Abstract
JANUARY 16, 1948. On January 3 I met with Mr. Żarnecki, director of the Central Board of the Electrotechnical Industry, who informed me that he would be arranging for the Świdnica meter-manufacturing plant to produce a model of an electricity meter appropriate to a quadratic price schedule. Yesterday at the Polytechnic I met with the engineer Metol, the present manager of the plant’s laboratory, to discuss the details. I had known him in Lwów but not seen him these past seven years.
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Notes
- 1.
A town in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship.
- 2.
Henryk Greniewski (1903–1972), Polish mathematician, logician, and cyberneticist. Professor and head of the Department of Econometrics at Warsaw University 1958–1968. Popularizer of cybernetics.
- 3.
A village in the Łódź Voivodeship, in central Poland.
- 4.
Minister of Industry.
- 5.
By 1914 Italy had annexed Eritrea and Somalia, and wrested control of Libya from the Ottoman Empire. Mussolini attacked Ethiopia and by 1936 had subdued that country, over protests from some western nations. However, by 1943 all of Italy’s African colonies had been taken over by the Allies.
- 6.
Zygmunt Modzelewski (1900–1954), Polish communist politician.
- 7.
Of April 18, 1948, the second democratic elections in Italy (after those of 1946) with universal suffrage. The Christian Democratic Party won by a comfortable margin over the communist Popular Democratic Front and the Italian Socialist Party.
- 8.
The Free Territory of Trieste was established in September 1947 at the Paris Peace Conference. In 1954 the city of Trieste itself and most of the surrounding territory was ceded to Italy, the remainder going to Yugoslavia.
- 9.
The 1946 general elections held in the newly re-established Czechoslovakia resulted in the Communist Party coming to power, although they polled a minority in Slovakia. Edvard Beneš continued as president of the republic, with Jan Masaryk as foreign minister. A coup d’état, engineered by the communists, and involving purges and assassinations, took place in February 1948, communist rule was confirmed in the elections of May 1948, and in June Beneš resigned.
- 10.
Stalin.
- 11.
Czech diplomat and politician. Foreign minister of Czechoslovakia 1940–1948 (from 1940 to 1945 in the Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile in Britain). His father, Tomáš Masaryk, had become the first president of Czechoslovakia in 1918. On March 10, 1948 Masaryk fils was found dead below his bedroom window in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry.
- 12.
Postwar Finland managed to maintain a democratic constitution and free economy. However treaties signed in 1947 and 1948 with the USSR imposed obligations and restraints on that country, as well as territorial concessions.
- 13.
James Vincent Forrestal (1892–1949), US Secretary of Defense 1947–1949. Advocated complete racial integration of the US armed services. Eisenhower said of him that “he always counselled caution and alertness in dealing with the Soviets.”
- 14.
The military governing body of the Allied Occupation Zones of Germany after World War II. Postwar relations between the USSR and the Western Allies quickly deteriorated. On March 20, 1948, Marshal Vasiliĭ Sokolovskiĭ, the Soviet representative, walked out of a meeting of the Council, effectively ending cooperation in administering occupied Germany.
- 15.
Henry A. Wallace (1888–1965), 33rd Vice President of the US (1941–1945). Championed a softer approach to the USSR and less exploitation in commercial relations with Latin America. Replaced by Truman as Roosevelt’s running mate at the 1944 Democratic convention. Following a period as Secretary of Commerce, he became editor of The New Republic. He took advantage of this position to vociferously criticize Truman’s foreign policy, predicting that it would mark the beginning of “a century of fear.”
- 16.
Cousins of the author.
- 17.
Andrzej Zięba (1929–1986), later docent at Wrocław University. Worked at the Pedagogical Institute in Opole. In 1955 went to the Jagiellonian University in Kraków to work in the Kraków Astronomical Observatory. Went to Austria in 1978. Tadeusz Huskowski (1924–1984), adjunct, and later director of the Computing Center of the Wrocław Polytechnic. Henryk Fast obtained his Ph.D. under Steinhaus in 1958. Eventually, he became a professor in the US. Abraham Goetz also emigrated to the US, obtaining a position at Notre Dame University.
- 18.
The “Berlin Blockade” lasted from June 24, 1948 to May 12, 1949, during which time the USSR blocked road and railway access to the sectors of Berlin controlled by the Western powers. In response the British and Americans organized the “Berlin airlift”, ferrying supplies to West Berlin by air. Along with the Royal Air Force and the US Air Force, the air forces of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa took part.
- 19.
Civil war raged in Greece from 1946 to 1949 between government and communist forces.
- 20.
Nikola Dimitrov Petkov (1893–1947), Bulgarian politician, one of the leaders of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union. Like several other eastern-European leaders of peasant-based parties, he was tried and executed soon after control of Bulgaria passed into Soviet hands postwar.
- 21.
In 1946 it became evident that the communists regarded the Provisional Government of National Unity as merely a temporary expedient, and although Mikołajczyk’s Polish People’s Party was the most popular party, the communists rigged the vote at the general elections of January 1947. Facing arrest, Mikołajczyk fled the country in April of that year. On seeing him in London, Churchill is said to have remarked: “I’m surprised you made it out alive.”
- 22.
In Czech, Univerzita Karlova v Praze, founded in 1348. The first university of Central Europe, and one of Europe’s oldest universities continuously operating since being founded.
- 23.
“legitimate substitute”
- 24.
Edward Szczeklik (1898–1985), Polish specialist in internal medicine. Studied in the Medical Faculty of the Jagiellonian University, and then in Paris and Vienna. In 1946 headed the Clinic of Internal Medicine opened at the new University of Wrocław, subsequently becoming Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine there.
- 25.
Granulocytes are a kind of white blood cells. Granulocytosis is a disease characterized by the presence in peripheral blood of an excessive number of granulocytes.
- 26.
Julian Perkal (1913–1965) was later to become a mathematics professor at Wrocław University.
- 27.
American harmonic analyst. Lived from 1927 to 2010. In his article “Mathematics in Poland after the war” (Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 44 (1997), pp. 209–212), he writes:
…[I] was crazy to see the destruction caused by the war in Europe…. The most desperate place in Europe seemed to be Poland, and there were mathematicians in Poland.
- 28.
Mathematics journal founded in 1946–1947 by Knaster, Marczewski, Ślebodziński, and the author.
- 29.
After a purge of their leadership, the Polish Socialist Party and the Polish Workers’ Party were merged in the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) (the Communist Party) in December 1948.
- 30.
Polanica-Zdrój, a town in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship, 89 km south-west of Wrocław.
- 31.
In 1946, the Polish poet and prose writer Elżbieta Szemplińska defected to the West while working as a member of the Polish legation in Luxembourg. She returned to Warsaw in 1962.
- 32.
This may be any of various princes of the Piast dynasty, for which “Bolko” seems to have been a popular name. The street in question may, for instance, have been named after Bolko I Surowy (1278–1301) or Bolko II Mały (1326–1368).
- 33.
The town of Pszczyna in southern Poland is thought by some to have been named after one Pleszko, the German equivalent of which is “Pless”.
- 34.
A Polish popular science magazine founded in 1882, now issued monthly.
- 35.
Used pejoratively, presumably.
- 36.
Anna Kowalska (née Chrzanowska) (1903–1969), Polish novelist and diarist.
- 37.
Alfred Borowicz, a cousin of the author’s wife.
- 38.
Wiktor Bross (1903–1994), Polish surgeon and professor of medicine. After World War II founded the Wrocław School of Surgery. First in Poland to perform open-heart surgery.
- 39.
Seweryn Wysłouch (1900–1968), Polish historian of government and law, and academic lawyer. Head of the Law Faculty at the University of Wrocław 1956–1958.
- 40.
Polish-Ukrainian writer, freemason, and politician. See also Chapter 7 of Volume 1.
- 41.
Since Yugoslavia had largely defeated the Axis occupying forces without direct support from the Allies, Josip Broz Tito felt he could pursue Yugoslavia’s local interests independently of the USSR. Yugoslavia was expelled from the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) in 1948. Relations with the USSR continued poor till 1955.
- 42.
Polish mathematician at Wrocław University.
- 43.
The quotation marks here signal that the magazine used incorrect Polish grammar in connection with Steinhaus’s first name.
- 44.
A city near the White Sea coast of northern Russia. There were several prison camps in the region, most notably the former monastery on the Solovetskie Islands, known briefly as “Solovki”, which served as prison during both the tsarist and Soviet eras.
- 45.
An elaborate exhibition held at the Wrocław Exhibition Grounds, in the eastern part of the city, close to the Zoological Gardens. Of the buildings on the grounds, Centennial Hall is one of Wrocław’s main tourist attractions. In the People’s Republic of Poland the term “Recovered Territories” was used for those parts of pre-war Germany that became part of Poland after World War II together with the former Free City of Gdańsk (Danzig). These territories were called “recovered” because they had been part of the Polish state at various times in history, mostly during the rule of the medieval Piast dynasty. Under the terms agreed to at the Yalta Conference (1945), Poland was granted these lands in compensation for the loss of the eastern territories annexed by the Soviet Union.
- 46.
Gomułka was ruthless in engineering the merger, on communist terms, of the PPS and PPR in 1948, but at the same time opposed forced collectivization of agriculture and favored a more traditional form of socialism, opposing the formation of the Cominform in 1947. By January 1949 he had, ultimately on Stalin’s orders, been relieved of his government posts, and in July 1951 was arrested. In 1954, after Stalin’s death, he was released, and in 1956 rehabilitated politically.
- 47.
Georgi Dimitrov Mikhaylov (1882–1949), Bulgarian communist politician. In 1923 he led a revolutionary movement against the rule of Aleksander Tsankov, imposed on Bulgaria via a coup d’état, but was forced to flee to Yugoslavia. In 1929 he relocated from the USSR to Germany, where he was put in charge of the Central European Branch of the Comintern. Arrested in 1933 in connection with the burning of the Reichstag, he won renown for the calm manner in which he conducted his defense. Released in a deal with the USSR, he became a Soviet citizen and General Secretary of the Comintern. He returned to Bulgaria in 1944, succeeding to the premiership in 1946. A planned Balkan federation with Tito’s Yugoslavia led to a falling out with Tito, and the rupture between Tito and Stalin in 1948 then worked to Dimitrov’s advantage in his relations with the USSR. The circumstances of his death in a sanitorium near Moscow in 1949 prompted suspicions that he had been poisoned.
- 48.
Vafiadis Markos (1906–1992), commanding general of the Democratic Army of Greece, the military wing of the Greek Communist Party, during the Greek civil war 1946–1949.
- 49.
Tadeusz Malewski (1891–1959), Polish physician who founded a sanatorium in Rabka in 1935.
- 50.
An isohypse or isoheight is a curve of constant elevation on a map of terrain, that is, a contour.
- 51.
Andrzej Kmicic, a character in Sienkiewicz’ novel Potop (The Deluge), an unruly yet patriotic Polish-Lithuanian noble.
- 52.
Jan Skrzetuski, a character in Sienkiewicz’ novel Ogniem i mieczem (With Fire and Sword), a man of honor, always faithful to his master.
- 53.
The World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace was held in Wrocław August 25–28, 1948. Marked by an anti-American and pro-communist tone, it was attended by Picasso, Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie, Brecht, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Ilya Ehrenburg, Olaf Stapledon, and Mikhail Sholokhov, among other famous people. Julian Huxley later commented that for a congress nominally devoted to peace, they had spent a great deal of time discussing war.
- 54.
This may be Paul Robeson (1898–1976), black American concert singer, actor, athlete, and scholar. Outspoken advocate of the Civil Rights Movement in the first half of the 20th century. Criticism during the 1950s by Senator McCarthy and his supporters for his friendly attitude towards the Soviet Union tended to impair his reputation.
- 55.
Aimé Fernand David Césaire (1913–2008), French poet, writer, and politician from Martinique. Considered one of the founders of the négritude movement in Francophone literature.
- 56.
Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Fadeyev (1901–1956), Soviet writer. A co-founder of the Union of Soviet Writers, and its chairman 1946–1954. Called Stalin “the greatest humanist the world has known”. In the 1940s supported Zhdanov’s repression of the best of Soviet writers and composers. At the onset of the Khrushchov thaw in the mid-1950s became an alcoholic.
- 57.
He called Sartre a “jackal with a pen”, to the disgust of members of the French delegation.
- 58.
Former name for a region of present-day Vietnam.
- 59.
After over a century of British colonial rule, Ceylon—now Sri Lanka—was granted independence, as a Dominion of the British Commonwealth, in February 1948. However, the British Royal Navy maintained a significant presence at Trincomalee till 1956.
- 60.
Bolesław Drobner (1883–1968), Polish politician. Gave his support to cooperation with the communists. First Polish mayor of Wrocław in 1945.
- 61.
This was the VIth Meeting of the Polish Mathematical Society, marking the forty years of Sierpiński’s scientific activity.
- 62.
Eduard Čech (1893–1960), Czech mathematician. Worked in projective differential geometry and topology.
- 63.
Vladimír Kořínek (1899–1981), Czech mathematician.
- 64.
Győrgy Alexits (1899–1978), Hungarian mathematician. President of the János Bolyai Mathematical Society from 1949 to 1963.
- 65.
John Henry Constantine Whitehead (1904–1960), British topologist. One of the founders of homotopy theory.
- 66.
Possibly George Lomadze (b. 1912). Worked mainly on quadratic forms.
- 67.
Jan Oderfeld (1908–2010), Polish mathematician and aircraft engineer. Did his doctorate under Steinhaus on statistical sampling for quality control. Helped establish the Polish system of industrial norms. Professor at the Warsaw Polytechnic 1949–1978.
- 68.
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898–1976), Soviet agronomist. Director of Soviet biology under Stalin. Rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of the hybridization theories of the Russian horticulturist Michurin. Much of Lysenko’s agricultural experimentation and research is today considered to have been fraudulent.
- 69.
Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin (1855–1935), Russian and Soviet botanist and horticulturist. Worked mainly on improving varieties of stone fruits through selective breeding. His theory of the influence of the environment on heredity smacked of lamarckism.
- 70.
“in the long run”
- 71.
Philipp Eduard Anton von Lenard (1862–1947), Hungarian-German physicist. Nobel laureate in 1905 for research on cathode rays. An active proponent of Nazi ideology. Expressed contempt for English physics, asserting that it was derivative of the German variety, and, while the Nazi regime was in power in Germany, for “Jewish physics” as opposed to the true deutsche Physik.
- 72.
In this situation an embryo may be formed which is Rh positive, and the mother’s immune system may then produce antibodies against the “intruder”, with negative effects on the embryo.
- 73.
The Chinese communists under Mao took Beijing late in 1948 in the civil war with the nationalist Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek.
- 74.
This would seem to have been a false rumor.
- 75.
Presumably people attempting to leave Poland.
- 76.
Warsaw is on the Vistula.
- 77.
Jean Frédéric Joliot-Curie (1900–1958), French physicist. While assistant to Marie Curie at the Radium Institute, he married her daughter Irène Curie. Active in the French resistance during World War II. In 1945 appointed France’s first High Commissioner for Atomic Energy, and in 1948 oversaw the construction of the first French atomic reactor. Nobel laureate for chemistry in 1935. Communist sympathizer.
- 78.
The Kellogg-Briand Pact or World Peace Act was signed on August 27, 1928 by the US, France, Britain, Italy, Japan, Weimar Germany, and a number of other countries. It prohibited the use of war as “an instrument of national policy” except in self-defense. Its authors were the US Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg and the French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand.
- 79.
Signed in 1932 by representatives of Poland and the USSR, and unilaterally broken by the USSR on September 17, 1939, when Soviet forces invaded eastern Poland.
- 80.
Latin for “a closed number”, that is, a maximum number.
- 81.
The Bereza Kartuska detention camp was a Polish prison principally for political opponents of the Sanacja regime. It operated from 1934 to 1939.
- 82.
That is, in Germany long ago.
- 83.
The interview took place on January 27, 1949, with the journalist Kingsbury Smith.
- 84.
“one-on-one”
- 85.
The alliance known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was ratified on April 4, 1949.
- 86.
Lasting from May 14, 1948, when the British Mandate for Palestine ended, and an independent Israel was declared, till the 1949 Armistice Agreements.
- 87.
August Hlond, Polish cardinal. For a time primate of Poland. See also Chapter 13 of Volume 1.
- 88.
That is, volume.
- 89.
A scientific journal published by the Polish Society of Forestry, founded in Warsaw in 1820.
- 90.
Where d is a suitable (average, perhaps?) diameter and ℓ the length of the log.
- 91.
Over the period 1946–1989 the only house of the Polish parliament, now its lower house.
- 92.
Jean-Paul Marat (1743–1793), born near Neuchâtel, physician and political theorist, best known for his career in France as a radical journalist and politician during the French Revolution. His journalism was noted for the uncompromising enmity it expressed towards “enemies of the revolution”. He was murdered in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday.
- 93.
That this was the reason for the withdrawal was an oft-repeated but false rumor. Note added by Aleksandra Zgorzelska, editor of the first Polish edition
- 94.
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevskiĭ (1821–1881), Russian writer of novels and short stories, exploring human psychology in the troubled political, social, and spiritual context of 19th-century Russia. Considered a precursor of 20th century existentialism. Politically ultra-conservative.
- 95.
Kornel Ujejski (1823–1897), Polish poet, and patriotic writer. He wrote, in particular, to bolster the Polish people in their struggle for independence during the contemporary partition of Poland.
- 96.
Juliusz Kleiner spent the Nazi occupation in hiding. In 1947 he took up a position at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
- 97.
Via thesis–antithesis–synthesis.
- 98.
St. Thomas’ Abbey, dating from 1653. The Augustinians first arrived in Brno in 1346, and began construction of their first monastery in 1352.
- 99.
Friar Gregor Johann Mendel (1822–1884), Austrian scientist. Founder of the science of genetics. Conducted his experiments on pea plants in the gardens of the Augustinian monastery in Brno between 1856 and 1863.
- 100.
As part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, much of the present-day Czech Republic formed what was called the Kingdom of Bohemia, with Prague as its capital.
- 101.
Now Taiwan.
- 102.
According to the NKVD’s archives Parnas died of a heart attack the day after his arrest on January 28, 1949, during interrogation in the Lubyanka.
- 103.
Władysław Matwin (1916–2012), Polish communist politician. Served in the Red Army during World War II. Chief editor of the communist newspaper Trybuna Ludu (The People’s Tribune) 1953–1957.
- 104.
Związek Młodzieży Polskiej (Union of Polish Youth), a Polish communist youth association existing from 1948 to 1956. It was subordinated to the Polish United Workers’ Party, and used as a means of political indoctrination of the young.
- 105.
On October 16, 1949.
- 106.
László Rajk (1909–1949), Hungarian communist politician. From 1946, as Minister of the Interior, he organized and directed the Hungarian communist secret police, suppressing various opposing associations and initiating the first show trials. On May 30, 1949 General Secretary Rákosi had him arrested, charging him with being a “Titoist spy”. At the show trial in September 1949, he confessed and was sentenced to death. He is considered as having served as an early example in connection with Stalin’s anti-Titoist purges. Popular demonstrations led to Rajk’s rehabilitation in 1956, a precursor of the Hungarian revolution of that year.
- 107.
At 7 am on August 29, 1949 at the Semipalatinsk Test Site, Kazakhstan.
- 108.
That is, timber to be used for making wood pulp for paper production.
- 109.
Czesław Ryll-Nardzewski (1926–2015), Polish mathematician working mainly in measure theory, probability theory, functional analysis, and foundations of mathematics. He was a student of Steinhaus and later professor at Warsaw University 1952–1959 and from 1959 at the Wrocław University of Technology.
- 110.
Possibly Parnas Jr., still unaware that his father was dead. His mother may have been arrested.
- 111.
A mountain range in Central Asia where Russia, China, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia meet, and where the Siberian rivers Ob′ and Irtysh have their sources.
- 112.
Such plans were announced by Andreĭ Vyshinskiĭ, Soviet representative to the UN, on September 23, 1949.
- 113.
Konstanty Ksawerowicz Rokossowski (1896–1968), Soviet career officer of Polish origin. Imprisoned from 1937 to 1940 in Stalin’s purge of Red Army officers. Served with great distinction as a commanding general on the eastern front in World War II. In October 1949 Stalin ordered that he be made Polish Minister of National Defense in Bolesław Bierut’s communist government, and designated Marshal of Poland. Almost all Polish military units were placed under the command of Soviet officers, including Rokossowski, or Soviet advisors.
- 114.
A reference to the Holodomor (Killing through hunger) of 1932–1933, when millions of Ukrainians died of starvation during a famine attributable at least in part to forced collectivization of Ukrainian peasant holdings, and also to requisitioning of grain by brigades of party officials and security police.
- 115.
Polish lawyer specializing in international criminal law. Practised in Lwów from 1936 to 1941. From 1944 to 1946 he was prosecutor in the Supreme Court of the National Commission for Prosecution of War Criminals in Poland. In 1946 he undertook the investigation of the massacre of Polish officers and others at Katyń, believing the Germans to be the perpetrators. Also participated in the Nuremberg Trials. Lived from 1910 to 1967.
- 116.
Roman Andreevich Rudenko (1907–1981), Soviet lawyer. Soviet chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, and chief prosecutor at the Trial of the Sixteen, where leaders of the wartime Polish Underground Government were purged. Also presided over the trial of Lavrentiĭ Beria in 1953, at which the latter was sentenced to death.
- 117.
In Katyń Forest, in the Smolensk Region of Russia.
- 118.
Dean Gooderham Acheson (1893–1971), American statesman and lawyer. As US Secretary of State in Truman’s administration from 1949 to 1953, he played a central role in defining US foreign policy during the Cold War, in particular in the founding of NATO. Helped design the Marshall Plan. He came to the defense of employees of the State Department, in particular suspected spy Alger Hiss, during the Red Scare investigations of Senator Joseph McCarthy and others.
- 119.
American lawyer and government official. In August 1948 Whittaker Chambers, a former member of the Communist Party, testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities that Hiss had secretly been a communist while in federal service, contravening an oath he had sworn to the contrary. Ultimately Hiss was convicted only of perjury. The case remains controversial to this day.
- 120.
December 1949–February 1950.
- 121.
A Polish passenger liner completed in 1938 for Polish Ocean Lines to replace the aging SS Kościuszko and SS Pułaski. Named in honor of the Polish King Jan III Sobieski. In 1950 it was sold to the USSR and renamed Gruziya.
- 122.
Oskar Ryszard Lange (1904–1965), Polish economist and diplomat. Known for providing the earliest model of market socialism. Professor at the University of Chicago from 1938 to 1945, when he renounced his US citizenship and returned to Poland. While in the US, met with Mikołajczyk, then Prime Minister of the Polish Government-in-Exile, whom he tried to convince of “ Stalin’s reasonableness”. Also requested the US State Department to put pressure on exiled Poles to return to Poland. In that same year 1945 he went back to the US as the Polish communist regime’s first ambassador to that country.
- 123.
Czesław Bobrowski (1904–1966), Polish economist. Director of the Central Planning Office in Poland 1945–1948, in which capacity he conceived the Three-Year Plan. When his leadership came under question in 1948, he took advantage of a posting to the Polish embassy in Sweden to defect, but returned to Poland in 1957.
- 124.
Jenő Egerváry (1891–1958), Hungarian mathematician. Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Research Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 1950. Suicided in 1958, apparently over difficulties with the communist bureaucracy in Hungary.
- 125.
The First Congress of Polish Science took place in Warsaw between June 29 and July 2, 1951. The Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) was founded at the congress.
- 126.
In the Soviet system of university education, five years of study to the “diplom” was followed, for the few, by three years of graduate work to the degree of “kandidat”. The “doctorate” was earned by demonstrating appropriate research activity beyond the “kandidat”.
- 127.
Aleksandr Vasilievich Suvorov (1729–1800), fourth and last generalissimo of the Russian Empire. Never lost a battle—in particular, in putting down the Kościuszko Uprising in Poland in 1794, which aimed to end the second partition of Poland of 1793 between Prussia and Russia.
- 128.
Władysław Wolski (1901–1976), Polish politician. Vice-Minister in charge of repatriation in 1947. Minister of Public Administration in 1950, when he collaborated in drawing up an agreement between the Government of the People’s Republic of Poland and the Episcopate of Poland.
- 129.
The radioactive isotope of hydrogen with nucleus containing two neutrons in addition to the usual single proton.
- 130.
Banach had received an award from the Polish Academy of Learning in 1939.
- 131.
Steinhaus understands this to mean “basic research”.
- 132.
At that time the official name of the highest part of the town of Karpacz, in the district of Jelenia Góra, Lower Silesia, named for Bolesław Bierut, President of the postwar People’s Republic of Poland 1947–1952. Since renamed Karpacz Górny.
- 133.
Bolesław Napierała (1909–1976), Polish cycling champion, twice winner of the Tour de Pologne.
- 134.
The Korean War (June 25, 1950–July 27, 1953) was fought between South Korea, supported by the UN, and North Korea, supported by the People’s Republic of China, with military material aid from the USSR. Korea had been ruled by Japan from 1910 to the end of World War II in the Pacific theater. At the end of the war the Allies agreed to partition Korea along the 38th Parallel, with US troops occupying the southern part and Soviet troops the northern part. Cross-border skirmishes and raids escalated into open warfare when North Korean forces invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950. In 1953 an armistice was signed establishing a 4 km wide demilitarized zone along the 38th parallel. (It is probably no coincidence that agreement on an armistice was reached not long after Stalin’s death, since he was the chief instigator of the conflict.)
- 135.
Obsolete term for the Evenks, a people indigenous to northern China, Mongolia, and north-eastern Siberia.
- 136.
That is, to lower the temperature.
- 137.
At the end of the war Zhukov was indeed put in charge of the Odessa Military District, ostensibly to put down banditry in Odessa and environs. It is believed that Stalin’s jealousy of the war hero Zhukov had not a little to do with the posting.
- 138.
Possibly Julian Czyżewski. See below.
- 139.
“Marxism and Problems of Linguistics” appeared in the issues of Pravda of June 20, July 4, and August 2, 1950. In it Stalin denies that language depends on class, or needs to be radically changed when the social base is changed.
- 140.
A term for people behaving in an uncouth, barbaric manner, derived from the Portuguese “botocudo” for a tribe of Brazilian natives.
- 141.
Eugenia Krassowska, “O podniesienie poziomu pracy dydaktycznej w wyższych uczelniach” (On Raising the Level of Educational Work in Institutions of Higher Learning), Życie Nauki, 1950, Nos. 3, 4.
- 142.
Count Władysław Michałowski was the starosta of Jasło in the author’s youth.
- 143.
Or Sudeten, as the Germans used to call it.
- 144.
That is, indigenous.
- 145.
Sněžka in Czech, Schneekoppe in German. A mountain on the border between the present-day Czech Republic and Poland. Its summit is the highest point in the Czech Republic.
- 146.
Christian Bernhard, Freiherr von Tauchnitz (1816–1895), founded the firm Bernhard Tauchnitz in 1837, an offshoot of an earlier publishing house founded by an uncle. In 1841 he started his “Collection of British and American Authors”, a reprint series of inexpensive, paperback editions which became familiar to anglophone travellers in Europe. A similar series of works by German authors followed in 1868.
- 147.
A novel with this title was published in 1929 by the British novelist Beatrice Mary Kean Seymour (1886–1955). Apparently Steinhaus is confusing this with the novel Loves of Youth written by Lilian Seymour-Tułasiewicz (1912–2003) and published in 1930.
- 148.
“two years with the counts”—meaning the “nobs”
- 149.
Presumably Stefan Michałowski, son of Count Michałowski. See above.
- 150.
Jacek Soplica is a fictional character of Mickiewicz’ epic poem Pan Tadeusz. He is supposed descended from provincial nobility, and known for his patriotism—and also his bluster, adventurism, and carousing. As an example showing the comparison appropriate, we may take Jakub Jasiński (1761–1794), Polish general, engineer, and poet. As a military commander of partisan forces in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania during the Kościuszko Uprising (1794), he died in Warsaw defending the last point of resistance against the forces of Suvorov.
- 151.
The largest park in Warsaw. The park and palace complex lies in Warsaw’s downtown, on the Royal Route linking the Royal Castle with Wilanów Palace to the south.
- 152.
Tadeusz Kasprzycki (1891–1978), Polish officer and politician. Fought in the Polish Legions in World War I. A general in the Polish army from 1929, and Polish Minister of Military Affairs 1935–1939. Emigrated to Canada after World War II.
- 153.
Possibly Zofia Kajzerówna, Polish actress. Appeared in films between 1933 and 1939.
- 154.
“loyal Jews”
- 155.
Now a region of western Belarus, before World War II it was a borderland region shared between Belarus and Poland.
- 156.
Carl Adolf Maximilian Hoffmann (1869–1927), German officer and military strategist during World War I.
- 157.
“But of course we know there are not really any waves.”
- 158.
This seems to have been a Countess Ira Potocka.
- 159.
“Polish Blood”. This was actually a series of novels by Emil Rasmussen (1873–1956), published in Copenhagen in 1918–1926. The Countess Ira Potocka sculpted a bust of Rasmussen.
- 160.
Stefan Zubrzycki (1927–1968), Polish mathematician. An undergraduate at the University of Wrocław 1946–1950. Obtained his doctorate in 1954, and was appointed associate professor at the Mathematics Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1957.
- 161.
Wanda Szmielew (1918–1976), Polish mathematician. Studied under Tarski. Proved that the first-order theory of abelian groups is decidable.
- 162.
That is, exchanging złotys for dollars or gold on the black market, as was also common—and incurred similar penalties—in the USSR.
- 163.
The Yakovlev Yak-9 single-engine propeller-driven fighter aircraft used by the USSR in World War II and by Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean pilots in the Korean War. These and other World War II vintage fighters were outclassed by the American planes until the swept-wing Mikoyan–Gurevich MiG-15 was introduced in late 1950, achieving air superiority, and forcing the cancellation of B-29 daylight raids. This was countered by the introduction of the swept-wing F-86 Saber, restoring the balance in the air over Korea to some extent.
- 164.
Marking the border between China and North Korea. The Koreans call it the Amnok River.
- 165.
Jan Parandowski (1895–1978), Polish writer, translator, and essayist.
- 166.
A 1919 novel by Joseph Conrad.
- 167.
Count Zygmunt Szembek (1844–1907), Polish aristocrat living mostly in Italy for his health. His son Jan (1881–1945) was a politician and diplomat, highly influential during the later years of the interwar Second Polish Republic. He left Poland in 1939 together with other members of the Polish government.
- 168.
Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) (1857–1924), Polish-born English novelist. See also Chapter 12 of Volume 1.
- 169.
“The Count”
- 170.
Polish-American mathematician, born in 1932. Obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Wrocław in 1957 under Stanisław Hartman. He is now professor emeritus at the University of Boulder, Colorado.
- 171.
A district of Warsaw where the historic Wilanów Palace, the traditional second home to Polish royalty, is situated.
- 172.
Such conferences were organized by the World Peace Council, originating with the Cominform doctrine of 1947 according to which the world was divided between peace-loving progressive forces led by the USSR and warmongering capitalist countries led by the US. The World Peace Council emerged from Communist-led congresses held at Wrocław in 1948, Paris and Prague in 1949, and Sheffield and Warsaw in 1950. The 1949 Paris meeting was rendered jejune through the refusal of French authorities to grant visas to many delegates, and a similar fate befell the meeting planned for Sheffield in 1950.
- 173.
James Gerald Crowther (1899–1983), British journalist and populariser of science and social ideas. He was enthusiastic about Stalin’s scientific policy as matching his own ideological view of the scientist’s role in society. Forged close links with French communist scientists such as Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie, as well as certain prime movers in the Bauhaus movement.
- 174.
Martin Andersen Nexø (1869–1954), Danish writer. The first significant Danish author to depict the working class in his writings, and the first great Danish socialist—later communist—writer.
- 175.
A city in Russia on the Oka River, 150 km southwest of Moscow.
- 176.
A town in Russia on the Vyazma River, about halfway between Smolensk and Mozhaisk. Battles were fought near Vyazma during both Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in 1812 and the German advance in 1941. It was occupied by the Germans from October 1941 till March 1943.
- 177.
In 1928 Lysenko wrote a paper on “vernalization”, claiming to have found a successful treatment of wheat seeds that would allow them to yield a crop under cool Spring conditions. He also claimed that this advantage would then be inherited by the seeds of the wheat grown from the treated seeds. Both claims were false. Stalin looked to Lysenko for a “miraculous cure”, as it were, for the low productivity resulting from his ruinous policy of forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture.
- 178.
German novelist, short story writer, social critic, and essayist. His highly ironic and symbolic novels and novellas are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. Anti-fascist, he fled to Switzerland when Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, and in 1939 immigrated to the US. He returned to Switzerland in 1952. Nobel laureate for literature in 1929. Lived from 1875 to 1955.
- 179.
From 1945 the Russian word for “securing” was used in Poland in place of the appropriate Polish one, and sometimes incorrectly. (The author often points out Russianisms and other mistakes in Polish texts, especially in newspapers.)
- 180.
Polish politician and Polish and Soviet secret agent. From February 1947 to September 1948, Polish Minister of Supply and Trade. He spent the years 1949–1956 in prison on false charges, where he was tortured in order to induce him to incriminate Gomułka and Marian Spychalski. He was rehabilitated in 1956, and went on to hold further government posts. Lived from 1911 to 1986.
- 181.
Acronym for Urząd Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego (Department of the Security Service). See Chapter 13 of Volume 1.
- 182.
The official external broadcast institution of the US federal government, beginning in 1942 as a department of the US Office of War Information.
- 183.
Organ of the French Communist Party. Founded in 1904, its status was highest from the late 1940s into the 1960s, when the Communist Party was the dominant party of the French left. The paper is now independent, though maintaining close ties with the French Communist Party.
- 184.
Ol′ga Borisovna Lepeshinskaya (née Protopopova) (1871–1963), Russian revolutionary and Soviet medical scientist. As a member of the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences, in response to criticism by Marxists of the theory that cells propagate by dividing, she propounded a pseudo-theory about the creation of cells from non-living matter. Awarded the Stalin Prize in 1950.
- 185.
Aleksandr Sergeevich Davydov (1912–1993), Soviet and Ukrainian physicist. Director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences 1963–1990.
- 186.
“from the east”
- 187.
This episode was related earlier. (See Volume 1.)
- 188.
A notorious collaborator with the Germans.
- 189.
A teacher whom the author met when in Stróże.
- 190.
The first president of South Korea, from August 1948 to April 1960. An anticommunist and strongman, he led Korea through the Korean War. He resigned following protests over a disputed election, and died in exile in Hawaii. Lived from 1875 to 1965.
- 191.
Preliminary talks held from March 5 to June 21, 1950, expected to lead to meetings of the foreign ministers themselves. The meeting ended in stalemate, however.
- 192.
Andreĭ Andreevich Gromyko (1909–1989), Soviet statesman during the Cold War. Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs in the late 1940s and Minister 1957–1985. Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet 1985–1987.
- 193.
Yakov Aleksandrovich Malik (1906–1980), Soviet diplomat. Soviet ambassador to the UN 1948–1952 and 1968–1972. On June 25, 1950, he boycotted the vote by the UN Security Council on admittance of communist China to the UN, with the result that China was not admitted. On June 23, 1951, Malik proposed an armistice in the Korean War.
- 194.
MacArthur was relieved on April 11, 1951 for making public statements contradicting the US administration’s policies on the Korean War.
- 195.
Matthew Bunker Ridgway (1895–1993), US Army general. Some historians credit him with turning the Korean War around in favor of the UN forces.
- 196.
The movement came to a head in March 1951, when the Iranian parliament voted for nationalisation, leading to a boycott of Iranian oil by western nations. In 1953 a coup, organized in part by the CIA, and supported by the Shah, forced the pro-nationalisation prime minister to resign, and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was reorganized as an international consortium which agreed to share profits on a 50–50 basis with Iran.
- 197.
They joined NATO in 1952.
- 198.
From the Commission for Quality Control in Mass Production.
- 199.
Joachim Lelewel (1786–1861), Polish historian and politician. In 1847 collaborated with Marx and Engels in founding the Democratic Society for Unity and Brotherhood of All Peoples, with headquarters in Brussels.
- 200.
Hugo Kołłątaj (1750–1812), Polish Roman Catholic priest, historian and philosopher, and social and political activist. In particular, created a socio-ethical system emphasizing a natural interdependence between people’s rights and obligations.
- 201.
Stanisław Wawrzyniec Staszic (1755–1826), Polish priest, philosopher, statesman, geologist, poet, and writer, a leader of the Polish Enlightenment of the late 1700s.
- 202.
Wilhelm Marceli Nencki (1847–1901), famous Polish chemist and medical doctor. Worked on the synthesis of urea and the chemical structure of haemoglobin.
- 203.
“for an external court or forum”
- 204.
Aleksander Weryha (1894–1971), professor of statistics at Warsaw University.
- 205.
The so-called Trial of the Generals was a show trial organized by the communist rulers of Poland and lasting a month from July 1951. Its purpose was to purge the new pro-Soviet army of those officers who had served in the armed forces of interwar democratic Poland or in the anti-Nazi resistance during World War II. The main victims were Marshal Michał Rola-Żymierski and the generals Marian Spychalski and Wacław Komar. All of the accused generals were sentenced to life imprisonment, while certain lower-ranking officers received shorter sentences. About forty others were condemned to death, but only twenty executions were actually carried out. In 1956, following the end of Stalinism in Poland, all those surviving were freed, and soon afterwards most were rehabilitated.
- 206.
An assembly of twenty-three judges appointed in every city of the Biblical Land of Israel.
- 207.
But those “authorities” included the Prime Minister Osóbka-Morawski and deputy ministers Gomułka and Mikołajczyk, already discredited or about to be so.
- 208.
Marian Spychalski (1906–1980), Polish architect, military commander, and communist politician. A leader of the People’s Guard (Gwardia Ludowa) and then the People’s Army (Armia Ludowa) during World War II. Imprisoned during the 1949–1953 purges, he was released in 1956, becoming Polish Minister of Defense 1956–1968, and Chairman of the Council of State (and so legal head of Poland) 1968–1970.
- 209.
“Big-shot communists”
- 210.
Now Bolekhiv, in Western Ukraine.
- 211.
Horse and buggy.
- 212.
A traditional Jewish elementary school where the basics of Judaism and Hebrew are taught. The first Cheders in Europe date from towards the end of the 18th century.
- 213.
That is, with the sneaky types of the security service.
- 214.
A national independence coalition formed in Vietnam in 1941.
- 215.
The Federation of Malaya was the name given to a federation of eleven of the former Malay States, formed in 1948. It gained its independence from Britain in 1957. A guerilla war was waged in the peninsula from 1948 to 1960 between British Commonwealth forces and the Malayan National Liberation Army, the military arm of the Malayan Communist Party.
- 216.
In October 1951, the Egyptian government unilaterally abrogated the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, whose terms granted Britain a lease on its Suez base for another twenty years. Britain refused to withdraw from Suez, insisting on its treaty rights, and relying on the presence of a sizable Suez garrison. The result was a steady escalation of violent hostility towards Britain and British troops stationed in Egypt, which the Egyptian authorities did little to curb.
- 217.
Farouk I of Egypt (1920–1965), tenth ruler of the Muhammad Ali Dynasty, and the penultimate king of Egypt and Sudan, succeeding his father, Fuad I, in 1936. In September 1952, a military coup led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and Muhammad Naguib put an end to Farouk’s reign. He was forced to abdicate in favor of his son Fuad II.
- 218.
A Persian city 360 km southwest of Tehran, believed to be one of the oldest in the world.
- 219.
Oborniki Śląskie is a traditional resort and spa town in the northeastern part of the Lower Silesian Voivodeship.
- 220.
In 1945 Zierhoffer became head of the Department of Geography at the University of Poznań, and from 1947 to 1957 was head of the Geographical Institute of that university.
- 221.
The execution of about 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals in Katyń Forest, Russia, and also at sites in Ukraine and Belarus. The memorandum from Beria to Stalin proposing the execution, dated March 5, 1940, signed into effect by Stalin and other members of the Politburo, is extant. It was handed over to the Polish president Lech Wałęsa in the early 1990s. In 1951–1952, a US congressional investigation chaired by the Republican Ray J. Madden concluded that the Katyń massacre had been carried out by the Soviets. See also Chapter 8 of Volume 1.
- 222.
Kazimierz Nitsch (1874–1958), Polish linguist, slavist, and historian of Polish at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
- 223.
Polish mathematician at Warsaw Polytechnic. Lived from 1890 to 1965.
- 224.
“On the Safety of Buildings as a Problem in Probability”
- 225.
Stefan Drobot (1913–1998), Polish applied mathematician. In 1940 deported to Stalinsk, where he worked as an engineer in the Kuznetsk Metallurgical Plant; later he was at the Institute of Mechanics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Moscow. Returned to Poland in 1946, where initially he obtained a position as adjunct professor at the Institute of Theoretical Mechanics of Wrocław University and Polytechnic.
- 226.
Józef Łukaszewicz (1927–2013), Polish mathematician, later professor at Wrocław University, and from 1981 to 1982 Rector.
- 227.
Geological strata.
- 228.
Here δ(x) denotes (average) thickness—of topsoil, say—in the direction given by x.
- 229.
A city in south-eastern Poland, in the Subcarpathian Voivodeship.
- 230.
Samuel Lehm, a Lwów pharmacist whose son had been living in Motyka’s apartment in 1941.
- 231.
Józef Motyka, Polish botanist and lichenologist. Worked in the Lwów Botanical Gardens during World War II.
- 232.
Jan Mydlarski (1892–1956), Polish anthropologist. From 1948 professor of anthropology at Wrocław University. First director of the Department of Anthropology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Wrocław. Rector of Wrocław University 1951–1953.
- 233.
One year after the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany, that is, in August 1950, the Consultative Assembly of western Europe began to consider the formation of a “European Defense Community” with German participation.
- 234.
Jacques Duclos (1896–1975), French communist—or rather Stalinist—politician. First elected to the French National Assembly in 1926. Supervised the clandestine French Communist Party during the Nazi occupation 1940–1944. As a candidate in the 1969 French presidential elections, he won over 20 % of the vote. Perhaps the reference here is to his call, in a speech before the Central Committee of his party in 1952, for a “united national front.”
- 235.
An island off the south coast of Korea where the main UN POW camp was located. Difficulties with the procedure for screening out those Chinese and North Korean POWs who did not wish to be repatriated culminated in a prison riot, the capture and humiliation of the camp commander by the POWs in May 1952, and the replacement of General Ridgway by Lieutenant-General Mark W. Clark as UN commander.
- 236.
Ernest A. Gross (1906–1999), American diplomat and lawyer. Deputy Ambassador to the UN from late 1949 till 1953.
- 237.
Perhaps because he didn’t like the atmosphere of sycophancy in the Academy.
- 238.
As opposed to the Lamarckian sort espoused by Michurin and Lysenko in the USSR.
- 239.
Perhaps the standard charge by Lamarckians and old-fashioned “blank-slate” sociologists that espousing a theory of genetic, as opposed to purely cultural, input into heredity is tantamount to supporting racism.
- 240.
A beautiful Baroque hall on the first floor of the main building of Wrocław University, named after the Austrian Emperor Leopold, founder of the university in 1702.
- 241.
Possibly Jan Oderfeld, Steinhaus’s former doctoral student. See above.
- 242.
Note that the paper in question has at this juncture already appeared, although there is no mention of a journal or a chief editor.
- 243.
Egon Pearson (1895–1980), an outstanding English statistician. Best known for the development of the Neyman–Pearson lemma of statistical hypothesis testing.
- 244.
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890–1962), outstanding English statistician, evolutionary biologist, and geneticist.
- 245.
Sir Harold Jeffreys (1891–1989), English mathematician, statistician, geophysicist, and astronomer. His book Theory of Probability (1939) played a seminal role in the revival of the “Bayesian” view of probability.
- 246.
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. First published in 1948. MIT Press, 2nd revised ed. 1961.
- 247.
The probability of an event A, given that an event B occurs.
- 248.
“Danaans” was a name used by Homer for the mainland Greeks. Steinhaus is referring to the palace as a “Greek gift”, like the Trojan horse.
- 249.
The Palace of Culture and Science, built to house not only the PAN but also allied institutions.
- 250.
The Castle in Kazimierz Dolny (on the Vistula) was built by King Casimir the Great in the 1340s, and subsequently rebuilt many times. It is now in ruins.
- 251.
Held from July 7 to July 11, 1952, where Eisenhower was nominated for president and Richard M. Nixon for vice-president.
- 252.
Stepsister of Józef Wittlin.
- 253.
Gerlachovský Štít, in Slovak.
- 254.
“Farthest North”
- 255.
“for the future”
- 256.
Dwight David Eisenhower officially assumed office on January 20, 1953. He was the first president to be limited by the Twenty-Second Amendment of the US Constitution to two four-year terms. He left office on January 20, 1961.
- 257.
Adlai Stevenson.
- 258.
The strike by the United Steelworkers of America against US Steel and nine other steelmakers. The strike was scheduled to begin on April 9, 1952, but Truman nationalized the US steel industry hours before the workers walked off. In June the US Supreme Court ruled against this, and the strike went ahead. It lasted 53 days and won the workers the terms their union had initially requested.
- 259.
Possibly Anton Ackermann (1905–1973), an East German politician.
- 260.
The Slánský Trial was a show trial of members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia suspected of wishing to follow a line independent of the USSR like that of Tito. On November 20, 1952, Rudolf Slánský (1901–1952), General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, together with 13 other communist leaders or bureaucrats, 11 of them Jews, was convicted of participating in a Trotskyist-Titoist-Zionist conspiracy. Eleven were executed and the rest sentenced to life imprisonment. The trial was part of a Stalin-inspired purge of disloyal elements in the communist parties of central-European countries in the Soviet bloc.
- 261.
Vladimir Clementis (1902–1952), Slovak politician, lawyer, publicist, literary critic, author, and member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party.
- 262.
Bedřich Geminder (1901–1952), Chief of the International Section of the Party Secretariat in Czechoslovakia.
- 263.
A Jewish religious movement of the 18th and 19th centuries centered around Jacob Frank (1726–1791), who claimed to be a Jewish messiah.
- 264.
In the original Polish “uroszczenie”, which, according to the “Polish Language Dictionary”, is an obsolete word meaning “pretension”, “unreasonable request”, or “claim”.
- 265.
A Soviet-sponsored Peace Congress held in Vienna in 1952.
- 266.
His Inaugural Address of January 20, 1953.
- 267.
Enewetak, in the Marshall Islands of the central Pacific. The site of atomic tests from 1947 to 1962. Former residents began returning in the 1970s and the island was declared safe for human habitation in 1980.
- 268.
Once again British Prime Minister (1951–1955).
- 269.
Georges Bidault (1899–1983), French politician. Active in the French resistance during World War II. Postwar served as Minister of Foreign Affairs and Prime Minister of France on several occasions. In 1962 chose exile in Brazil after being exposed for his activities in the OAS (Organisation de l’Armée Secrète) opposed to de Gaulle’s extending independence to Algeria.
- 270.
It took place in December 1953.
- 271.
The basic tenet of science, according to which an event will recur if the conditions are exactly reproduced. No ultimate logical justification for it has been found, though not for want of trying on the part of philosophers.
- 272.
Latin for “Agreements must be kept”.
- 273.
Poland was indeed an ally of both Britain and the USSR—although in the latter’s case after an interval.
- 274.
Sudan was ruled by an Anglo-Egyptian condominium from 1899 to 1956. In 1956 Britain and Egypt, ruled since 1953 by Nasser and Naguib, agreed that Sudan would become an independent state.
- 275.
During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Cardinal Sapieha was active in the independence movement and collaborated with the Polish Government-in-Exile.
- 276.
The infamous “Doctors’ Plot”, the most dramatic anti-Jewish episode of Stalin’s regime, involving the “unmasking” of a group of prominent Moscow doctors, predominantly Jews, as conspiratorial assassins of Soviet leaders. This was accompanied by show-trials and anti-Semitic propaganda in the state-run mass media. Scores of Soviet Jews were dismissed from their jobs, arrested, and sent to the Gulag or executed. After Stalin’s death in March 1953, the new Soviet leadership declared that the affair had been fabricated.
- 277.
Marshal Khorloogiin Choibalsan (1895–1952), Communist leader of the Mongolian People’s Republic from the 1930s till his death.
- 278.
In 1936, on the death of the great Russian writer Maxim Gorky (1868–1936), Trotskiĭ, Bukharin, and others were accused of plotting Gorky’s death and using a Dr. Levin to carry it out. Some believe this bizarre story was fabricated by Stalin and his entourage to divert attention from their own involvement in Gorky’s death.
- 279.
Short for the “American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee” (JDC), founded in 1914 as a Jewish relief organization. In particular, it distributed funds to help support the Jewish populations of eastern Europe and the Near East during World War II. The organization’s mandate was subsequently widened to embrace aid to overseas Jews in need generally.
- 280.
Stanisław Radkiewicz (1903–1987), Polish communist activist with Soviet citizenship. As head of the Polish communist secret police (MBP or UB) between 1944 and 1954 he was one of the chief instigators of the Stalinist terror in Poland during those years.
- 281.
The “US Special Services Division”, so named in 1941, and deriving from earlier such divisions formed in the aftermath of World War I.
- 282.
Abbreviation for Spetsial′noe Otdelenie (Russian for “Special Section”).
- 283.
Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), first Prime Minister of independent India 1947–1964. A principal leader of India’s independence movement in the 1930s and 1940s.
- 284.
Klement Gottwald (1896–1953), Czechoslovak communist politician, longtime leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Prime minister 1946–1948, and president 1948–1953.
- 285.
After Stalin’s death Malenkov became Premier of the Soviet Union (1953–1955), before being overshadowed by Nikita Khrushchov.
- 286.
Nikolaĭ Mikhailovich Shvernik (1888–1970), Soviet politician. He was Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR from March 19, 1946 to March 15, 1953. Although titular president, he in fact had little actual power as real authority lay with Stalin as General Secretary of the Communist Party. He was removed from the presidency on March 15, 1953, just after the death of Stalin, and replaced by Marshal Kliment Voroshilov. Later Khrushchov placed Shvernik in charge of rehabilitating the victims of Stalin’s purges. He resumed membership of the Presidium in 1957, retiring in 1966.
- 287.
Lavrentiĭ Pavlovich Beria (1899–1953), Soviet politician of (like Stalin) Georgian origin. Chief of the NKVD under Stalin during World War II, and Deputy Premier 1946–1953. At the time of Stalin’s death he is said to have claimed to have poisoned him.
- 288.
On March 10, two US Air Force Thunderjets based in West Germany crossed into Czechoslovakian airspace, and one of them was shot down by a Czech MiG-15. The pilot ejected and survived.
- 289.
This was an RAF Avro Lincoln which was attacked by two MiG-15s on March 12, 1953, as it entered the twenty-mile-wide air corridor from Hamburg to Berlin on a regular training flight. The Soviet planes continued strafing the Lincoln as it fell. Prime Minister Churchill called the incident a “wanton attack” and had a strong note of protest delivered to the Soviets, who claimed the Lincoln had fired first.
- 290.
The deputies of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe met in Strasbourg from March 16 to March 19, 1953, with the aim of drafting a constitution and ratifying the terms of a European Defence Community, and, generally speaking, strengthening the Council and facilitating liaison with proposed or existing European communities (“Big Europe”).
- 291.
Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.
- 292.
It was given its old name back in 1956.
- 293.
Nikolaĭ Aleksandrovich Bulganin (1895–1975), Soviet politician. Moved to the first rank of Soviet leadership at Stalin’s death, he was Minister of Defense 1953–1955, and Premier of the Soviet Union 1955–1958.
- 294.
The 1953 uprising in East Germany began with a strike by East Berlin construction workers on June 16, developing by the next day into a widespread anti-Stalinist uprising against the government of the German Democratic Republic. The unrest was violently suppressed by tanks and troops of the Soviet forces in Germany and the Volkspolizei.
- 295.
First president of South Korea, from 1948 to 1960. See above.
- 296.
This took place on June 15, 1953. Elizabeth was crowned Queen Elizabeth II on June 2, 1953.
- 297.
This was Captain Jan Ćwikliński (1901–1976), Polish sea captain.
- 298.
Franciszek Jarecki flew on March 5, 1953, and Zdzisław Jaźwiński on May 20, both to Bornholm Island, a Danish island in the Baltic.
- 299.
Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg (1915–1953) and Julius Rosenberg (1918–1953) were American communists convicted on March 29, 1951 and executed on June 19, 1953 for espionage involving the passing of information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. The decision to execute them, ultimately taken by Eisenhower, remains controversial, in particular since the involvement of Ethel has come to seem doubtful.
- 300.
Alfred Gradstein (1904–1954), Polish composer. Best known for children’s songs and popular music for voice and accompaniment.
- 301.
Beria was arrested on June 26, 1953. At his trial he was accused of treason, terrorism, and counterrevolutionary activity in Azerbaijan during the Russian Civil War. It was also alleged that he used his position of power to indulge in obsessive sexually depraved activities, including multiple rapes. He and six other defendants were shot following the trial.
- 302.
A village of the Silesian Voivodeship, in the Beskid Range, near the border with what was then Czechoslovakia.
- 303.
Certain species of yellow or white butterflies found world-wide.
- 304.
Returned to Poland after studying in the US with Tarski. See above.
- 305.
Steinhaus’s Słownik racjonalny (Rational Dictionary) was published partly in the journal Problemy (Problems) and partly in Wiadomości Matematyczne (Mathematical News). Almost all of it was reprinted, with certain items removed by the censor and the introduction by Stanisław Hartman omitted, by the publishing house “Ossolineum” in 1980. A second, complete, edition was brought out in 1993 and a third in 2003. Note added by Roman Duda, editor of the second Polish edition
- 306.
This was the VIIIth Meeting of Polish Mathematicians (the last in the general series) organized by the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (independently of the Polish Mathematical Society) in Warsaw, September 6–12, 1953.
- 307.
At that time parts of the Old City that had been rebuilt were opened to use. The residential portion of Marszałkowska Street, one of the main thoroughfares of Warsaw’s city center, had been opened to residents a year before. The Polonia Palace Hotel is just off Marszałkowska Street.
- 308.
In Warsaw, typical examples of the architecture of socialist realism were the Marszałkowska Dzielnica Mieszkaniowa (MDM estate, that is, Marszałkowska Residential Area), a housing development, and the Palace of Culture and Science.
- 309.
Johann Radon (1887–1956), Austrian mathematician. Known for the Radon–Nikodým Theorem, Radon measure, etc.
- 310.
Albert Cyril Offord (1906–2000), British mathematician. First professor of mathematics at the London School of Economics.
- 311.
Pál Turán (1910–1976), Hungarian mathematician, working primarily in number theory. Collaborated extensively with Erdős.
- 312.
Győrgy Hajós (1912–1972), Hungarian mathematician. Worked, in particular, in graph theory and geometry.
- 313.
Alfréd Rényi (1921–1970), Hungarian mathematician. Best known for his contributions to probability theory, although he also made notable contributions to combinatorics, graph theory, and number theory.
- 314.
Easternmost district of Kraków.
- 315.
Kasprowy Wierch is a mountain in the Western Tatras.
- 316.
Gabriele d’Annunzio (1863–1938), Italian poet, journalist, novelist, and dramatist. Of controversial reputation for his influence on the Italian Fascist movement.
- 317.
Powszechna Kasa Oszczędności Bank Polski (General Savings Bank–Polish Bank). The bank was founded in 1919.
- 318.
Witold Eugeniusz Zawadowski (1888–1980), pioneer in Polish radiology.
- 319.
David Herbert Lawrence (1885–1930), English novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, and painter. Preached a kind of bodily intuition in life as opposed to an intellectual approach.
- 320.
Perhaps this means that Lidka and Jan Kott and their daughter had an apartment next to Broniewski’s.
- 321.
Stefan Wyszyński (1901–1981), Polish prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. Bishop of Lublin 1946–1948, and Archbishop of Gniezno and Warsaw and Primate of Poland 1948–1981. Made a cardinal in 1953. Well known in Poland for his heroic stand against both Nazism and Communism. In 1953, when a wave of persecution swept Poland, mass trials and internment of priests began, and in September of that year Archbishop Wyszyński was imprisoned and subsequently placed under house arrest till late 1956.
- 322.
On May 8, 1953, the Polish episcopate sent this letter to Bierut in protest against the Polish Council of State’s decree that the appointment of parish priests and bishops must be vetted respectively by local authorities and the government.
- 323.
René Jules Gustave Coty (1882–1962), right-wing French politician, President of France 1954–1959, the second and last president of the Fourth Republic.
- 324.
The main topics of the Four Powers Conference in Berlin commencing on January 25, 1954, were the easing of east-west tensions and the possible reunification of Germany. Essentially the only result of the talks was an agreement to meet again in Geneva to discuss the sources of conflict in Korea and Indochina.
- 325.
Józef Cyrankiewicz (1911–1989), Polish socialist, from 1948 communist, politician. Prisoner in Auschwitz from September 1942. Prime Minister of the People’s Republic of Poland 1947–1952 and 1954–1970. Polish head of state 1970–1972.
- 326.
Order of the Rebirth of Poland.
- 327.
Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński (1905–1953), Polish poet. Many of his poems were turned into popular and cabaret songs. Well known for his absurdly humorous sketches published under the title “Teatrzyk Zielona Gęś” (Green Goose Theater) in Przekrój between 1946 and 1950.
- 328.
Acronym for “Wojskowa Akademia Techniczna” (Military Technological Academy).
- 329.
This was Maxwell Bodenheim (1892–1954), American poet and novelist. Known as the King of Greenwich Village Bohemians. Successful in the 1920s and 1930s, he later began living the life of a derelict, panhandling in the streets of New York, and was arrested several times for vagrancy and drunkenness. He and his wife were murdered by a sociopathic dishwasher whom they had befriended on the streets of the Village.
- 330.
Słownik Sestertiusa. “Sestertius” was the author’s nickname at his Gymnasium.
- 331.
Latin for “Peas with Cabbage”.
- 332.
In interwar Lwów the author had worked with Dr. Gröer on statistical aspects of inoculations with tuberculin. See Chapters 7, 8, and 9 of Volume 1, and Chapter 2 of Volume 2.
- 333.
- 334.
Warecki Square, Napoleon Square, and Square of the Warsaw Insurrectionists.
- 335.
Towns near Lwów, now in the L′viv Province of western Ukraine.
- 336.
“New World Street”, one of the main thoroughfares of Warsaw. Part of the “Royal Route” from the Royal Castle to King Jan Sobieski’s 17th-century royal residence at Wilanów.
- 337.
Jan Ernst (professional name “Eryan”), Polish geographer and stage performer.
- 338.
Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchov (1894–1971), Soviet politician. Premier (1958–1964) and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR (1953–1964). In 1964 he was replaced by Brezhnev as general secretary and Kosygin as premier. Responsible for the partial de-Stalinization of the USSR while in power.
- 339.
Apparently a graduate student of Lysenko; see below.
- 340.
A Soviet newspaper.
- 341.
From 1954 split into the ordinary police—called “militia”—and the Committee on State Security (Komitet Gosudarstvennoĭ Bezopastnosti or briefly KGB).
- 342.
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849–1936), Russian physiologist. Much of his research was concerned with temperament, conditioning, and involuntary reflex actions.
- 343.
On March 1, 1954 at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, with a yield of 15 megatons, some 10 megatons more than anticipated.
- 344.
The crew of the Japanese fishing boat “Lucky Dragon Number Five” suffered from radioactive poisoning from the fallout.
- 345.
A treaty concerning a “European Defense Community”, between West Germany, France, Italy, and the Benelux countries, was signed in May 1952, but failed to obtain ratification in the French National Assembly. There was a repeat performance of this scenario in 1954.
- 346.
A neoclassical palace in Warsaw, once the residence of Poland’s last king Stanisław August Poniatowski. Between the wars it was the residence of Marshal Piłsudski. Bolesław Bierut resided there from 1945 to 1952, and subsequently it served as the residence of the president of the Council of State.
- 347.
Here the author is punning on the Polish word pokój, which can mean either “peace” or “room”.
- 348.
A river in south Poland, flowing into the Vistula northeast of Oświęcim.
- 349.
They would probably have had access to the book The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern (Princeton University Press, 1944), considered the fundamental text of interdisciplinary game theory, or even the second edition of 1947.
- 350.
Helena Rasiowa (1917–1994), Polish mathematician working in foundations and mathematical logic. Professor at Warsaw University.
- 351.
Wiesław Sadowski (1922–2010), Polish economist and statistician. Professor at the Warsaw School of Economics, and from 1965 to 1978 its Rector.
- 352.
Marek Fisz (1910–1963), Polish probabilist and statistician. Later professor at Warsaw University. In the US from 1960.
- 353.
Andrzej Grzegorczyk (1922–2014), Polish mathematical logician and philosopher. Later professor at Warsaw University.
- 354.
Processus stochastiques et mouvement brownien (1948).
- 355.
Roman Marciniak, Polish radiologist. Professor at the University of Wrocław.
- 356.
Julian Czyżewski was founder and first director of the Institute of Geography at the University of Wrocław after World War II.
- 357.
A village in southern Poland close to the mountains. See also Chapter 13 of Volume 1.
- 358.
Irena Orska-Wtorzecka (1915–2004), Polish stage and film actress.
- 359.
A journal founded by the author in 1953, later renamed Applicationes Mathematicae.
- 360.
The oldest existing Polish scientific journal in the field of economics.
- 361.
Hitler Youth, the paramilitary youth organization set up by the Nazis. It existed from 1922 to 1945.
- 362.
Julian Aleksandrowicz (1908–1988), Polish medical professional. Notable specialist in leukemia. During World War II he escaped from the Kraków ghetto and served as a physician in the Polish resistance. Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków from 1951, and director of its Hematology Clinic 1950–1978.
- 363.
A town near Katowice.
- 364.
A female prison guard in Nazi concentration camps.
- 365.
Teodor Marchlewski (1899–1962), Polish specialist in animal breeding and genetics. Supported Lysenko’s lamarckism at some stage.
- 366.
Kazimierz Petrusewicz (1906–1982), Polish ecologist. Cofounder of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Director of the Academy’s Institute of Ecology till 1973.
- 367.
The microbiologist Ludwik Hirszfeld died on March 7, 1954, so it was in response to his demise that his Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapeutics of the Polish Academy of Sciences was reorganized.
- 368.
To Rokitnica Bytomska, an address near Katowice.
- 369.
The Medical Academy was founded in Rokitnica Bytomska in 1948. It was renamed the Medical University of Silesia in 1949, and was moved to Katowice in 1971.
- 370.
Stefan Ślopek (1914–1995), Polish clinical microbiologist and immunologist.
- 371.
Julian Tokarski, prewar head of the Department of Mineralogy and Petrography at the University of Lwów. See also Chapter 7 of Volume 1.
- 372.
A village in southern Poland near Zakopane.
- 373.
Konrad Józef Górski (1895–1990), Polish historian and literary theorist. Worked in the underground education system during World War II. Postwar he was at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, until being ousted in 1950. He was reinstated in 1956.
- 374.
A village in Łódź Voivodeship, central Poland.
- 375.
The Second Law states that in a process involving heat transfer occurring in an isolated physical system some of the system’s energy will be transformed into random molecular motion, or, in other words, the entropy, a measure of the disorder of the system, will increase.
- 376.
The 1954 International Congress of Mathematicians was then being held in Amsterdam (September 2–9).
- 377.
The “Nine-Power Conference” of September 1954, called mainly to determine the status of West Germany. This was followed by a meeting in October in Paris at which the Western European Union, a compromise on the European Defense Community, was agreed to, with West Germany as a full member and its occupation by foreign forces to cease.
- 378.
Andreĭ Yanuarevich Vyshinskiĭ (1883–1954), Soviet politician, jurist, and diplomat. Soviet state prosecutor at Stalin’s show trials and at the Nuremberg Trials. Soviet Foreign Minister 1949–1953. On November 22, 1954, while in New York as Soviet representative to the UNO, he suffered a heart attack and died.
- 379.
Zofia Orlicz, née Krzysiak (1898–1999), Polish school teacher, and physics assistant at Lwów University before World War II. She was a lieutenant in the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) in the Lwów District during the German occupation. In 1948 she was arrested and sentenced to 12 years in prison for her wartime activities, but released in 1953, and rehabilitated three years later. Her husband was Władysław Orlicz, professor of mathematics at the University of Lwów, and, postwar, at the University of Poznań.
- 380.
Robert Fortet (1912–1998), French mathematician. Obtained his Ph.D. under Fréchet in 1939. Erik Gustav Elfving (1908–1984), Finnish mathematician and statistician. Antonín Špaček (1911–1961), Czechoslovak mathematician working mainly in probability, information theory, and statistical decision theory. He also held patents in radioelectronics. Yuri Vasilyevich Prokhorov (1929–2013), Russian probabilist. Studied under Kolmogorov.
- 381.
Since the “Roter Adler” was converted postwar into an office building, it is more likely that Steinhaus stayed at the Hotel Adlon.
- 382.
Reich Chancellery.
- 383.
Berlin City Palace.
- 384.
One of the most famous of Berlin’s avenues, taking its name from the Kurfürsten, the prince-electors of Brandenburg. It was the leading commercial street of West Berlin during the period of the city’s division into two zones.
- 385.
Previously Grosse Frankfurter Strasse, now called Karl-Marx-Allee. Starting in 1952 “palaces for the working class” were built along this street in the “wedding-cake” style of Soviet socialist classicism.
- 386.
Heinrich Grell (1903–1974), German mathematician. Endured opprobrium for his criticisms first of the Nazi regime and then of the East German one.
- 387.
Lev Arkadievich Kaluzhnin (1914–1990), Soviet algebraist. Moved from St. Petersburg to Germany in 1923. Enrolled in Humboldt University in 1933. Fled from the Nazis to Paris in 1938, where he obtained his Ph.D. at Université Paris IV-Sorbonne in 1948. First head of the Department of Algebra and Mathematical Logic at Taras Shevchenko University in Kiev in 1959.
- 388.
On West German sovereignty and a European defense force; see above.
- 389.
Józef Światło (born Izaak Fleischfarb) (1915–1994), high-ranking official in the Polish Ministry of Public Security (MBP). Nicknamed “the butcher” by prisoners of the MBP. Defected to the West through Berlin in 1953. His written and broadcast (over Radio Free Europe) incriminations shook the Polish United Workers’ Party, ultimately contributing to the reform of the Polish security apparatus and the political liberalisation of the socialist Polish October revolution of 1956 (“Gomułka’s thaw”), when Gomułka became First Secretary of the PZPR. The texts of Światło’s broadcasts were distributed over Poland in special balloons, revealing many secrets of the MBP, including the inhuman treatment of prisoners.
- 390.
On December 7 the Ministry for Public Security was abolished, to be replaced by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, with Władysław Wicha as minister, and a Committee for Public Safety, headed by Władysław Dworakowski. The minister of the now non-existent MBP, Stanisław Radkiewicz, was appointed Director of State Farms.
- 391.
The French National Assembly had voted against ratification earlier, chiefly because of its large communist bloc, and by way of compromise the West European Union, now including West Germany, was established following the London-Paris talks of September and October 1954.
- 392.
Pierre Mendès-France (1907–1982), French politician of Portuguese-Jewish background. The right-wing member of the Assemblée Nationale Jean-Marie Le Pen was heard to say he had a “patriotic, almost physical repulsion” for Mendès-France. He was Prime Minister of France from June 1954—following the French defeat by Ho Chi Minh’s forces at Dien Bien Phu—to February 1955. He negotiated an armistice with the North Vietnamese, and engineered a complete withdrawal of French forces from Indochina. He also began making concessions to Algerian nationalists.
- 393.
The State Treaty for Austria was signed into effect at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna on May 15, 1955 by the foreign ministers of the US, Britain, France, and the USSR. The treaty put an end to seventeen years of occupation of Austria by foreign troops and accorded the Austrians complete sovereignty.
- 394.
This would seem to be a rumor stemming from Soviet propaganda averring, for instance, that the Marshall Plan was aimed at “the enslavement of Europe”.
- 395.
Stefan Banach Sr.’s father was Stefan Greczek (1867–1967). See: R. Duda, “Facts and Myths about Stefan Banach”, Newsletter of the European Mathematical Society 71 (2009), pp. 29–34.
- 396.
A town in southern Poland, the historical capital of the mountain region Podhale.
- 397.
Franciszka Płowa.
- 398.
Irish-born, naturalized American author, editor, journalist, and publisher. While he attracted attention during his life for his irascible, aggressive personality, his editorship of famous British and American periodicals, and his friendship with the talented and famous, he is remembered mainly for his four-volume autobiographical memoir My Life and Loves (1922), banned in several countries for its sexual explicitness. Lived from 1856 to 1931.
- 399.
Polish writer, translator, journalist, and social worker. Lived from 1881 to 1946.
- 400.
Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny (The Illustrated Daily Courier).
- 401.
Stanisław Runge (1888–1953), Polish veterinarian. Assistant and then Professor of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Poznań 1920–1939 and 1946–1953. Rector 1933–1936.
- 402.
Bogusław Bobrański (1904–1991), Polish chemist. Rector of the Wrocław Medical Academy 1957–1962.
- 403.
It may be relevant to mention that Lawrence’s wife Frieda, née Baroness von Richthofen, was German.
- 404.
Published by the Polish School and Pedagogical Publishing House (PZWS): 15,000 copies each of 300 pp., with 321 illustrations; price 30 złotys.
- 405.
Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (1894–1980), Polish poet, essayist, and dramatist.
- 406.
Władysław Matwin was at the time in question secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), that is, the Polish communist party. See above.
- 407.
Jerzy Maria Kirchmayer (1895–1959), Polish historian and military commander. A brigadier general in the Polish army after World War II, and one of the first to document the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. In 1950 he was arrested by the UB and sentenced to life imprisonment as one of the defendants in the Trial of the Generals. During the short political thaw in October 1955 he was released, and rehabilitated in April 1956, but never fully recovered his health.
- 408.
General Wacław Komar (1909–1972), Brigadier General in the Polish security forces. He was arrested in 1952 on trumped-up charges at the time of the anti-Semitic “Doctors’ Plot” in the USSR. Director General of the Ministry of Internal Affairs from 1960, he was dismissed from this post in 1968 because of his Jewish background.
- 409.
Vasiliĭ Iosifovich Dzhugashvili (1921–1962) was Stalin’s son by his second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva. In 1952 he was dismissed from his post as Air Force Commander of the Moscow Military District for apparent dereliction of duty. He was arrested in April 1953 for revealing classified information at a dinner with foreign diplomats. Released in 1960, he died two years later of chronic alcoholism. Stalin’s son Yakov (1902–1943) by his first wife, was captured by the Germans during the Battle of Smolensk and apparently died in captivity.
- 410.
Józef Różański (1907–1981), born Josek Goldberg. Member of the postwar Polish security service. Called “Stalin’s right-hand man in Poland.” After Stalin’s death he was arrested and charged with torturing innocent prisoners, and in 1957 given an extended sentence. He was buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw.
- 411.
That is, a high-ranking, and exceptionally vicious, secret service officer.
- 412.
The point here is that these members of the UB were notorious torturers.
- 413.
Widow of the late Polish poet Julian Tuwim. See above.
- 414.
Visiting from the US. See above.
- 415.
Tadeusz Gustaw Jackowski (1889–1972), Polish ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg 1929–1937.
- 416.
Antoine Pinay (1891–1994), French conservative politician. Prime Minister of France for most of 1952.
- 417.
The seat of the French National Assembly, the lower legislative chamber of the French government.
- 418.
Pierre Eugène Jean Pflimlin (1907–2000), French Christian Democratic politician. Prime minister of the French Fourth Republic for a few weeks in 1958 before being replaced by Charles de Gaulle.
- 419.
Christian Pineau (1904–1995), French resistance fighter and politician. Survivor of Buchenwald Concentration Camp. Prime Minister of France for two days in February 1955.
- 420.
Malenkov was forced to resign in February 1955 after coming under attack for his closeness to the discredited Beria, and for the slow pace at which the rehabilitation of political prisoners was proceeding.
- 421.
The “Geneva Summit”, starting on July 18, 1955, a meeting of the “Big Four” (represented by Eisenhower, Bulganin, Anthony Eden, and Edgar Faure) to discuss the enhancement of global security. Khrushchov also attended.
- 422.
A State Agricultural Farm (Państwowe Gospodarstwo Rolne (PGR)) was a kind of collective farm similar to the Soviet Kolkhoz. Such farms were established in the People’s Republic of Poland in 1949 as a form of socialist ownership of the land by the government.
- 423.
Hanna Hirszfeldowa (1884–1964), Polish pediatrician and professor of medicine. Participated in the creation of the Medical Academy in Wrocław. Wife of Ludwik Hirszfeld.
- 424.
Queen consort of King Albert I of Belgium from 1909 to 1934. Lived from 1876 to 1965.
- 425.
Suburbs of Warsaw.
- 426.
- 427.
kaiserlich und königlich (Imperial and Royal)
- 428.
Count Napoleon Stanisław Adam Feliks Zygmunt Krasiński (1812–1859), great Polish romantic poet, ranked with Mickiewicz and Słowacki as one of Poland’s three national bards.
- 429.
See Chapter 4 of Volume 1.
- 430.
See Chapter 4 of Volume 1.
- 431.
Edward Porębowicz (1862–1937), Polish novelist, poet, translator, and literary scholar. For many years he held the chair of Romance philology at the University of Lwów.
- 432.
Jan Kasprowicz (1860–1926), was a Polish poet, playwright, critic, and translator; a prominent representative of “Young Poland”.
- 433.
Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia 1940–1948. See above.
- 434.
Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan (1895–1978), Armenian Old Bolshevik and Soviet statesman. Of declining favor with Stalin towards the latter’s death, he rose to become the second most powerful figure in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union.
- 435.
Also called the “Jagiellonian tapestries”, originally consisting of about 360 tapestries collected by the Jagiellons to decorate the interiors of their royal residences from the 14th to the 16th century. Over the centuries they were subject to many vicissitudes; for instance, some are in various museums in Russia. At the outbreak of World War II in 1939 those tapestries stored at Wawel Castle in Kraków were transported via a circuitous route to Canada, to be finally returned to Wawel Castle, after fifteen years of negotiations, in the early 1960s.
- 436.
The lecture was published with the title Współpraca nauk na przykładzie roli matematyki w środowisku wrocławskim (“Cooperation of the Sciences in the Applications of Mathematics in the Wrocław Environment”), in: Hugo Steinhaus, Między duchem a materią pośredniczy matematyka (Between Spirit and Matter There Exists Mathematics), Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warszawa–Wrocław 2000, pp. 192–210.
- 437.
Possibly Felix Burkhardt, who obtained his D.Phil. from Leipzig University under Hölder and Herglotz in 1917.
- 438.
That is, East Germany.
- 439.
Konrad Hermann Joseph Adenauer (1876–1967), German statesman. Chancellor of West Germany from 1949 to 1963. Took West Germany from its immediate postwar ruination to its establishment as a prosperous and powerful nation enjoying close relations with Israel and its former enemies the US and France.
- 440.
An agent of the Second Department of the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces. Later, in the 1950s, people undergoing trial for political reasons were sometimes also called “dwójka” agents.
- 441.
Scientific representative on the Central Committee of the Party. See above.
- 442.
Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe (PWN); since 1991 Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.
- 443.
Something like: “as to this” instead of “as regards this”, except that “odnośnie tego” is a solecism.
- 444.
This story bears similarities to Le silence de la mer (The Silence of the Sea), by Jean Bruller, penname Vercors, written in 1942. Evidently it’s a recurring theme! Note added by Aleksandra Zgorzelska, editor of the first Polish edition (In Vercors’ story an idealistic German officer is billeted in the house of a young woman and her uncle in occupied France in 1941. Although they refuse to speak to him, he talks to them of his country and of his idealistic views of French-German relations. However, when he discovers the evils being perpetrated by Nazis, he takes one of only two decent ways out….)
- 445.
A Polish fishing port and popular seaside resort on the Hel Peninsula in the Baltic Sea.
- 446.
Certain tribes of Pomeranians speaking Kashubian, one of the Lechitic languages, a subgroup of the Slavic languages.
- 447.
An extinct West Slavic language formerly spoken by the Polabian Slavs in present-day northeastern Germany, around the Elbe River, until the mid-18th century. It was closely related to Pomeranian and Kashubian.
- 448.
In 1960 a small Kashubian dictionary compiled by the Kashubian writer Aleksander Labuda was published. A Polish-Kashubian dictionary was issued in 1982. The history of the Kashubs has been explored and written up by the outstanding Polish historian Professor Gerard Labuda (1916–2010), himself of Kashubian origin.
- 449.
A town in northwestern Poland, in Gdańsk Pomerania, on the Bay of Puck.
- 450.
kolkhozy, so-called.
- 451.
A town close to Kraków.
- 452.
That is, statistical inference considered as a game against nature.
- 453.
Whereby one employs a strategy making the worst possible loss least.
- 454.
A cable car, constructed in 1936, takes visitors to the peak, where there is a meteorological observatory.
- 455.
A village near Zakopane.
- 456.
This turns out to be unnecessary. It suffices to make a large number of dodecagons approximating cross-sections and reject those not represented among the population. Steinhaus’s Note
- 457.
In English one would say “One cannot but assert…”.
- 458.
Polish economist specializing in macroeconomics of a broadly-defined Keynesian sort. Worked at the London School of Economics, the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and in the UNO, and, from 1955, when he finally returned to Poland, the Warsaw School of Economics. Considered one of the most distinguished economists of the 20th century. Lived from 1899 to 1970.
- 459.
The PAN is subdivided into divisions according to natural groupings of the sciences. Division III contains mathematics, physics, chemistry, geology, and geography.
- 460.
That is, West Germany (FRG).
- 461.
Włodzimierz Michajłow (1905–1994), Polish parasitologist and zoologist. Head of the Institute of Parasitology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.
- 462.
That is, an experiment such as tossing a coin where the probability of heads, counted as a success, is p, known to the devil but not to his opponent.
- 463.
An extended exposition of this work appeared in 1957. See H. Steinhaus, “The Problem of Estimation.” Annals Math. Statist. 28 (1957), pp. 633–648 (see Formula (10)).
- 464.
“narcotic drugs”
- 465.
Leonard Sosnowski (1911–1986), Polish physicist. Founder of a school of semiconductor physics at the University of Warsaw. Director of the Institute of Physics of the PAN 1954–1966.
- 466.
Like the atom bomb to the Japanese.
- 467.
The parallel rise in population in the West is reckoned as one of the major causes of the unprecedented prosperity of the West lasting from just after the war till around 1973, a period called by one historian “The golden age in the West”.
- 468.
Paweł Jasienica was the penname of Leon Lech Beynar (1909–1970), Polish historian, journalist, and soldier. An outspoken critic of the policy of censorship of the postwar People’s Republic of Poland and notable dissident, he was continually harrassed by the government.
- 469.
Adam Ważyk joined the communist party before World War II, and during the war served in the Soviet-controlled Polish Armed Forces formed in the USSR. His book of verse Serce granatu (The Heart of the Grenade) was published in Moscow in 1943. He was editor of the Marxist literary weekly Kuźnica 1946–1950 and for some time a loyal disciple of Stalin. However, in 1955 he published Poemat dla dorosłych (A Poem for Adults), in which he summed up the grimness, falsity, and terror of the first postwar decade in Poland. He resigned from the Party in 1957 when the new magazine Europa was suppressed.
- 470.
Polish serial killer living in Kraków and owning property in Warsaw. Nicknamed “the gentleman killer”, he was charged with the murders of at least thirty women, convicted, and hanged. Lived from 1911 to 1957.
- 471.
Latin for “secular arm”. In church tradition this is the lay authority invested with the power to carry out sentences handed down by the church authorities, such as torture, execution, imprisonment, etc.
- 472.
The Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic, now the independent nation Kyrgyzstan.
- 473.
A disease of the large intestine involving inflammation of the lining and the growth of polyps, with a high risk of developing into colon cancer.
- 474.
Something like a North American master’s degree.
- 475.
Short for Państwowa Fabryka Wagonów (National Rail Carriage Factory), located in Wrocław. It now belongs to the company Bombardier Transportation Polska.
- 476.
Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The congress was held on February 24–25, 1956. In his so-called “secret” speech to the Congress, Khrushchov denounced the excesses of Stalin’s one-man rule, attacking the late Soviet ruler’s “intolerance, brutality, and abuse of power”, and the “cult of personality” that had grown up around him.
- 477.
Mátyás Rákosi (born Rosenfeld) (1892–1971), Hungarian communist politician. Ruler de facto of communist Hungary from 1945 to 1956 as General Secretary of the communist party under its two different names. His rule was aligned with Stalin’s. He was removed from office under pressure from the Soviet Politburo in June 1956, and replaced by Ernő Gerő.
- 478.
See above.
- 479.
The circumstances of Bierut’s death are somewhat mysterious: he died in Moscow shortly after attending the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at which Khrushchov delivered his “secret speech” denouncing Stalin.
- 480.
This would seem to be a mistake, since the Minister of Justice removed at the time was Henryk Świątkowski. Note added by Aleksandra Zgorzelska, editor of the first Polish edition
- 481.
Państwowa Komisja Planowania Gospodarczego (PKPG).
- 482.
However Lysenko was removed from his post as director of the Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR only in 1965, after representations were made over several years against him by eminent Soviet scientists such as Zel′dovich, Kapitsa, and Andreĭ Sakharov.
- 483.
Ol′ga Lepeshinskaya, Soviet medical biologist claiming extraordinary results. See above.
- 484.
Scientific advisor to the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party. See above.
- 485.
Jan Mydlarski, Polish zoologist and anthropologist. He was rector of the University of Wrocław just prior to his death.
- 486.
Anthropometry is the “measurement of man”, which plays an important role in industrial design: statistical data about the distribution of body dimensions in a population are used to optimize production.
- 487.
This was a ten-day visit in April 1956 at the invitation of the then British Prime Minister Anthony Eden.
- 488.
The conflict between France and Algerian independence movements between 1954 and 1962, ending in Algerian independence. A civil war was waged concurrently between loyalist Algerians and insurrectionist Algerian muslims. The war led to the collapse of the French Fourth Republic in 1958. During its final months the war evolved into a civil war between pro-French hardliners in Algeria and supporters of General Charles de Gaulle, involving a split in the French Army, with the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS) fighting against both the Algerians and French government forces.
- 489.
As Minister of Culture, Włodzimierz Sokorski was responsible for implementation of the Stalinist doctrine in Poland during the dark period of gross human rights violations committed by the state security forces.
- 490.
Adam Rapacki (1909–1970), Polish politician and diplomat. He was a member of the Polish Socialist Party 1945–1948, and also its successor the Polish United Workers’ Party, and Minister of Foreign Affairs in the cabinet of Józef Cyrankiewicz 1956–1968.
- 491.
The Poznań 1956 uprising was the first of several massive protests of the Polish people against the communist government of the People’s Republic of Poland. After demonstrations by factory workers demanding better conditions were violently suppressed on June 28, 1956, a crowd of around 100,000 gathered at the city center near the UB secret police building. The Polish People’s Army and the Internal Security Corps were ordered to suppress the demonstration, and in doing so fired on the protesting civilians, resulting in the deaths of between 57 and 78 people.
- 492.
Secret Police officers.
- 493.
A trade fair held every year on the Poznań exhibition grounds, starting in 1921.
- 494.
“No pipe dreams”, the infamous response of the Russian Tsar Aleksander II, during his visit to Warsaw in June 1856, to a Polish delegation asking him what the chances were of a relaxation of the Russian grip on the Polish “Kingdom”, the third of Poland ruled from 1815 to 1914 by Russia. Here it is intended to refer to similar intransigence on the part of Bulganin: that Poland should not dream of any relaxation of the Soviet grip.
- 495.
Edward Ochab (1906–1989), Polish communist politician. Promoted to First Secretary of the Party in March 1956, stepping down in October of the same year, when the “Gomułka thaw” began.
- 496.
Polish United Workers’ Party, the communist party of Poland.
- 497.
Zenon Nowak (1905–1980), Polish communist politician in the People’s Republic of Poland. A member of the pro-Soviet faction of the PZPR Central Committee during the “Polish October” of 1956.
- 498.
Franciszek Jóźwiak (1895–1966), Polish communist politician. Commander of the underground Gwardia Ludowa during World War II, and first commandant of the communist state police in postwar Poland.
- 499.
Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny (National Radical Camp), a Polish extreme right-wing, anti-Semitic, anti-communist, nationalist political party formed in 1934. See also Chapter 7 of Volume 1.
- 500.
Zenon Kliszko (1908–1989), Polish communist politician. A close associate of Gomułka. Member of the Polish Politburo 1959–1970.
- 501.
“publicly”
- 502.
Polish anthropologist, ethnologist, and philosopher of religion. Subsequently professor at Warsaw University and other institutions. Lived from 1930 to 2003. (Presumably he was also a member of the group visiting Prague.)
- 503.
A Polish literary and artistic cabaret active in the years 1956–1968.
- 504.
Also called Kazimierz Dolny, a town in the Lublin Voivodeship, on the east bank of the Vistula. It takes its name from Prince Casimir II the Just (1138–1194), a member of the Piast dynasty, and benefactor of the Norbertine nuns who settled on the spot where the town was later founded by King Casimir the Great (1333–1370).
- 505.
Perhaps this refers to the tsarist government of this region during the partitions of Poland, when almost no bridges were built.
- 506.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovskiĭ (1893–1930), Russian and Soviet poet, among the foremost representatives of early 20th century futurism. Placed his genius at the service of the Bolsheviks until disillusionment set in the late 1920s. His suicide has long been considered suspect.
- 507.
The last lines of Mayakovskiĭ’s poem Brooklyn Bridge, written when visiting the US in 1925.
- 508.
RUCH (Movement) was the sign used to advertise the Public Distribution Enterprise “Ruch”, distributors of newspapers, magazines, books, etc.
- 509.
This paragraph continues with the reporting of the travels of the anthropometric team.
- 510.
Sediment formed by an accumulation of wind-blown silt.
- 511.
Polish plait, a disease of the hair and scalp.
- 512.
A small town on the Pomeranian coast near Władysławowo, regarded by many as the most beautiful part of the Polish seacoast.
- 513.
A town on the Baltic Sea in the Kashubian region of Eastern Pomerania.
- 514.
Stating that a contracting self-map of a complete metric space has a unique fixed point.
- 515.
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (1871–1922), French novelist, critic, and essayist. Best known for his monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time).
- 516.
See Chapter 7 of Volume 1.
- 517.
French for the “nail” or “hook” of the show, meaning the main attraction.
- 518.
Polish biologist. See above.
- 519.
Henryk Jabłoński (1909–2003), Polish socialist, from 1948 communist, politician, and professor of history at Warsaw University. Member of the PAN from 1952. Member of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party 1948–1981. Chairman of the State Council of the People’s Republic of Poland 1972–1985.
- 520.
Panteleĭmon Kondratievich Ponomarenko (1902–1984), Red Army general, and, following World War II, a Soviet administrator in Belarus and then Kazakhstan. Member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the USSR 1952–1953, and Soviet ambassador to Poland 1955–1957.
- 521.
Polska Agencja Prasowa (Polish Press Agency).
- 522.
Mahmoud Fawzi (1900–1981), Egyptian diplomat. Foreign Minister under Nasser 1952–1958. Christian Pineau was Foreign Minister of France 1956–1958. (See also above.) John Selwyn Brooke Lloyd, Baron Selwyn-Lloyd (1904–1978), British conservative politician. Foreign Secretary 1955–1960.
- 523.
Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961), Swedish diplomat, economist, and writer. Second Secretary-General of the UN, from 1953 till his death in a plane crash in 1961. President J. F. Kennedy called him “the greatest statesman of our century.”
- 524.
The Suez Crisis was ignited by the announcement of July 26, 1956, by Egypt’s President Nasser that Egypt would nationalize the Suez Canal, in violation of an agreement with France and Britain signed in 1954. On October 29, 1956 Israel invaded the Sinai, and France and Britain bombed Cairo, dropped paratroops into the canal zone, and sent marines to Port Said. Anglo-French forces had withdrawn by the end of the year, but Israeli forces remained until March 1957. International pressure, in particular from the US, ultimately led to the crisis’ being resolved in Egypt’s favor, an outcome considered extremely humiliating for Britain and France, and contributing to a certain amount of hubris on Nasser’s part in pursuing subsequent political and military goals.
- 525.
Natolin is a historic park and nature reserve on Warsaw’s southern edge, and also the name of a neighborhood located to the west of the park. The “Natolin faction” was so named since they used to meet in a government villa located in this neighborhood.
- 526.
Kazimierz Witaszewski (1906–1992), Polish Major-General. Deputy to the postwar National Council and the Sejm of the People’s Republic of Poland 1952–1956. A Stalinist who post-Stalin managed to escape the consequences of his actions. A leading figure in the PZPR till 1971. At the time in question he was head of the office exercising political oversight over the Polish army.
- 527.
Lazar Moiseevich Kaganovich (1893–1991), Soviet politician. Supported Khrushchov against Beria after Stalin’s death, but objected to de-Stalinization, as a result of which he was dismissed from all party and government positions in 1957 and expelled from the Party in 1961.
- 528.
Wacław Komar, arrested and tortured in 1952, was released in 1954, and in 1956 placed in charge of the Internal Troops, that is, those assigned to the Internal Security Service. See also above.
- 529.
A confined district of Warsaw containing several industrial installations, for example, the Żerań Power Plant. The vehicle manufacturing plant in question is, however, not located in Żerań, but in the district Praga North.
- 530.
A town in central Poland, now in the Masovian Voivodeship, about 50 km west of Warsaw.
- 531.
Hungarian communist politician. His second term as Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the People’s Republic of Hungary came to an end when Soviet troops invaded Hungary to put down the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He was executed for treason by the new Soviet-backed government two years later. Lived from 1896 to 1958.
- 532.
Aleksander Zawadzki (1899–1964), Polish communist political figure. Polish head of state from 1952 to 1964.
- 533.
Latin for [It is ordered] that you have the body, a writ or legal action through which a prisoner can be released from detention without adequate cause or evidence. Thought to have originated explicitly with the Magna Carta of 1215, although earlier instances are known.
- 534.
A town in the Haute-Savoie Département in south-eastern France.
- 535.
This was a meeting of the World Peace Council (WPC), founded in 1950, emerging from the Soviet policy of promoting peace campaigns around the world to oppose “warmongering” by the US. Its first president was Frédéric Joliot-Curie. The WPC advocated universal disarmament, sovereignty, independence, and peaceful co-existence of nations, and campaigned against imperialism, weapons of mass destruction, and all forms of discrimination.
- 536.
Infeld had been stripped of his Canadian citizenship during the “Red scare” of a few years earlier.
- 537.
“Put Simply” or “Straight from the Shoulder”.
- 538.
János Kádár (1912–1989), Hungarian communist leader and General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, presiding over Hungary from 1956 till his forced retirement in 1988. During his rule Hungary was stabilised and liberalised to an extent not approached by any other country of the Soviet bloc.
- 539.
Stefan Staszewski (1906–1989), Polish communist apparatchik. During Stalin’s Great Purges he was arrested by the NKVD and sentenced to eight years in Kolyma, part of the Gulag. On his release in 1945 he returned to Poland where he was placed in charge of propaganda, education, and culture for Silesia, later becoming editor-in-chief of the Polish Press Agency. He supported Gomułka during the “Polish October”, but was soon removed from his position of influence. He was expelled from the Party in 1968.
- 540.
Polish historian and politician. Member of the Polish Government-in-Exile during World War II. See also Chapter 13 of Volume 1.
- 541.
An ultra-nationalist movement in Russia in the early 20th century. Loyal to the Romanov dynasty, they were noted for extremist anti-Semitic, xenophobic, russocentric doctrines, and were known to have incited pogroms.
- 542.
This colorful story is now considered as mythical by most historians. According to the official version, Beria was shot only in December, following his trial; but even if he had been killed in June, it seems more likely that he would have been shot by Zhukov or someone under his command.
- 543.
French socialist politician. Prime Minister of France 1956–1957. Lived from 1905 to 1975.
- 544.
A town in the present Lower Silesian Voivodeship.
- 545.
An additional 30,000 Polish Jews who had initially elected to remain in the USSR returned to Poland in 1957.
- 546.
Feliks (Felix) Milgrom (1919–2007), Polish-American immunologist, best known for a simple test for syphilis. He was head of the department of microbiology of the Medical University of Silesia 1954–1957. In 1958 he joined the Department of Microbiology of the University of Buffalo’s School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences in New York, and chaired that department 1967–1985. Recipient of honorary degrees from several European and American universities.
- 547.
Possibly the immunologist Władysław Mański.
- 548.
In 1954, Drobot was promoted to associate professor in the Department of Mathematics of the Wrocław Polytechnic. He was Chairman of that department 1957–1959. Moved to the US in 1959.
- 549.
Member of the landed nobility of Prussia and eastern Germany from the 16th century to the time of the Weimar Republic. Formed the bulwark of Hohenzollern Prussia. The word “Junker” means “squire”. Marx’s wife, Jenny von Westphalen (1814–1881), actually came from the higher Prussian nobility (and moreover her family was connected to the royal Stuarts!).
- 550.
Bernard Stanisław Mond (1887–1957), a Jewish general in the interwar Polish army. Fought in World War I, the Polish-Soviet War, and World War II, most of which he spent in German POW camps. In 1946 he obtained a managerial position in the Polish travel firm “Orbis”, but was dismissed in 1950, subsequently working as a handyman in a warehouse for building materials.
- 551.
American scientist, mathematician, science administrator and advocate. An important figure in obtaining support for science in the US. Director of the Division of Natural Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation 1932–1955, and president of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research from 1958.
- 552.
The detonation of Britain’s first operational H-bomb took place on May 15, 1957, 30 miles off the southern tip of Christmas Island, some 1300 miles south of Hawaii. Two more had been detonated by late June, and yet two more were tested in November of that year. Servicemen stationed on the island were demanding compensation for damaged health from the British government as long as fifty years later. These tests in particular led to the founding of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958.
- 553.
A female who can reel off bons mots, a (female) stand-up comic.
- 554.
A natural gum made of hardened sap from certain species of acacia tree. Used in the food industry as a stabilizer, and also in paint production and cosmetics. It also has various industrial applications such as viscosity control.
- 555.
Probably Adolf Szmosz, Steinhaus’s wife’s brother.
- 556.
That is, the equivalent of 30 four-ducat coins.
- 557.
That is, more than a deviation.
- 558.
Or Academy of Arts and Sciences, a revival in Kraków of the institution of the same name founded there in 1872, but formally absorbed after World War II into the Polish Academy of Sciences. However, it was never formally dissolved, and continues to function as a more-or-less independent institution.
- 559.
Adam Alojzy Krzyżanowski (1873–1963), Polish economist and libertarian theorist. During World War II worked in the Polish underground university. Democratic Party member of the Legislative Sejm 1947–1949. Attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to revive the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in Kraków over the period 1957–1958. Awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta.
- 560.
Polish lawyer specializing in administrative law. Worked in the Faculty of Law of Wrocław University from 1946 to 1949 and again from 1956. Lived from 1912 to 1969. (He was the nephew of Roman Longchamps de Bérier, the last Polish Rector of the University of Lwów before World War II, mentioned in Chapters 8 and 9 of Volume 1.)
- 561.
Polish politician. Deputy Prime Minister 1959–1965.
- 562.
Franciszek Studnicki (1914–1994), Polish lawyer, specialist in the field of legal informatics. Professor at the Jagiellonian University.
- 563.
Jan Gwiazdomorski (1899–1977), Polish lawyer. Professor at the University of Wrocław from 1948 to 1956, when he returned to the Jagiellonian University.
- 564.
Adam Joachim Vetulani (1901–1976), canonist and Polish historian of medieval law. Both before and after the war, professor at the Jagiellonian University.
- 565.
“who has more cannot have less”—probably meaning that once paternity is presumed, there is no detracting from it.
- 566.
Multiple sexual partners.
- 567.
Marshall Harvey Stone (1903–1989), American mathematician. Contributed to real and functional analysis, and the study of Boolean algebras.
- 568.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910–1995), American astrophysicist of Indian origin. Nobel laureate in 1983, joint with William A. Fowler, for discoveries relating to the later evolutionary stages of massive stars. At the University of Chicago from 1937.
- 569.
Bronisław Knaster, perhaps, who is said to have been “famous for his sense of humor”.
- 570.
Kashmir, in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent, has been in recurring territorial dispute since the partition of India in 1947.
- 571.
Valerian Aleksandrovich Zorin (1902–1986), Soviet diplomat and statesman. Soviet representative to the UN 1952–1953 and 1956–1965. Soviet ambassador to France 1965–1971.
- 572.
Dmitriĭ Shepilov (1905–1995), Soviet politician. In 1952 he was commissioned to write a new Soviet economics textbook based on Stalin’s recently published treatise “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR”. In late 1952 he was appointed editor-in-chief of Pravda. In June 1956 he became Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs. He joined an abortive plot to oust Khrushchov from power in 1957, after which he, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Malenkov were themselves ousted from the Central Committee and vilified in the press. He was expelled from the Communist Party in 1962.
- 573.
In 1957 Khrushchov dismissed Molotov from all posts and had him expelled from the Central Committee and the Presidium. This was a move by Khrushchov against old Stalinists. In 1962 Molotov was expelled from the Communist Party.
- 574.
Capital and largest city of Mongolia.
- 575.
The New Economic Policy, or “State Capitalism”, was introduced by Lenin in the Soviet Union in 1921 because of the dire condition of the economy. It allowed small private businesses, including small peasant holdings, to reopen, while maintaining government control of banks, foreign trade, and large-scale industry. The result was a flourishing of economic activity. The policy was ended by Stalin in 1928 with the introduction of his first Five-Year Plan.
- 576.
Folke Bernadotte, Count of Wisborg (1895–1948), Swedish diplomat noted for his arranging the release of around 31,000 prisoners from German concentration camps during World War II, including 450 Danish Jews from Theresienstadt in 1945. Chosen as UN Security Council mediator in the Arab-Israel conflict of 1947–1948, he was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1948 by a militant Zionist group. One of those who made the decision to assassinate him was Yitzhak Shamir, later to become Prime Minister of Israel.
- 577.
The married name of Countess Elsa Bernadotte of Wisborg (1893–1996), one of Folke Bernadotte’s sisters.
- 578.
This was a program broadcast over Radio Free Europe.
- 579.
“Put Simply”
- 580.
Alekseĭ Innokentievich Antonov (1896–1962), Red Army general. Recipient of the Order of Victory for his leadership during World War II. Postwar he was Commander-in-Chief of the Transcaucasus Military District and from 1955 Chief of Staff of the Combined Forces of the Warsaw Pact.
- 581.
One might think that once the People’s Tribunes had ejected the malfeasant editors from the paper, there would be no need to close it down. In any case, what gives the Polish United Workers’ Party the right to close down a non-Party newspaper? Steinhaus’s Note
- 582.
“Revanchist” is a term used since the 1870s for those wishing to reverse territorial losses, for example following a war.
- 583.
“Behold a sign of the times!”
- 584.
Zhukov had been trying to improve the professional caliber of the Soviet armed forces. It was he who in June 1957 had organized the air transport bringing members of the Party’s Central Committee to Moscow from distant regions, thus shifting the political balance in Khrushchov’s favor at the time of the attempt by Molotov and others to oust him. However, Khrushchov could not tolerate Zhukov’s persistent efforts to make the armed forces more autonomous, and in October 1957 he was dismissed as minister of defense and a week later removed from his Party posts, remaining in relative obscurity until Khrushchov’s fall from power in 1964.
- 585.
Rodion Yakovlevich Malinovskiĭ (1898–1967), Soviet military commander in World War II, and Minister of Defense from October 1957 to March 1967.
- 586.
One episode in a history of troubled relations between Turkey and Syria. When Turkey, whose power Russia had been trying to reduce for centuries, mobilized its forces on the Syrian frontier in 1957 in reaction to a possible communist takeover of Syria, Moscow came to Damascus’ support.
- 587.
Named “Laika”, meaning “barker”. There was no expectation that she would survive as the technology for de-orbiting had not yet been developed. She probably died within hours of the launch from overheating due to a malfunction, although this was not revealed till 2002.
- 588.
A Polish idiom meaning “rotten”.
- 589.
Two of Andrzejewski Sr.’s novels, Ashes and Diamonds, about the immediate postwar situation in Poland, and Holy Week, dealing with the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, were adapted into film by Andrzej Wajda. Andrzejewski was co-founder in 1976 of the intellectual opposition association “The Workers’ Defense Committee”.
- 590.
Paweł Hertz (1918–2001), Polish writer, poet, translator, and editor.
- 591.
Juliusz Żuławski (1910–1999), Polish writer of poetry and prose, literary critic, and translator.
- 592.
As did two others expected to be involved in the venture, namely Jan Kott and Adam Ważyk. Note added by Aleksandra Zgorzelska, editor of the first Polish edition
- 593.
The Atomic Energy Act of 1946, determining how the US would manage the nuclear technology it had developed jointly with Britain and Canada. It was sponsored by Senator Brian McMahon, chairman of the US Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy. The act excluded US allies from receiving information on new American developments in nuclear energy, thereby displeasing the British and Canadian governments, which had signed agreements with the US concerning postwar sharing of nuclear technology before contributing technology and manpower to the Manhattan Project. The act was amended in 1958 to allow cooperation between the British and American nuclear programs.
- 594.
Józef Hen (b. 1923), Polish writer and screenwriter.
- 595.
I have been congratulated on this account by Marek Kac, Herman Wold of Uppsala, and Jan Oderfeld. They mainly refer to how well written it is. Steinhaus’s Note
- 596.
Hugo Steinhaus, “Remarks de lege ferenda on the establishment of paternity and maintenance rights”, Prace Wrocławskiego Towarzystwa Naukowego, Seria A63 (1958), pp. 5–19.
- 597.
Polish mathematician. Made contributions to topology, general algebra, information theory, quantum theory, and statistical mechanics. Studied at the University of Wrocław 1948–1952, and completed his Ph.D. there in 1956. Director of the Mathematical Institute of Wrocław University 1967–1978 and 1981–1996, and Rector of the university 1975–1981. Lived from 1930 to 2005.
- 598.
Stefan Żółkiewski, Polish literary historian and politician. See also Chapter 2 of Volume 2.
- 599.
A lottery requiring the marking of five numbers in a 10 × 9 array of the first 90 positive integers. There were payouts for correctly choosing two or more of the winning five numbers. “Liczyrzepa” (in German Rübezahl) is the traditional Polish name for a spirit supposed to dwell in the Karkonosze Mountains forming the border between Bohemia and Silesia. The lottery seems to have been named for him since he was said to sometimes bestow great gifts of gold and medicine on poor peasants.
- 600.
Stanisław Czesław Trybuła (1932–2008), Polish mathematician and statistician. Completed his Master’s degree and Ph.D. under Steinhaus at Wrocław University. From 1968 to 1998 he was a faculty member of the Institute of Mathematics of the Wrocław University of Technology.
- 601.
Other general psychological heuristics employed by players were subsequently brought to light, and published in a paper by Steinhaus et al. in 1960.
- 602.
Deuterium, also called “heavy hydrogen”, is an isotope of hydrogen whose atoms each have a neutron in addition to the usual proton in the nucleus.
- 603.
The fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium atoms as the source of the sun’s heat was first proposed by Sir Arthur Eddington in 1920, motivated in part by Einstein’s equation E = m c 2. By the late 1950s it had become established that most of the elements in the periodic table had been synthesized by means of nuclear fusion reactions in the cores of stars.
- 604.
The Scholl siblings in question were Hans and Sophie Scholl, members of a non-violent student resistance movement in Nazi Germany called the “White Rose”. On February 18, 1943, they were caught distributing anti-Nazi flyers at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and were arrested and sentenced to death by the People’s Court, the execution by guillotine being carried out on the same day as the sentence, February 22, 1943. Their names are memorialized in many places in present-day Munich, and in Germany more widely. In particular, since 1968 there has been a Geschwister-Scholl-Institut (Scholl Siblings Institute) of Political Science in the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. A student proposal to rename the university after the Scholl siblings had earlier been rejected by the university authorities.
- 605.
Roland Freisler.
- 606.
“It is sweet and fitting to die for the fatherland”, a quote from Horace’s Odes.
- 607.
“The dead place an obligation on the living.”
- 608.
Leopold Tyrmand (1920–1985), Polish novelist and publisher of anti-regime newspapers. His diary Dziennik 1954 was much praised for its description of daily life in Stalinist Poland. Emigrated to the US in 1966.
- 609.
The Austrian satirist, essayist, aphorist, playwright, and poet much admired by the author. See e.g. Chapter 6 of Volume 1.
- 610.
Often translated as “Books have their own destinies.” The original Latin expression was Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli (“The fate of books depends on their readers’ capabilities”), a verse from a work by the 2nd century Latin grammarian Terentianus Maurus.
- 611.
Emphasizing, e.g., the fact that the students’ demand to rename that university for the Scholl siblings was rejected.
- 612.
The Good Soldier Švejk, a famous novel made up of farcical incidents befalling a World War I soldier and a satire on the ineptitude of authority figures, by the Czech satirical writer Jaroslav Hašek (1883–1923).
- 613.
The Warsaw Treaty Organization of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance between the eight communist states of eastern Europe, signed on May 14, 1955. The Warsaw Pact was the military complement of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (ComEcon), and was the Soviet military response to the integration of West Germany into NATO in 1955. It was dissolved in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union.
- 614.
The word “deficit” was used very commonly also in the Soviet Union in the sense of “shortage”.
- 615.
Hovercraft?
- 616.
That is, administrative personnel as opposed to miners working for a wage.
- 617.
Edward Ochab was Minister of Agriculture in the period 1957–1959, although not an expert in the field.
- 618.
Originally built in 1637–1641, it was rebuilt in 1660 for King Jan II Kazimierz Waza, from whom it takes its name, and again in 1765–1768. From 1816, with some intervals of closure, it has served as one of the main buildings of Warsaw University.
- 619.
Polish historian of law specialising in Roman law and papyrology. Fled to France and then the US at the outbreak of World War II, returning to Poland in 1947, where he became Chair of the Department of Ancient Law at Warsaw University. Lived from 1881 to 1958.
- 620.
Eisenhower offered credit to Poland in October 1956 in the hope that the “Gomułka thaw” heralded the beginning of “a free and independent Poland.” Although Gomułka complained about the interest rate, an agreement was reached in 1957 on a loan of 95 million dollars.
- 621.
Bolesław Gleichgewicht (b. 1919), Polish mathematician. Served in the Red Army 1942–1945. Graduated in mathematics from the University of Odessa in 1950. Member of the Communist Party of the USSR 1946–1956. Eventually obtained a position at Wrocław University. Following the events of March 1968 he joined the anti-communist opposition movement.
- 622.
The author is referring to the struggle of the Algerians to throw off French colonial rule. The conquest of Algeria by France began in 1830 with the fall of Algiers, but took several more decades to complete. In 1954 the Algerian National Liberation Front launched a struggle for independence. The war ended in 1959 when de Gaulle, newly elected French President, decreed that a plebiscite be held in Algeria, resulting in a landslide vote for complete independence from France. There was violent opposition to this by the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS), consisting of French generals and officers hostile to the negotiations of the Gaullist government. See also above.
- 623.
Félix Gaillard d’Aimé (1919–1970), French radical politician. Prime Minister of France 1957–1958.
- 624.
Raoul Albin Louis Salan (1899–1984), general in the French Army in Indochina and Algeria. In May 1958 led an insurrection of the French army in Algeria calling for the return to power of Charles de Gaulle. Frustrated by the ensuing liberation of Algeria, he, together with three other generals, founded the OAS, and in 1961 organized a putsch against de Gaulle. He was eventually arrested and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and in 1968 he and others were granted amnesty.
- 625.
The original “Committee of Public Safety” was formed in revolutionary France in 1793 by the National Convention. It was the de facto executive branch of government in France during the Reign of Terror (1793–1794).
- 626.
René Coty.
- 627.
The next prime minister was Michel Debré, during whose term of office de Gaulle was elected president (December 1958).
- 628.
According to other sources, because he did not fit in with the political style of the administration of the Ukrainian Academy, Gnedenko was released from all administrative duties in Kiev, and in 1960 took up an offer from Kolmogorov of a position at Moscow State University, where he succeeded Kolmogorov as Head of the Department of Probability Theory, a post he held for the remaining thirty years of his life.
- 629.
As explained below, in the final issue he wasn’t.
- 630.
That is, people born in Australia of European descent.
- 631.
Michael Bialoguski (1917–1984), Ukrainian-born of Polish parents. Medical practitioner and intelligence agent. Educated in Wilno, where he studied the viola at the conservatorium, and enrolled in the medical faculty of Stefan Batory University. In 1941 he emigrated to Australia, where he completed his medical studies at Sydney University.
- 632.
Known as the “Petrov affair”, after the official in question, Vladimir Petrov, Third Secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Canberra. Bialoguski was working part-time for the Australian secret service. When the Soviets tried to abduct Petrov’s wife Evdokia back to the USSR, the Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies intervened to “rescue” her and return her to her husband, whom the Soviets claimed was being held against his will in Australia.
- 633.
Vera Turán (b. 1930), née Sós, was a distinguished mathematician in her own right.
- 634.
Norbert Wiener’s theory of feedback mechanisms.
- 635.
August 14–21, 1958.
- 636.
Nephew of Antoni Łomnicki. See Chapter 7 of Volume 1.
- 637.
Presumably Ulam had attended the Edinburgh Congress and was stopping over in London on his way back to the US.
- 638.
Possibly meaning he looked and acted like a millionaire.
- 639.
Ada Halpern (1922–2011) wrote, in particular, “An Essay on Soviet Hospitality”.
- 640.
Stanisław Krystyn Zaremba, Polish mountaineer and mathematician. Son of Professor Stanisław Zaremba of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. See Chapters 8, 13 of Volume 1.
- 641.
British aircraft manufacturer 1934–1961.
- 642.
After the Battle of Culloden in 1745, the final conflict of the long struggle by the Stuarts to regain the English throne, the English army systematically reduced the highland lords and clan chieftains who had supported the Jacobite cause.
- 643.
Israel Moiseevich Gel′fand (1913–2009), eminent Soviet mathematician. Made major contributions in particular to the representation theory of Lie groups and functional analysis. Professor for many years at Moscow State University. Shortly before his 76th birthday he emigrated to the US, where he obtained a position at Rutgers University.
- 644.
To mark the beginning of the academic year.
- 645.
Published in the author’s Między duchem a materią pośredniczy matematyka (Between Spirit and Matter There Exists Mathematics), Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warszawa–Wrocław 2000, pp. 21–35.
- 646.
The US, Great Britain, and the USSR agreed at this meeting to suspend nuclear testing for one year. A voluntary moratorium continued until broken by the Soviet resumption of testing in 1961.
- 647.
In the end Pasternak reluctantly bowed to pressure and declined the Nobel Prize.
- 648.
The Communist Youth League.
- 649.
Artur Lundkvist (1906–1991), Swedish writer, poet, literary critic, and translator. During the Cold War he was a member of a group advocating a neutral political stance.
- 650.
This was the spacecraft Luna I, launched on January 4, 1959, the first to reach the vicinity of the Moon. A malfunction caused the rocket to fly past the Moon at a distance of around 6000 km, with the result that the satellite took up a heliocentric orbit.
- 651.
A whirlwind tour in January 1959.
- 652.
Cyrus Stephen Eaton (1883–1979), Canadian-born American investment banker, businessman, and philanthropist.
- 653.
A French translation from the German of Robert Jungk’s Heller als Tausend Sonnen (Brighter than a Thousand Suns), published in 1956.
- 654.
Edward Teller (1908–2003), Hungarian-American theoretical physicist. Known as “the father of the H-bomb.” Later in life vigorously supported President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, among other controversial technological solutions to both military and civilian problems.
- 655.
“the genial Polish mathematician”
- 656.
Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs (1911–1988), German-British theoretical physicist and atomic spy. Convicted in 1950 of supplying information from the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos to the USSR during and briefly after World War II. His testimony implicated one Harry Gold (1910–1972), a laboratory chemist convicted of being a courier for Soviet spy rings during the Manhattan Project.
- 657.
The god of fire, blacksmiths, and goldsmiths in ancient Greek mythology. Hephaestus was supposed to be the son of Zeus and Hera.
- 658.
The relevant paper is that by the author and K. Urbanik: “Poissonsche Folgen”, Math. Z. 72 (1959), pp. 127–145. See also K. Urbanik, “Effective processes in the sense of H. Steinhaus”, Studia Math. 17 (1958), pp. 335–348.
- 659.
Founded in 1948 as the principal philosophical journal in Russian, issued under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. It dealt with subjects related to Marxist philosophy.
- 660.
Mikhail Vasilievich Lomonosov (1711–1765), Russian polymath, scientist, and writer. Considered to be the father of modern Russian science and literature.
- 661.
Nikolaĭ Ivanovich Pirogov (1810–1881), was a prominent Russian scientist, medical doctor, pedagogue and public figure. He is considered to be the originator of field surgery and was one of the first to use ether as an anaesthetic.
- 662.
Tadeusz Banaś (1909–1993), a cultural activist connected mainly with Polish Radio in Lwów, and then with Wrocław Radio. Director of Wrocław Radio’s artistic program 1955–1977.
- 663.
Polish movie actress.
- 664.
“Signals”, a Polish cultural and social magazine published 1933–1939 in Lwów, the leading periodical of the leftist Polish intelligentsia of that era. Its editor-in-chief was Karol Kuryluk, and its editorial committee included Tadeusz Banaś, Stanisława Blumenfeld, Halina Górska, and Tadeusz Hollender.
- 665.
Karol Kuryluk (1910–1967), Polish journalist, editor, activist, and politician. Minister of Culture from 1956 to 1958 in the government of Cyrankiewicz. During his term of office he took liberalizing measures opening Polish culture more to the West. Honored in 2002 by Yad Vashem for saving Jews from the Holocaust.
- 666.
Stanisław Rogowski (1911–1940), Polish poet.
- 667.
Meaning that she contributed to its finances. For more on the Blumenfelds see e.g. Chapter 7 of Volume 1.
- 668.
“Poisson sequences”
- 669.
Edward Rydz-Śmigły was appointed Polish Commander-in-Chief when the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Relinquishing this post to Sikorski in October 1939, he escaped to Hungary from internment in Romania in late 1940. He managed to return to Poland in October 1941 to participate in the Polish resistance movement as an ordinary soldier, but died suddenly of heart failure in December 1941. See also Chapter 7 of Volume 1.
- 670.
Hermann Robert Karl Buddensieg (1893–1976), German writer, editor, and translator. After the war, during which he fought as a German soldier, he became a polonist, and in 1963 published a translation of the epic Pan Tadeusz of Mickiewicz.
- 671.
“Mickiewicz Pages”, a journal put out by Hermann Buddensieg thrice yearly from 1956 to 1976.
- 672.
Cyprian Kamil Norwid (1821–1883), nationally esteemed Polish poet, dramatist, painter, and sculptor. Regarded as a second-generation Romantic.
- 673.
“a literary lady”
- 674.
Walter Harry Pitts Jr. (1923–1969), American logician. Worked in cognitive psychology, proposing theoretical formulations of neural activity and emergent processes which influenced diverse fields such as cognitive science, philosophy, neuroscience, computer science, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence. With Warren McCulloch he proposed the first mathematical model of a neural network.
- 675.
N. Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Paris, Hermann & Cie. and Camb. Mass., MIT Press. Second revised ed. 1961.
- 676.
Jean Buridan (1300–1358), a French priest who sowed the seeds of the Copernican revolution in France. He developed the concept of “impetus”, a forerunner of the modern concept of inertia. “Buridan’s ass” is meant as a satire of Buridan’s philosophy of moral determinism, referring to a hypothetical situation where an ass is placed exactly midway between two haystacks and dies of hunger since it is unable to make a rational decision as to which haystack it should approach.
- 677.
That is, by extrapolating from samples of workers’ activity over various time intervals.
- 678.
See H. Steinhaus, “The problem of estimation”, Ann. Math. Statist. 28 (1957), pp. 633–648.
- 679.
A valley in the Tatra Mountains.
- 680.
Alpine rose, an alpine rhododendron resembling a thornless rose.
- 681.
Now a southern suburb of Wisła, a town in the Silesian Voivodeship, southern Poland, situated in the Silesian Beskid mountain range. The river Wisła (Vistula) has its source in the mountains near the town.
- 682.
Polish lawyer and economist. Editor of the Ekonomista 1904–1928, and a professor at the Free Polish University from 1927. Lived from 1876 to 1941.
- 683.
See Chapter 4 of Volume 1.
- 684.
“bottom” or “bum”.
- 685.
Tarski’s biographers state that “along with his contemporary Kurt Gödel he changed the face of logic in the 20th century….”
- 686.
Possibly Dana Scott (b. 1932), American mathematician. Currently emeritus Hillman University Professor of Computer Science, Philosophy, and Mathematical Logic at Carnegie Mellon University.
- 687.
This was the spacecraft Luna 2, launched on September 12, 1959.
- 688.
Thomas Andrew Lehrer (b. 1928), American singer-songwriter, satirist, pianist, and mathematician. Best known for the pithy satirical songs he recorded in the 1950s and 1960s.
- 689.
Greek for moon.
- 690.
That is, Khrushchov.
- 691.
Located adjacent to the Gettysburg Battlefield, the farm served President Eisenhower as a weekend retreat and a meeting place for visiting world leaders. It is now part of the Eisenhower National Historic Site.
- 692.
Latin for a great landed estate, applied originally to Roman farming estates.
- 693.
Russian for wealthy landowners.
- 694.
Acronym for the Association of Polish Stage and Film Artists.
- 695.
Irena Krzywicka, née Goldberg (1899–1994), Polish feminist, writer, journalist, and translator. Collaborated with Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński in the promotion of “conscious motherhood”, contraception, and sex education. Ran a literary salon in Warsaw 1955–1962. Left Poland with her son Andrzej in 1962.
- 696.
Andrzej (André) Tadeusz Krzywicki (1937–2014), Polish-French physicist, a professor in France from 1963.
- 697.
An acute viral, infectious disease. In a small proportion of those infected the virus enters the central nervous system, destroying motor neurons, resulting in muscle weakness and acute flaccid paralysis. From 1910 there was a dramatic increase in polio cases worldwide, with frequent, regular epidemics, until vaccines were developed in the 1950s.
- 698.
That is, accord him the rights of a lawful son.
- 699.
Bogdan Suchodolski (1907–1992), Polish philosopher, historian of science and culture, and teacher.
- 700.
Dutch electrical engineer and physicist. Worked mainly in radio wave propagation and the theory of electrical circuits. The van der Pol oscillator is named after him. Lived from 1889 to 1959.
- 701.
Thales’ theorem, named after the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus (ca. 624–546 BC), is usually considered to be the one stating that in a triangle inscribed in a circle having a diameter as base, the base always subtends a right angle. The author seems to be referring here to the theorem that in an isosceles triangle the angles opposite the equal sides are equal, of which there is a very simple proof involving congruence of the triangle with itself.
- 702.
Pappus of Alexandria (ca. 290–350 AD), last great Greek mathematician of antiquity. His best known work A Collection, most of which survives, covers a wide range of topics, including geometry—in particular treatments of polygons and polyhedra—and recreational mathematics. Known for “Pappus’ Theorem” of projective geometry.
- 703.
Jan Czekanowski, Polish anthropologist, statistician, and linguist. Presumably he was involved somehow in the project in question.
- 704.
Witold Juliusz Kapuściński (1910–1988), Polish eye doctor, poet, and writer. Taught in the underground university in Warsaw during World War II. Professor at Wrocław University and the Wrocław Medical Academy 1946–1980.
- 705.
Names of inimical individuals or peoples sometimes associated in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptures with apocalyptic events or conflicts related to the coming of the world’s end.
- 706.
Carl Gottfried Neumann (1832–1925), German mathematician. Worked, in particular, on the Dirichlet principle. Considered one of the pioneers of the theory of integral equations. Joint founder with Alfred Clebsch of the journal Mathematische Annalen.
- 707.
Albert Turner Bharucha-Reid (1927–1985), world-renowned black American probabilist. Also published in mathematical biology. Held positions at Columbia University, Berkeley, the University of Oregon, and Wayne State University, and, from 1981, the Georgia Institute of Technology and then Atlanta University.
- 708.
Eugeniusz Szyr (1915–2000), Polish communist politician, and a former major in the Polish Army. Deputy prime minister from October 1959 to March 1972. Chair of the Committee for Science and Technology 1963–1968.
- 709.
Tadeusz Gede (1911–1982), Polish politician. Deputy prime minister of Poland from November 1952 to March 1956.
- 710.
Polish party activist. Secretary of the Central Committee of the PZPR 1955–1956 and 1957–1960. Member of the politburo 1956–1960. Lived from 1918 to 2012.
- 711.
Former Ph.D. student of the author; see above.
- 712.
French for: “a young booby of communist observance whose face has the Kalmyk cast, [noticeable] even compared to his colleagues.”
- 713.
Of 1956, when Gomułka took control of the government. See above.
- 714.
City Projects Office.
- 715.
See above.
- 716.
A journal devoted to “advances in operations and logistics research” founded in 1954.
- 717.
H. Steinhaus, “Definitions for a Theory of Games and Pursuits.” Naval Res. Log. Quarterly 7 (1960), pp. 105–108.
- 718.
“voluntarily”
- 719.
The so-called “Fourth Partition” of Poland was initially ordained at the 1815 Congress of Vienna, dividing the Duchy of Warsaw between Prussia, Russia, and Austria. In 1832 the “Congress Kingdom” of central-east Poland was incorporated into Russia, and in 1846 the Republic of Kraków into the Austrian Empire. Poland attained independence in 1918, at the end of World War I.
- 720.
This was effectively part of the Russian Revolution of 1905, linked to the defeats endured by Russian forces in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, which grew out of rival imperial ambitions of the Russian and Japanese Empires in Manchuria and Korea.
- 721.
The 1905 strike by over 400,000 Polish workers in the Kingdom of Poland was the prelude to an even larger series of strikes which rocked Poland in the following year, involving over a million Poles, including university and high school students and even some students from elementary schools, demanding the right to study in the Polish language. In some areas of Poland the school strike went on for another two years.
- 722.
Michał Drzymała (1857–1937) was a Polish peasant living before World War I in Greater Poland, the northwestern region of Poland under Prussian rule from the early 19th century till 1918. He became a Polish folk hero because after being denied permission to build a house on his own land by the local Prussian authorities through being Polish, he bought a circus wagon and made it his home, thereby taking advantage of the Prussian law according to which any dwelling constituted a home if stationary for more than a day. The publicity given to his manoeuver energized Polish resistance to Prussian rule and turned Drzymała himself into a heroic figure for the Poles.
- 723.
The Prussian Settlement Commission, active from 1886 to 1918, was set up by Bismarck to increase land ownership at the expense of Poles, by both economic and political means, in the German’s eastern provinces of West Prussia and the Province of Posen. Germanization of the areas of western Poland under German rule had been going on for some time prior to this, for instance under Frederick the Great in the 18th century.
- 724.
A “unique phenomenon” or “unique pecularity”.
- 725.
In May, 1926, Piłsudski attacked Warsaw, and ordered troops to march on Lwów to cut off the advancing forces of General Sikorski. Piłsudski’s “May coup d’état”, overthrowing the government headed by Wojciechowski as president and Witos as prime minister, marked the beginning of the Sanation government of Poland, with Kazimierz Bartel as prime minister and Ignacy Mościcki as president. However, Piłsudski was effectively dictator until his death in 1935. See also Chapter 7 of Volume 1.
- 726.
The name of the sword used in the coronation ceremonies of most kings of Poland from 1320 to 1764. The Polish word “szczerba” means “gap” or “notch”.
- 727.
In November 1958, Ernest Hemingway invited his Polish translator Bronisław Zieliński to his home in Ketchum, Idaho, and arranged for royalties from the translation of Green Hills of Africa plus an additional thousand dollars to be used to fund a prize for the best novel of the year in Poland. Incidentally, Hemingway was a great admirer of Conrad’s novels.
- 728.
Acronym for Związek Autorów i Kompozytorów Scenicznych (Polish Society of Theatrical Authors and Composers), a Polish organization representing authors and composers, with the mission of “defending their rights under copyright.”
- 729.
Polish writer, journalist, essayist, screenwriter, and translator—in particular of works of Conrad. At some time president of the Polish Writers’ Union and the Association of Polish Writers. Fought with the Polish underground forces during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Lived from 1919 to 2003.
- 730.
Born in Kielce in 1927, Dawid’s schooling stopped in 1939, when Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland were prohibited from attending school. Dawid began a diary in Krajno on March 21, 1940, and the last entry is dated June 1, 1942, when he was in Bodzentyn. In it, in addition to describing the countryside, he recounts the horrors of village life under the Nazis. Towards the end of 1942 the Jewish community of Bodzentyn was sent with other wagonloads of Jews to Treblinka extermination camp. The diary was left with his next-door neighbor and friend Tadeusz Waciński. Its contents became widely known only in 1957, and since then have caught worldwide attention and interest.
- 731.
Polish socialist journalist and writer. Lived from 1918 to 1975.
- 732.
Kultura (Culture) was a leading Polish-émigré literary and political magazine published between 1947 and 2000 by the Instytut Literacki (Literary Institute), initially based in Rome, and then in Paris, whence its popular name Kultura Paryska (Parisian Culture). Its editor and publisher was Jerzy Giedroyc (1906–2000), Polish writer and political activist.
- 733.
Published in Poland as Pamiętnik Dawida Rubinowicza (“The Diary of Dawid Rubinowicz”), edited by Adam Rutkowski, Preface by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Epilogue by Maria Jarochowska, “Książka i Wiedza”, Warszawa 1960 (print run 30,000 copies).
- 734.
Gaius Julius Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Commentaries on the Gallic War).
- 735.
Annelies Marie “Anne” Frank (1929–1945), famous German-Jewish diarist. Born in Frankfurt in Weimar Germany, she lived most of her life near Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Her diary documents her experiences during the German occupation of the Netherlands. In hiding from 1942, she and her family were betrayed to the Nazis in 1944 and transported to concentration camps. Anne and her sister Margot were eventually transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died in February or March 1945.
- 736.
David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), a founder and first Prime Minister of Israel 1948–1954, serving again from 1955 to 1963. He was born in Płońsk, Congress Poland, then part of the Russian Empire.
- 737.
Wife of Tadeusz Huskowski, mathematics adjunct, and later director of the Computing Center of the Wrocław Polytechnic. See also above.
- 738.
Franciszek Szczotka, Polish mathematician. Later emigrated to Germany. Note added by Roman Duda, editor of the second Polish edition
- 739.
A Wrocław settlement in the administrative district of Psie Pole.
- 740.
One of the five administrative districts of Wrocław, lying to that city’s northeast. The name means “Dog’s Field”.
- 741.
In fact, 3:100.
- 742.
That is, parity with the ruble—which, however, the Soviet government rated unreasonably high against the US dollar, as was made clear by the demand for dollars on the black market in the USSR, despite severe punishment—up to execution—for trafficking in dollars.
- 743.
The millennium of the existence of the Polish State, the commemoration of which was proclaimed by the Sejm for the years 1960–1966. The thousandth anniversary was dated from the adoption of Christianity by Mieszko I, Duke of Poland, in 966, and with the establishment of the medieval monarchy. However, the communist authorities were concerned that the celebration be mainly of secular character.
- 744.
The sessions of the West German Bundestag were held in Bonn from 1949 until its move to Berlin in 1999.
- 745.
“Ostforschung” scientist, Nazi officer, and German politician. Pre-World War II devised plans for eliminating the Jewish and Polish populations of the territories to be conquered by Germany, and during the war supported the ethnic cleansing policies of the Nazi regime. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, he served as a contact officer with Nazi collaborationists on the Eastern Front. After the war served as Federal Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees, and Victims of War in the Second and Third Cabinets of Chancellor Adenauer, from 1953 to 1960. Member of the Bundestag 1953–1961 and 1963–1965. Lived from 1905 to 1998. The charge that he participated in the massacre of Lwów professors when serving as political officer of the Ukrainian “Nachtigall Battalion”, one of two military units formed by the Abwehr in February 1941 and manned primarily by Polish citizens of Ukrainian ethnicity directed to fight on the German side under the umbrella of Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, was not established at that time. Despite this, he was tried and sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment by an East German political court.
- 746.
Her name was Katarzyna Demko, arrested while a guest at the home of Professor Tadeusz Ostrowski, who, together with his wife and their other guests, was also arrested.
- 747.
Here the author is criticizing the line of reasoning of the Polish government in adhering slavishly to the Soviet one, in particular in its policy towards West Germany and its government. Partial normalization of Polish-West German relations had to wait till 1970, with the signing of the Treaty of Warsaw, and full normalization till 1990 with the German-Polish Border Treaty.
- 748.
Khrushchov was then First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian SSR.
- 749.
Gleichgewicht obtained his doctorate from the University of Wrocław in 1961.
- 750.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the US for spying for the USSR. See above.
- 751.
Leon Kruczkowski (1900–1962), Polish writer and publicist, and prominent figure in Polish theater post-World War II. Deputy Minister of Culture and Art 1946–1948. Member of the Polish Council of State from 1957.
- 752.
Possibly Halina Świderska, Polish author.
- 753.
The Paris Commune of 1871 ruled Paris from March to May of that year. It consisted largely of workers and lower-middle class Parisians concerned to secure democratic government for Paris, following the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War, the siege of Paris by German forces, and the fall of Napoleon III. The Commune received strong support from the large community of political refugees from outside France, most notably from the Polish ex-officer Jarosław Dąbrowski, its most competent general. The uprising was quelled with much bloodshed by forces of the Thiers government from outside Paris.
- 754.
Probably Adolf Szmosz, Stefa’s brother.
- 755.
This refers to the authorities’ wish that readers be oblivious of censorship.
- 756.
Franz Rellich (1906–1955), Austrian-Italian mathematician. Made significant contributions to mathematical physics through his work on partial differential equations and linear operators on Hilbert space. Forced out of Göttingen for his anti-Nazi position, he returned there as director of the Mathematical Institute in 1946.
- 757.
German mathematician. Worked in the theory of functions and mathematical physics. Lived from 1831 to 1889. Runge’s wife was in fact the daughter of Emil, not Paul.
- 758.
German physician and physiologist, discoverer of nerve action potential, and the father of experimental electrophysiology. Lived from 1818 to 1896.
- 759.
“We do not know and never will.”
- 760.
Andrzej Krzywicki (b. 1928), Polish mathematician. From 1996 professor at the University of Wrocław.
- 761.
“he was indeed a Pole” (German)
- 762.
Lichtenstein worked as an electrical engineer with the firm Siemens & Halske from 1902 to 1910, when he became Privatdozent at the Berlin Technische Hochschule.
- 763.
“One cannot but grant him a certain talentlessness.”
- 764.
See Chapter 7 of Volume 1.
- 765.
Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer (1881–1966), Dutch mathematician and philosopher. Famous for his work in topology, and for his championing of “intuitionism” or “constructivism” in mathematics. Contributed also to set theory, measure theory, and complex analysis.
- 766.
Pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon, and photographer. Most famous for his stories Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass.
- 767.
A poem written by Lewis Carroll in 1874, describing “with infinite humor the impossible voyage of an improbable crew to find an inconceivable creature.”
- 768.
This occurred on May 1, 1960. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was flying a US U-2 high altitude surveillance plane. Coming two weeks before the scheduled opening of an East-West summit in Paris, the incident was a great embarrassment to the US. Not knowing Powers had survived, the US initially scrambled to formulate a cover-up until Khrushchov revealed that they were holding the pilot. The incident led to a marked deterioration in relations between the US and the USSR.
- 769.
Christian Archibald Herter (1895–1966), American politician and statesman. Governor of Massachusetts 1953–1957, and US Secretary of State 1959–1961.
- 770.
A river in the French Département of the same name where the “Battle of the Marne” was fought between September 5 and September 12, 1914, effectively ending the month-long German offensive that opened World War I.
- 771.
At the age of seventeen Malinovskiĭ was sent as a member of the Western Front Russian Expeditionary Corps to fight in France. After the Russian revolution, such Russian units were disbanded, but Malinovskiĭ continued fighting the Germans in the French Foreign Legion. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre and promoted to senior NCO. He returned to Russia in 1919 and joined the Red Army in the Civil War with the White Army, serving with distinction in Siberia. He joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1926.
- 772.
The International Chopin Piano Competition dates from 1927. Competitions were held in 1927, 1932, 1937, 1949, 1955, and every five years from then on.
- 773.
Ukrainian pianist. Runner-up at the sixth Chopin Competition in 1960. Settled in London in 1985, where she taught at the Royal College of Music.
- 774.
Polish poet, essayist, and translator. See also above.
- 775.
Bolesław Piasecki (1915–1979), Polish politician and writer. Between the wars a prominent nationalist, during World War II converted to communism following his arrest by the NKVD as a participant in the Polish resistance. A member of the Polish Sejm from 1965, and member of the Polish Council of State 1971–1979.
- 776.
Roman Zambrowski (1909–1977), influential Polish communist activist of Jewish background. Held many positions in the Polish government and the Party. Removed from the Party in 1968 for allegedly instigating the Polish political crisis of that year.
- 777.
Stanisław II August Poniatowski (1732–1798), last King and Grand Duke of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1764–1795). At the Third Partition of the Commonwealth in 1795 he was forced to abdicate, and lived till his death in St. Petersburg as a virtual prisoner of Catherine the Great.
- 778.
Polish diplomat and economist. See above.
- 779.
Distinguished Polish economist. See above.
- 780.
Izaak Wirszup (1915–2008), Polish-American mathematician and mathematical educationalist. Spent two years in concentration camps during World War II. After the war went first to France and then, in 1949, to the US, where Antoni Zygmund obtained a position for him at the University of Chicago. There he devoted himself to improving mathematics education in America.
- 781.
Note that Mazurkiewicz died in 1945, so this must pertain to the pre-war period.
- 782.
Zygmunt Szparkowski (1902–1988), Polish engineer, automation expert, and computer scientist. Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering at the Wrocław Polytechnic from 1950, where he co-founded the Departments of Communications and Electronics. Rector of the Polytechnic 1960–1969.
- 783.
“at all costs”
- 784.
Jerzy Słupecki (1904–1987), Polish logician of the Lwów-Warsaw school. Studied under Jan Łukasiewicz. Involved in underground education in Poland during World War II. Habilitated at Jagiellonian University in 1947, after which he took up a position at the University of Wrocław, becoming head of the Department of Mathematical Logic.
- 785.
The Polish armed forces organized in Galicia in 1914. Ultimately they were separated into three brigades, the First, under Piłsudski, the Second, under Józef Haller de Hallenburg, and the Third, under Zygmunt Zieliński and later Bolesław Roja, formed in 1915. These fought as part of the Austro-Hungarian forces during World War I, but at war’s end, when Poland regained its independence, they became part of Poland’s national armed forces. See also Chapter 6 of Volume 1.
- 786.
“Below the Peaks”
- 787.
Kasprowy Wierch is a mountain in the Western Tatras, since 1910 popular for skiing.
- 788.
“Bitter Hall” or “Bitter Valley”.
- 789.
A mountain in the main crest of the High Tatras, on the Polish-Slovak border.
- 790.
The expression \(\sqrt{\varLambda } = \frac{1} {2}(\sqrt{n} + 1)^{-1}\) gives the mean error of the estimate for the value Λ of a game between a statistician (S) and the devil (D), as described in: H. Steinhaus, “The problem of estimation”, Ann. Math. Statist. 28 (1957), pp. 633–648.
- 791.
A town in southern Poland in the Lesser Poland Voivodeship.
- 792.
“according to the law pertaining to that art” (Latin), i.e., correctly.
- 793.
After de Gaulle’s accession to power in France during the crisis of May 1958, he moved progressively towards granting Algerian independence. A referendum in Algeria was decisively in favor of independence, and this was granted in 1962. The Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS), consisting of opponents of Algerian independence, continued agitating against the move by terrorist means.
- 794.
The period 1960–1966 of turmoil in the First Republic of the Congo, beginning with independence from Belgium and ending with the seizing of power by Joseph Mobutu. Some 100,000 Congolese died over the period, including the first Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, executed after being deposed in a coup in early 1961.
- 795.
Henryk Golański (1908–1995), Polish engineer and politician. A high-ranking official in the Ministry of Higher Education from 1950, rising to minister in 1959.
- 796.
“thunderbolt”
- 797.
The name of a legendary Persian queen, the storyteller of the Thousand and One Nights.
- 798.
Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890), British geographer, explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, linguist, poet, diplomat, etc.
- 799.
Tadeusz P. Szafer, Polish architect, urban planner, and art historian at the Kraków Polytechnic.
- 800.
The Axiom of Determinacy, a possible axiom for set theory, was introduced in the paper “A mathematical axiom contradicting the axiom of choice”, by Jan Mycielski and Hugo Steinhaus in Bull. Acad. Polon. Sci. Sér. Sci. Math. Astronom. Phys. 10 (1962), pp. 1–3. It states that in a two-person game of length ω with perfect information, in which the players successively choose integers, one of the players has a winning strategy. This axiom is inconsistent with the Axiom of Choice, since it implies in particular that every subset of the real line is Lebesgue measurable.
- 801.
The USS George Washington was the world’s first nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, “with whose entry into service in December 1959 the US instantly gained the most powerful deterrent force imaginable, namely a stealth platform with enormous nuclear firepower”.
- 802.
Two-stage solid-fuel nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.
- 803.
Jerzy Mycielski (1930–1986), Polish theoretical physicist. Graduated from Wrocław University in 1952, and obtained a position at the Wrocław Polytechnic. From 1954 was associated with Warsaw University and the Physics Institute of the PAN.
- 804.
Mathematics professor at the University of Wrocław. See also above.
- 805.
Wife of Engineer Witek. See above.
- 806.
Anton von Galgótzy (1837–1929), army general in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Known for his eccentric behavior.
- 807.
Name used for members of rebel bands operating in the Balkans during the final period of the Ottoman Empire, fighting, in particular, against Turkish authority in Macedonia.
- 808.
Polish archeologist. Became professor of prehistory at the newly founded University of Poznań in 1919. From 1934 led the excavation of the iron-age settlement of Biskupin, resumed following the war, during which he was in hiding. Lived from 1885 to 1969.
- 809.
Adolf Otto Eichmann (1906–1962), German Nazi and SS-Obersturmbannführer. One of the major organizers of the Holocaust, in charge of the mass deportations of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe. In 1960 he was captured in Argentina by Mossad operatives and taken to Israel to face trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was found guilty and executed by hanging in 1962.
- 810.
Former Stalinist member of the Party and anti-intellectual. See also above.
- 811.
Stanisław Sabin Szeligowski (1887–1966), Polish astronomer originally from Kraków. Between the wars he held a position at Stefan Batory University in Wilno, and from 1949 was associated with Wrocław University.
- 812.
“in a public forum” (Latin)
- 813.
“the duty to learn [instead of] the right to teach”
- 814.
That is, before the political reversal of October 1956, when Gomułka was reinstated as First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party.
- 815.
Polish philosopher and psychologist. Founder of the Lwów-Warsaw school of philosophy, the most significant such school in the history of Poland. Lived from 1866 to 1938.
- 816.
In 1930 a petition was signed by many Polish professors protesting the imprisonment at Marshal Piłsudski’s instigation of members of the former political opposition in the Brest Fortress. Piłsudski’s government reacted by curtailing academic freedom. See Chapter 7 of Volume 1.
- 817.
“Ghetto” was originally the name of the Jewish quarter in Venice, established in 1516, in which the city’s Jews were compelled to live.
- 818.
David Lloyd George (1863–1945), British liberal politician. Prime Minister of Great Britain at the head of a wartime coalition government 1916–1922. A major player in the Paris Peace Conference of January 1919, which resulted in the Treaty of Versailles and other treaties aimed at laying the foundations for future international relations—foundations which in the event proved very insecure.
- 819.
Steinhaus actually means Archduke Friedrich, Duke of Teschen (Cieszyn in Polish) (1856–1936), a member of the House of Habsburg, and Supreme Commander of the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I.
- 820.
From the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had ceased to exist. The author wants to show through these examples and the following one that involvement with politicians and others outside the Academic fold does not ultimately redound to a university’s benefit.
- 821.
Important figures in interwar Poland. Mościcki was president of the Republic of Poland from June 1926 to September 30, 1939, while Rydz-Śmigły was General Inspector of the Armed Forces. Beck was at that time Minister of Foreign Affairs. See also Chapter 7 of Volume 1.
- 822.
Members of the landed nobility of Prussia and eastern Germany, mostly descended from old feudal nobility.
- 823.
“I offer freely, I profess, I practice (as),…”
- 824.
Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599–1660), Spanish painter. The leading artist in the court of King Philip IV.
- 825.
At that time Secretary of the Propaganda Section of the Wrocław branch of the Polish United Workers’ Party.
- 826.
“Critical discourse analysis” seeks to analyze texts in this way. Compare the Marxian claim that a writer cannot help unconsciously expressing the viewpoint of his class.
- 827.
Ol′ga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya (1912–1995), mistress of Boris Pasternak. The inspiration for the character of Lara in Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago. She was first arrested in 1950 as “an accomplice of a spy” and sentenced to five years in the Gulag, but was released in 1953 after Stalin’s death. After Pasternak’s death in 1960 she was arrested a second time, together with her daughter, on the grounds that in their contacts with Western publishers on Pasternak’s behalf they had been dealing in hard currency. Her daughter served two years and Ivinskaya four of the eight of her sentence. She was rehabilitated only in 1988, under Gorbachev.
- 828.
Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871), English mathematician.
- 829.
The axiom was subsequently changed, however. See: Jan Mycielski, Hugo Steinhaus, “A mathematical axiom contradicting the axiom of choice”, Bull. Acad. Polon. Sci. Sér. Sci. Math. Astronom. Phys. 10 (1962), pp. 1–3.
- 830.
Polish politician and writer. See above.
- 831.
There were undocumented accusations that members of the NSZ had engaged at various times in the murder of Jews.
- 832.
Probabilistic sequences, or sequences of random variables.
- 833.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917–1963), President of the US 1961–1963.
- 834.
Anti-Semitic laws introduced at the 1935 Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party.
- 835.
More likely this was Averkiĭ Borisovich Aristov (1903–1973), Soviet politician and diplomat. Dismissed from the Politburo in 1961, he was ambassador to Poland from February 1961 to February 1971, succeeding Piotr Andreevich Abrasimov, Soviet ambassador in Warsaw from 1957 to February 1961.
- 836.
A lady the author met on a holiday in the mountains in 1950. See above.
- 837.
Stanisław S. Świerczkowski, Polish mathematician, left Wrocław University for Australia and then the US.
- 838.
Polish chemist. Professor at the Wrocław Polytechnic.
- 839.
This may possibly be Bolesław Olszewicz (1893–1972), Polish geographer and early recruit to Wrocław University.
- 840.
Antoni Knot (1904–1982), Polish historian and librarian. Director of the Wrocław University Library 1945–1963.
- 841.
Tadeusz Szczęsny Owiński (1904–1995), Polish physician, surgeon, and stomatologist. He collaborated with Antoni Cieszyński in Lwów before World War II. Postwar he founded the school of stomatology in Wrocław, where he was professor of surgery.
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Steinhaus, H. (2016). Wrocław 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_4
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