VISIT TO POLAND The author travels to the land of his birth 'and

makes a tour of some of its ruined but reviving

universities. Last in a sertes of three articles

I WENT to Poland at the invitation of the Ministry of Education to lecture on theoretical physics at its universi­

ties and to acquaint myself with the Government's plans for the organization of higher learning. I looked forward to the visit with longing, and also with dread. Poland is the country of my birth. The longing for the country of one's childhood is the longing for youth. Yet Poland is not only the land of my youth; it is also a land of death. There my fam­ily, including my younger sister, whom I loved most dearly, was murdered by the Nazis. I do not even know in what man­ner they died.

Before I entered Poland, I made an important resolution to which I adhered: I decided that if I did not like something about the country I would tell my hosts about it first, and not save my impres­sions until I had left. This resolution proved to be a happy one. At first I did not feel that I received the full confi­dence of the Polish officials, but as I talked freely about the things that I liked and disliked, I experienced the pleasant realization that confidence in me in­creased. Indeed, the Poles were more in­terested in my criticisms than in my praise. The higher officials in the Minis­try of Education often argued with me, explaining why certain things were done for historical or ideological reasons, but they seemed grateful that I did not come to them with platitudes of approval or dogmatic disbelief.

When I arrived at the WaF saw airfield, two gentlemen were waiting for me. One introduced himself as the under-secre­tary in charge of universities and re­search in the Ministry of Education, a Mr. W. Michajlow. He greeted me in the name of his Ministry and introduced the other man, whom I later called "my guardian." He is assistant to the chair of theoretical physics in Warsaw Universi­ty, and he had a leave of absence for a month to be my escort throughout my visit.

We got into a car to drive to my hotel. I remember well the old Warsaw, where I lived more than 20 years ago. Now we drove through the remnants of streets and past ske1etons of buildings more

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by Leopold Infeld

thoroughly ruined than those I had seen in Berlin. My companions told me the names of the streets we passed. I remem­bered the names well, but could not recognize the streets. Yet Warsaw was much less depressing than I had antici­pated. In Berlin I had seen dead people walking on dead streets; in Warsaw, the people were wonderfully alive. The streets were overHowing with them. They were dressed modestly, yet with a cer­tain elegance that comes not from wealth but from a natural dignity. Work­ers, women and officers stood in orderly lines waiting for streetcars-a strange sight to one who knew only the old Poland. When we came to Nowy Swiat (New World), one of the principal streets of old Warsaw, I felt greatly cheered. Now largely rebuilt, Nowy Swiat and its prolongation (called Stal­in's Alley) is almost as beautiful as it ever was.

I had a comfortable room with a large bath in Warsaw's best rebuilt hotel, the Bristol. The hotel houses a number of embassies and legations, among them the Canadian Legation, where I later had several pleasant visits with the Canadian charge d'affaires, the distinguished poet Kenneth Kirkwood.

Michajlow discussed with me the itinerary for my visit. He urged that I give as many lectures as I could, in War­saw and in other university towns, and asked me to study the Ministry of Edu­cation's new plans for graduate and un­dergraduate teaching in science, espe­cially in phYSics and mathematics. He suggested that I begin by visiting the Warsaw UniverSity phYSics laboratory next day and have a talk with its head, Stefan Pienkowski, a former rector of the University. Michajlow told me that my escort would visit me every morning to arrange appointments for me with whomever I wished, and that a car and chauffeur were at my disposal for my stay in Warsaw. Moreover, my hotel bill and expenses in Warsaw were to be paid by the Ministry.

Michajlow, as under-secretary in charge of universities, did not at first

. strike me as a very spectacular person, but I became more and more impressed

with him as time went on. Tactful, un­derstanding and a very hard worker, he turned out to be one of the most intelli­gent and devoted civil servants I have ever met.

My escort, it soon developed, was practically indispensable. Telephones are so rare in W.arsaw that whenever I wished to see anyone I had to ask my escort to go trotting off to make an ap­pointment for me. This was the case even when I wanted to visit officials at the Government offices, for their telephones were almost constantly busy. My faithful escort contributed greatly to the comfort and efficiency of my visit.

The third man whom.I met daily, my chauffeur, was my only close contact with "the people." A witty man with no great interest in politics, he talked to me by the hour about Warsaw. He knew every neighborhood of the city-how it looked two years ago, and how it will look 10 years from now. He showed me the sites of the bloodiest fighting during the war. He had taken part in the War­saw uprising, and knew the history of every building, almost of every stone. This, I discovered, was typical of War­saw citizens. Their city is not merely a town they live in, but like a woman they love. Even those who severely criticize the Government grant it one great vir­tue: it is rebuilding their beloved town. No one can fail to be impressed with the job done by the Polish Government in rebuilding its capital.

My first call in Warsaw WRS 01'1 Mme' ..

Z. Korman, a good friend whom I had last seen some 20 years ago. A war widow, she is now a professor of history at Warsaw University, and it was she who had taken the initiative in having me invited to Poland. To reach her home we had to pass through the Jewish Ghet­to. Where once some 300,000 people lived, nothing now remains except acres of weed-grown rubble, without the slightest trace of a wall or building. The only signs of life in this void are a street­car line and road cutting through it and a monument erected to the fighters of the Ghetto, with two Polish soldiers guard­ing it. Nothing that I have ever seen was

© 1949 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC

as expressive of human suffering as these acres of rubble. It is the intention of the Polish Government never to build up this place. It will remain forever a monu­ment to human degradation-and hero­ism.

Shaken by this experience, I was re­lieved when we arrived in the suburbs, now rebuilt with huge modern apart­ment houses, where Mme. Korman lives. Except for the lack of a telephone, her attractive apartment had all the con­veniences that a professor in North America would have. I found that in general university professors in Poland live comfortably. I believe this would not be equally true of people in other occupations. Professors, writers and artists are the new aristocracy in P o l a n d; t h e i r standard o f living is higher than that of p h y s i c i a n s , lawyers or even important Gov­ernment officials. Scientists live well because food and a partmen ts (as­s i g n e d b y t h e Government) are c h e a p , a n d b e ­cause they have an almost unlim­ited opportunity to increase their earnings by writ­ing books and ar­ticles. Their writ­ings are in great demand because the libraries were burned and text­books destroyed.

seen him for 15 years. He is now in his 60s, but I did not detect much change in him; he is as vigorous as ever.

I asked Pienkowski what had hap­pened to his Institute during the Nazi occupation. To understand his story, it is necessary to know some background. Before the war Pienkowski's laboratory was one of the best equipped in central Europe, and was known throughout the world for its work in spectroscopy. The prewar government enlarged the Uni­versity's physics building, and the Rocke­feller Foundation gave a generous sum for scientific equipment. About five years before Hitler's invasion of Poland, an in-

vVhen Pienkowski refused, the General predicted: "Grass will grow here; War­saw will be a village." Soon afterward staffs of German experts came and methodically removed all the research equipment, teaching materials, even the furniture. It was all done with truly German thoroughness, according to a

careful plan prepared well in advance. To Pienkowski's pleas the German edu­cators replied: "We must do it; even if we lose the war we must make it harder for Polish science to rise again."

None of this equipment was recov­ered by Poland after the war. Pienkow­ski told me: "The Polish reparations

commission could not find any of it, and I have given up all hope."

It would be in­correct to say that all the intellectu-· als in the univer­sities are enthusi­astic supporters of the present Gov­ernment. Many

STEFAN PIENKOWSKI of Warsaw University directs physics laboratory known throughout the world before the war for its work in spectroscopy. Pienkowski attended Operation Crossroads at Bikini Ato]] as an observer.

IF you multiply

this despolia­tion by a factor of 1,000, you can un­d e r s t a n d w h a t happened to Pol­ish education dur­ing the war. No university or high school was per­mitted to func­tion. U ni versity professors became janitors or white­collar workers; many were killed. Nevertheless, Po­land's educators did not give up. The entire high­school and univer­sity system went underground, and all the teachers and professors taught secretly, besides working at the m a n u a l or desk jobs t h a t saved them from starvation. Pien­kowski was the chief organizer of the underground

are not. Yet not one professor has been dismissed, no inatter how well known his critical or hostile attitude. The reason for this is both the need for professors and the Polish tradition of appreciation of scholarship and intellectual achieve­ment.

Next day I visited Professor Pienkow­ski's physics laboratory at Warsaw Uni­versity. I have always liked Pienkowski, a lively, able man and excellent adminis­trator who, in the· prewar years when Polish academic life was saturated with anti-Semitism, was fair and decent to Jewish students. lowe at least partially to him the Rockefeller Fellowship for which he recommended me. I had not

ternational conference on fluorescence and spectroscopy was held at vVarsaw University. I attended the conference, and saw there many German scientists who delivered lectures and, with other guests, were guided thro'ugh the labora­tories and shown all the scientific equip­ment. After the fall of Warsaw in 1939, the laboratory, which had escaped bomb­ing, was promptly visited by a German educator, a General Schuman. He had a complete list of its equipment, and an­nounced that all the instruments would be taken to Germany. He tried to per­suade Pienkowski to go to Germany, of­fering to set him up in an institute at least as good as the one at Warsaw.

universities. The clandestine classes were restricted to 10 students each, and every month the meeting places were changed.

When Pienkowski returned to his lab­oratory in 1945, he found that the build­ing had been used as offices for a German transportation commission; the Germans left only broken walls, windows without glass, not one book of the once splendid library, a single lonely table. With mag­nificent courage Pienkowski and his col­leagues started all over again. First they hired six carpenters, salvaged sticks of lumber wherever they could find them, and built some furniture. The Provisional Government of Poland gave them per­mission to collect teaching equipment

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from the excellently equipped German high schools that the Nazis had estab­lished in Poland. Through Poles in the U. S. and through a British group Pien­kowski's laboratory obtained some books. The Soviet Academy of Sciences sent one precision spectroscope as a token of friendship. When the Polish state be­came organized, the new Government supplied costly precision apparatus, some bought in Switzerland, some in England. Pienkowski told me that the postwar Government's spending on the Institute has been considerably higher than even the generous support it had from governments before the war. His laboratory, now building a Van de Graaff generator to accelerate atomic particles, is again a going concern.

When I gave my first lecture at War­saw University (in Polish, in which I had difficulty at first with the technical terms), I was astonished and impressed by the level of knowledge among my audience. Many of the graduate students were as familiar with modern physical theories as those at any good university on this continent. They had acquired their knowledge from books and papers rather than from lectures, since there are very few theoretical physicists in the older generation in Poland. Among them the most distinguished is W. Rubinow­icz, a pupil of Niels Bohr. He is now a professor at Warsaw, leading the only school of theoretical physics in Poland worth mentioning. In the past few years Rubinowicz has sent brilliant students to France, England, Switzerland and the Netherlands to complete their graduate studies, a fact that emphasizes Poland's desire to keep its scientific ties with western Europe.

FROM Warsaw I went on to visit two other universities-Wroclaw and

Cracow. As we flew over Wroclaw, formerly the German town called Bres­lau, the center of the city presented an unbelievable sight. It looked as if a child had set out models of buildings to form a town, and then had trampled on it with angry feet. Hardly a house had a roof. After ''''arsaw, Wroclaw seemed lifeless and depressing. It had always been an ugly, graceless German town" and there is no noise of rebuilding there, nor the active life of Warsaw. The restoration of vVarsaw has priority over all other towns.

Wroclaw University is in effect a trans­plantation of the old Lwow University, where I taught in my younger days. The town of Lwow is now inside the U.S.S.R., and its university and professors were transferred to Wroclaw. Because many of the professors were my former col­leagues, I looked forward to this visit with nostalgia. Like many revisits to old stamping grounds, it turned out to be rather depressing. During my absence, I must have become sensitive to many things that had sounded natural to me

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when I lived in Poland. One of them is the mania for titles. Lwow used to be es­pecially hard-ridden by this mania, hav­ing inherited it from the period when it was part of the AUSh'o-Hungarian Em­pire. The obsession lives on in Wroclaw, and to a lesser degree in the rest of Po­land. At Wroclaw the official title of the rector is "his magnificence." After hear­ing "Mr. Magnificence" repeated every few seconds, it is hard to retain one's self-control.

The University's strong pOint is mathe­matics. Polish mathematics was world­famous before the war, but it suffered greater losses than any other science. Many mathematicians were murdered for being Jews; some died of hunger and exhaustion; some committed suicide. Polish mathematics is still good, but it is not what it was. What remains of its former greatness is concentrated in War­saw and Wroclaw.

I went from Wroclaw to the most beautiful city on earth-Cracow. It is the town where I was born and from which the members of my family were led to death. Physically nothing of Cracow was destroyed. Its parks are full of flowers and green; its people are well dressed. The reception I received in my native town was the most touching experience I have ever had. I lectured in the huge auditorium in the physics building, in the same room in which I had listened to the lectures of my former teachers. The lecture had been announced by ra­dio, and the room was full half an hour before I began to speak. People with whom I had gone to public school as a child came to shake my hand and to tell me that they were still alive. The ap­plause when I entered the room, and after my lecture, was warm and loud.

, Professor H. Niewodniczanski and his wife were my hosts. I knew them well, for we had spent a year together at Cam­bridge University on Rockefeller Fellow­ships. Again I heard the story of how an empty building became a physics lab­oratory. This time the story had a pecu­liar twist. At the end of the war, German marks became almost worthless, but lab­oratory apparatus in Germany was still listed at the low prewar German prices in marks. Thus it was theoretically pos­sible to buy them from (;erman factories for practically nothing, if one could con­vince them to sell. Niewodniczanski and a colleague had an idea. They requisi­tioned three trucks from the Polish Gov­ernment and drove to factories making scientific instruments in Germany. At each they staged the same performance. The director of the factory would say that all the equipment in stock had been ordered by Germa'n schools and univer­sities and there was none for sale. Then Niewodniczanski would take out a pack­age of cigarettes or a pound of bacon. The director's eyes would glitter, and he would change his tune immediately. He

would be ready to sell anything at the list price in almost worthless marks. For a few hundred dollars the professor bought enough equipment to outfit the entire University.

BACK in Warsaw, I was kept busy lec­

turing, seeing people, and confer­ring with officials of the Ministry of Education on the plans for reorganiza­tion of the Polish universities. I found this a most interesting problem.

Continental European universities are rooted in the Middle Ages. In Poland, as in Germany, the universities before the war, though functioning in a coun­try that was far from democratic, were more democratic in form than any uni­versity in America. While they were nominally under the supervision of the Ministry of Education, actually they gov­erned themselves according to their own laws. The faculty members chose their own rector (president) every three years, and a dean every year. A professor was as independent as a king. Departments were unkown; there were only inde­pendent chairs. Every professor had his own "Institute," his own assistants. Ap­pointments and promotions were made by the faculty on the recommendation of a committee especially elected for the purpose. Even if a murder was commit­ted on the campus, the police could come in only if called by the rector. Yet de­mocracy in these satrapies was only a

form. In spite of their democratic struc­ture, the universities in Poland were more socially backward, more anti-dem­ocratic than the rest of the country.

Immediately after the war they were rebuilt in the old tradition. Although their superficially democratic character was thus retained, this system of organi­zation lacked the fundamentally more democratic machinery for cooperation that exists in a modern university. The Ministry of Education also made other grave mistakes. To staff all the old uni­versities and new ones that it had to build, it spread the depleted teaching staff too thinly. The result was a decline in the level of research and teaching and a wasteful scattering of forces. In a pro­vincial university there would be one good man, say in physics, with no gradu­ate students, no equipment, no other physicists to ,talk to.

I found the, Ministrv officials entirelv ready to admit the IT;istakes and busy correcting them. They had already planned a process of integration and the creation of centers of research. Their plans for reorganization will bring the Polish universities nearer the American, English and Canadian models.

THE headquarters of the Ministry of Education in Warsaw was one of the

very few buildings that survived the war. The Ministry owes this piece of good luck to the fact that its modern,

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attractive structure was occupied by the German Gestapo. I ended my visit to Poland with a lecture in this building before some 50 professors, officials and guests of the Ministry. I discussed fea­tures of Canadian education which I thought should be adopted, with certain modifications, by Polish universities. One was the division of faculties into depart­ments, another that a clear distinction be made between graduate and under­graduate education, a distinction which is almost unknown on the European con­tinent. I also urged the need for reducing the bureaucracy in nniversity adminis­tration. Indeed, one of the worst things that I found in Poland was the great amount of red tape, in and out of the universities. The Polish officials ex­plained the reason for it. While the per­sonnel at the highest levels is usually intelligent and skillful, below these ranks competence drops sharply. There is a

tremendous lack in all branches of life in Poland of qualified, well-educated people. The mediocre civil servants, afraid of making decisions, pass papers up to higher levels, where they grow into mountains. The higher government offi­cials work 12 and often more hours a day, because everything from helow, from the trivial to the important, is load­ed on to them. Secretarial help at the universities is practically unknown. The Ministry vows, however, that in time all this will be changed.

YET comparisons are not all to the disadvantage of the Polish universi­

ties. Things that would be difficult to accomplish in Poland are easy in Amer­ica, but the reverse is also true. It would be difficult for me to obtain four new assistant professors in our department at the University of Toronto; in Poland it would be comparatively easy, provided the right people could be found.

European universities in general are remarkably allied in spirit, fantastic as this may sound to anyone who does not know Europe. In spite of the great dif­ferences between Ireland, England and Poland, in their attitude toward scholar­ship and intellectual achievement these countries are much closer to one another than any of them is to America.

For all its poverty in material and human resources, Europe has something which we do not have, and which all the splendid scholars who have come to this continent have not been able to kindle. It has greater curiosity and greater en­thusiasm for learning. While the flame of learning burns more dazzlingly here, in Europe it sets fire more widely to the imagination of the people.

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Leopold Infeld is professor of ap­plied mathematics at the University of Toronto and author, with Albert Einstein, of The Evolution of Physics.

t

WARSAW UNIVERSITY'S gates still stand after the German occupation. During the war the occupying forces removed all the equipment from the physics laboratory and used it as an office for a transportation commission.

CRACOW UNIVERSITY lihrary, like the rest of Cracow, was not greatly damaged by the war. The university, second oldest in central Europe, was founded in 1364. At left is a statue of Nicolaus Koppernigk ( Copernicus ) .

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