Postępowej (Union of “Progressive” Youth), but did not: no such association existed.
- 186.
Wife of Karl-Otto Koch, commandant of the Nazi concentration camps Buchenwald (1937–1941) and Majdanek (1941–1943). Arraigned before an American military court at Dachau in 1947, she was sentenced to prison for participating in murders at Buchenwald. Former inmates subsequently accused her of aberrations such as collecting samples of tattooed skin from executed prisoners, but these have never been incontrovertibly substantiated.
- 187.
Added September 30, 1965: Today’s Słowo Polskie states that Ilse Koch was sentenced to death in Nuremberg, but that the military governor of the American Zone in Germany reduced her sentence. It seems that she is now living in Philadelphia. Steinhaus’s Note (In fact Ilse Koch was re-tried by a German court and, in 1951, sentenced to life imprisonment. She committed suicide by hanging at Aichbach women’s prison in September 1967.)
- 188.
Many escaped to Lwów from the German area of occupation by this route. Steinhaus’s Note (Małkinia Górna is a town in the Masovian Voivodeship, east-central Poland.)
- 189.
The place near Stróże where the author and his wife Stefa hid for most of World War II. The people whose names he mentions helped them at that time.
- 190.
The author and his wife lived in a hut on the Cieluchs’ farm during the war.
- 191.
Colleague at Wrocław University. See also above and Chapter 4 of Volume 2.
- 192.
That is, an academic gown.
- 193.
Patron saint of Linz, Austria, interceding for chimney sweeps, soapmakers, and fire-fighters. Died ca. 304.
- 194.
In 1965–1966 there was an anti-communist purge in Indonesia resulting in a half million deaths and the elimination of the Indonesian Communist Party. The upheavals led to the downfall of President Sukarno and the beginning of Suharto’s thirty-year presidency.
- 195.
On November 25, 1965, President Joseph Kasavubu of the Republic of Congo was deposed in a bloodless coup by Major-General Joseph Mobutu.
- 196.
Adam Rapacki, Polish socialist politician and diplomat. See also e.g. Chapter 4 of Volume 2.
- 197.
Both Roman Catholic and Protestant in East and West Germany.
- 198.
“assent”
- 199.
Beyond Good and Evil, title of a work by Friedrich Nietzsche.
- 200.
Wielka encyklopedia powszechna PWN. Published by the State Scientific Publishers (PWN) between 1962 and 1970. Until 2005 the largest Polish encyclopedia ever compiled.
- 201.
Polish economist and mathematician. See also Chapter 5 of Volume 1.
- 202.
Jean-Gaston Darboux (1842–1917), French mathematician. Made important contributions to differential geometry and mathematical analysis. Wrote a biography of Henri Poincaré.
- 203.
I shared a bench with Jan Węgrzyński for eight years at the Jasło Gymnasium. Steinhaus’s Note (See Chapter 2 of Volume 1.)
- 204.
Now Mykulychyn, in Ukraine, a village in the Hutsul borderlands.
- 205.
Of office, perhaps, or is Steinhaus referring to prison as the participants’ ultimate destination?
- 206.
That is, in Gaius Julius Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico…. See corresponding footnote in Chapter 4 of Volume 2.
- 207.
This is a reference to Dickens’ novel Bleak House, whose central theme is a long-running litigation in England’s Court of Chancery.
- 208.
A patent issued by a head of state to a foreign consul guaranteeing that consul’s rights and privileges of office and ensuring his recognition in that state.
- 209.
Kazimierz Mijal (1910–2010), Polish politician and dissident. At one time Minister of Communal Economy and Director of the Investment Bank. Overestimating the liberalism of the political changes of 1956, he began disseminating his views in Poland, thereby compromising himself with the powers-that-be. Fled to Albania where he founded an alternative “Communist Party of Poland” and took charge of anti-Gomułka propaganda.
- 210.
Wiktor Bross (1903–1994), Polish surgeon originally from Lwów, founder of the Wrocław school of surgery. He was the first in Poland to perform open heart surgery (1958) and a kidney transplant from a live donor (1966).
- 211.
“whether I like it or not”
- 212.
Otherwise known as “pools”.
- 213.
A lottery in which each player chooses five numbers between 1 and 90. See Chapter 4 of Volume 2.
- 214.
“You, happy Poland, command!” From the late Middle Ages the motto of the Austrian Habsburgs was Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria, nube! meaning “Let others wage war, you, happy Austria, marry.” The motto is attributed to Matthias Corvinus (1443–1490), King of Hungary and Croatia from 1458 till his death, and under whose patronage Hungary became the first European country to adopt the Renaissance from Italy.
- 215.
At this time the so-called “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” was beginning in China. Its goal was to enforce socialism by removing all vestiges of capitalist, traditional, and cultural elements from Chinese society, and to impose Marxian orthodoxy within the Party. The revolution marked Mao’s return to absolute power after the failed “Great Leap Forward” (1958–1961). The Cultural Revolution continued till 1971, resulting in a million or more deaths.
- 216.
A meeting between Tito and Ceauşescu on December 3, 1966.
- 217.
There does not appear to have been such a meeting in Budapest in 1966. However, there was a meeting of Party leaders in Moscow from October 17 to October 22, 1966.
- 218.
This was the first coalition government of the FRG, with Kiesinger (CDU) as chancellor and Willy Brandt (SPD) as vice-chancellor and minister of foreign affairs.
- 219.
Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. See above.
- 220.
Close government associate of Gomułka. See above.
- 221.
In addition to Kosygin and Brezhnev, perhaps Foreign Minister Andreĭ Gromyko and President of the Supreme Soviet Nikolaĭ Podgornyĭ.
- 222.
Nikolaĭ Podgornyĭ did indeed pay a visit to Pope Paul VI in 1967.
- 223.
Premier of the People’s Republic of China (under Mao as president) 1949–1976. Attempted to mitigate the damage done by the Red Guards and protect others from their wrath during the later stages of the Cultural Revolution.
- 224.
According to the legend of Phrygian Gordium, Alexander the Great solved the problem of untying a certain intractable knot by cutting it with his sword. The legend has become a metaphor for solving a problem by cheating or “thinking outside the box”.
- 225.
The “Six Day War”, fought from June 5 to June 10, was essentially a pre-emptive strike by Israel to counter an impending attack by the Arab nations surrounding Israel. The air forces of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq were all but destroyed on June 5, and by June 7 many Egyptian tanks had been destroyed and Israeli forces had reached the Suez Canal. Meanwhile the whole of the west bank of the Jordan River was cleared of Jordanian forces, and the Golan Heights seized from Syria.
- 226.
Polish anthropologist, comparative linguist, and statistician. See above.
- 227.
“driving force, main aim”
- 228.
General Count Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski (1895–1966), Polish military leader. During World War II helped organize the Polish underground in the region of Kraków. Commander of the Home Army (AK) from July 17, 1943. In mid-1944 the High Command of the AK decided it was time to initiate an uprising in Warsaw in order to pre-empt a Soviet takeover of the city. By agreement with the Polish Government-in-Exile, Komorowski ordered the uprising to begin on August 1. Elements of the Red Army stood only 20 km away but on Stalin’s orders were told to wait till the Germans had put down the uprising—which they did with great ferocity.
- 229.
Związek Bojowników o Wolność i Demokrację (Society of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy), an official state-controlled veterans’ association in the People’s Republic of Poland, formed in 1949. In 1990 it was transformed into the Society of Veterans of the Republic of Poland and Former Political Prisoners.
- 230.
In the People’s Republic of Poland, especially immediately postwar, the Warsaw Uprising was a taboo subject for the Polish media. The very name of the Armia Krajowa (AK) (Home Army) was censored, and most of its soldiers and all of its officers were persecuted by the NKVD and the UB. Later on, Polish propaganda portrayed the soldiers of the Uprising as brave but the officers as treacherous and reactionary. The first veridical publications on the Warsaw Uprising appeared in Poland only in the late 1980s. For this reason the publication of the article in Nowiny Rzeszowskie in 1967 was a signal event in Polish media—perhaps made possible, as Steinhaus suggests, by the overshadowing importance of the Arab-Israeli war for the censors.
- 231.
On October 21, 1967, the Egyptian navy sank the Israeli destroyer INS Eilat, killing forty-seven sailors. However, this was but one of several attritional incidents in the aftermath of the Six-Day War.
- 232.
That is, from China and the USSR.
- 233.
Expression derived from a moral anecdote concerning one Damocles, whose exclamation at the good fortune of the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius II, prompted the latter to offer to change places with him, so that he might taste regal luxury. However, the king arranged for a sword to be suspended above the throne, held only by a horse’s hair, with the eventual result that Damocles begged to be allowed to return to his former status as courtier.
- 234.
In the original Polish there is here a pun on naukowce, meaning “scientists”, as against nauk owce, meaning “sheep of the sciences”.
- 235.
Polish historian at Warsaw University. Murdered by the Gestapo in 1945. See Chapter 12 of Volume 1.
- 236.
British Labor PM Harold Wilson visited Moscow on January 20, 1968, one of three official visits he made while prime minister.
- 237.
In the Brezhnev years there was a story circulating among Muscovites to the effect that once when caught having to take public transport, Brezhnev was at a complete loss as to how one goes about it.
- 238.
Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944), French novelist, essayist, playwright, and diplomat. Among the most important of interwar French dramatists. His dominant theme: the relationship between man and woman—or between man and some unattainable ideal.
- 239.
On January 23, 1968, North Korean forces captured the US technical research vessel USS Pueblo, claiming it had strayed into their territorial waters. The ship remains in North Korea to this day.
- 240.
It emerged much later that North Korea acted alone, and that their actions actually harmed North Korean relations with most of the European communist bloc.
- 241.
This was most probably Simon Wiesenthal (1908–2005), the Austrian holocaust survivor—he spent more than four years of World War II in various German concentration camps—who postwar dedicated himself to gathering information on and tracking down fugitive Nazis in order to bring them to justice for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
- 242.
Kazimierz Rusinek, Polish Minister of Labor and Social Affairs 1947–1952. Later Deputy Minister of Culture.
- 243.
In 1968, in the aftermath of an economic downturn, the Czechoslovak Communist Party was taken over by reformers led by Alexander Dubček, initiating the “Prague Spring”, an attempt to implement “socialism with a human face”.
- 244.
A poetic drama by the supreme Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. Considered one of the great works of European romanticism.
- 245.
Towards the end of January 1968 the communist authorities banned the performance of this play, directed by Kazimierz Dejmek at the National Theater in Warsaw, on the grounds that it contained Russophobic and anti-socialist references. The ban was condemned by Polish writers and actors, and there were student protests, first at Warsaw University and then at other academic institutions.
- 246.
Though there were widespread protests in the US throughout the war.
- 247.
Adam Michnik (b. 1946), Polish historian, essayist, former dissident. In communist Poland, while remaining faithful to the left-wing ethos, he was a relentless opponent of the regime. He was imprisoned following the 1968 “March Events”, and twice more after the imposition of martial law in 1981. He has since “maintained an influential voice through journalism”.
- 248.
Polish art historian. Professor at the Jagiellonian University. See also above.
- 249.
Turski personally expelled thirty-four students, suspended eleven others, and formally prohibited faculty members from participating in the protests.
- 250.
Nevertheless, on August 20, 1968, the Soviet Union led Warsaw Pact troops in an invasion of Czechoslovakia with the aim of aborting reformist trends in Prague’s ruling circles. Dubček was forced from power in April of the following year.
- 251.
A Wrocław publishing house. The original combined publishing house, museum, and library of that name was located in Lwów.
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Steinhaus, H. (2016). Home Again. In: Burns, R., Szymaniec, I., Weron, A. (eds) Mathematician for All Seasons. Vita Mathematica, vol 19. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23102-0_6
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