by Arthur Allen
After returning to Lwów, Weigl began a period of remarkable productivity that corresponded with a golden age of scientific and artistic creativity in the city, a time when Lwów grew rapidly. Between 1921 and the end of World War II, Weigl’s lab blossomed, expanded, and finally exploded in size, and then disappeared entirely, much like the population of Lwów itself. Weigl became famous, first in the research world, then in the city, and finally in Poland at large, until he, too, disappeared.
Like many successful Polish academics of this period, Weigl had married a few rungs up the socioeconomic ladder. Zofia Kulikowska, whom Weigl had met when they worked together as students in Nusbaum-Hilarowicz’s laboratory, was the daughter of a lawyer who had become wealthy through his own practice after gambling away the family fortune at the craps tables of Monte Carlo. She was beautiful and intelligent and a talented scientist, and they worked side by side while raising their only child, Wiktor, born in 1921.
The couple shared a comforting bourgeois routine that contrasted with the perilous life in the laboratory. The professor and Pani (Lady) Weigl walked each morning at nine from their apartment on Wagilewicza Street to the laboratory, a distance of less than a mile, and worked there through the morning. Zofia was the administrator of the laboratory, and also its paymaster. Everyone returned home for lunch, served punctually at two by the Ukrainian maid, with Zofia returning a bit early to help prepare the meal. Weigl would arrive, singing bawdy songs in Czech and German, head into the kitchen, and sniff the pots. At times, he would whisper to his son, “There’s nothing good today. Let’s go to the pub.” At lunch, Weigl would complain about his employees—“so and so is an idiot, I must fire him”—while Zofia diplomatically defended each one. Sometimes the professor napped before returning to the laboratory, where he often stayed deep into the night.
Sunday dinners were more formal. Depending on the season, there was trout cooked different ways, partridges in the autumn, or duck in cream sauce with Czech dumplings. Weigl himself prepared various dishes: crawfish soup, marinated trout, frog legs fried in bread crumbs. He was constantly trying new sauces, developed a finicky way of making tea involving serial filtration, and liked to eat bread smeared with honey mustard. On special occasions, the family dined at the Hotel George, a classy spot for the Lwów bourgeoisie.
Home life featured conversation and jokes and dancing with Zofia’s three sisters, all accomplished, intelligent women. Weigl teased his wife about her gilded ancestry, which included a great-grandmother who was an Italian countess. “I keep looking for aristocratic tendencies in you,” Weigl would tell his son in a deadpan way. “But so far all I detect is a certain laziness.” Some evenings the family watched home movies, powered by a hand crank—birds and animals and comical stick-figure cartoons that Weigl created. At Wiktor’s insistence, they took in a Tom Mix film, but Weigl scoffed at the hero’s gunfighting skills. “An 1840 Colt revolver didn’t have a threaded barrel,” he said. “You couldn’t shoot accurately with it from more than 20 meters.” Weigl was not a great fan of music, but he appreciated a risqué show. Once he traveled to Warsaw to see Josephine Baker perform. He came back disappointed that her outfits were not as skimpy as advertised in Paris, where she wore only ostrich feathers on her head and a gold cord around the hips.
Weigl had many affairs, according to his contemporaries. Eventually, they had significant consequences for Weigl and his family. At home and in the lab, he was absorbed in his own interests, and encouraged his family and lab assistants to find things that fascinated them and that they could do without bothering him too much. But he was an affectionate presence, free of prejudice, brilliant, not pompous though certainly arrogant.
Weigl, wife, and son in the mountains. (Courtesy of National Museum, Przemyl. Photograph of original by S. Kosiedowski.)
The family spent holidays at a wooden house in the Carpathian village of Ilemnia, 80 miles south of Lwów. A trout stream ran through the property, and the opportunities for hiking, hunting, mushroom collecting, and fishing were endless. Weigl found newts and salamanders that he brought back to the lab—embryology had been the subject of his dissertation. He designed fishing rods and created a trout fly that was carried for years in the English Hardy catalog as “Weigl’s glory.” Said his son, “It was characteristic of father to do everything perfectly, whether it was his profession, fishing, or dancing. When something didn’t interest him, he wouldn’t do it.” This included finances and administration, which he left to his wife. He hated parlor games and sunbathing, but in 1936 he organized the “Ilemnia Olympics” for Wiktor and his friends. He obtained javelins and disks and, naturally, threw them better than the boys did. Weigl became so fond of Ilemnia that in the mid-1930s he built a laboratory extension on the house. Soon it doubled as a research station for investigations of typhus among the Hutsuls, the mountain people of the area.
In Lwów, the renown of the Weigl laboratory grew steadily at the university through the 1920s and 1930s. Weigl’s corner office in the back of the building had a large window that looked out on sycamore, oak, and walnut trees in the university’s carefully maintained Botanical Garden, which ran uphill for two city blocks, ending in a row of greenhouses. Leaving the building by the front door and turning to the left, Weigl would pass St. Nicholas Church on his way down the cobblestoned hill to Akademicka Street, the lower end of the Lwów corso that ran for a mile and ended at the baroque Opera House. If the weather was fine, he’d often be dressed like a gentleman explorer, in a pith helmet and a wide-collared shirt known as a słowacka. On his way home, he would gaily greet students, and often stop at the Café Roma, at the corner of Akademicka below his lab.
Lwów was a city of rolling hills and twisting, undulating streets, with the ruins of the High Castle—built by the city’s founding king in 1269 and wrecked repeatedly in the centuries since—towering above everything. The variety of pleasing perspectives, the stock of Habsburg and Italianate buildings, the sheer good bones of the place, have struck visitors even in the city’s darkest times. The city had for centuries been a multiethnic crossroads linking the Polish heartland with Russia and the east. Its heterogeneity was symbolized by the cathedral spires of multiple faiths that scraped its skyline—Polish Catholic, Armenian, Ukrainian Uniate, and Eastern Rite, as well as numerous synagogues. In the recollection of those who studied and worked in interwar Lwów, that diversity was a source of both strife and cultural richness. In 1930, Lwów had about 300,000 residents, more than half Polish, a third Jewish. The working class had its own jargon, Bałak, incorporating elements of Yiddish, Ukrainian, and other languages. Fewer than a fifth of the city’s residents were Ukrainians, but the countryside was Ukrainian, with some Jewish towns as well, and a few Germans whom the kaiser had enticed to settle in the 18th century.
The Habsburgs had taken control of the region they called Galicia in the partition of Poland in 1772. To a far greater degree than the czar or the Prussians, Austria ruled its subjects with a conniving but relatively soft touch. Lwowites had a great deal of autonomy and self-confidence by the end of the 19th century; many Jews would gratefully remember the reigning Habsburg attitude as lenient bigotry. The crown may not have loved the Jews, but it tolerated them as just another patch in its multiethnic quilt. World war brought Russian occupation, looting, and reoccupation by the Austro-Hungarians, followed in November 1918 by a three-week struggle for the city between Polish and Ukrainian nationalists. When the Poles had seized control of the city for good, their militia fell upon the Jewish quarter, setting off one of the worst pogroms in the city’s history.
After independence, one author wrote, the Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews “politically worked against each other, lived daily near one another, and culturally exchanged productively with one another.” One might also have said the Poles resented the Jews, the Ukrainians resented the Poles and the Jews, and the Jews, including those who identified with the Polish nation, were optimistic or fearful but generally expected the worst. The inte
rwar era was dominated by the figure of Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the leader of Polish independence and chief of state until 1922, when he stepped down. Piłsudski returned in a 1926 coup d’état and remained Poland’s de facto dictator until his death in 1935. Many Jews viewed him as an ersatz, philo-Semitic kaiser who protected them from the worst excesses of Polish nationalism.
Overall, the city was relatively unscathed by the Great War and recovered quickly. The area south of Lwów had one of the world’s largest working oil fields, and the rising global consumption of the product put money in many a pocket. New buildings and residential neighborhoods grew steadily until the very start of World War II. For the Polish and Jewish middle class, there were plenty of ominous signs, but city life sparkled with promise. “We were like ants bustling in an anthill over which the heel of a boot is raised,” wrote the science fiction fabulist Stanisław Lem, a contemporary of Wiktor Weigl’s who recorded the Lwów of his childhood in the memoir Highcastle. “Some saw its shadows, or thought they did, but everyone, the uneasy included, ran about their usual business until the very last minute.” Poland was a new country, Lwów a growing city, and for Polish youth especially it was a heady time to be alive. “We were proud of our city, and we wanted to make it the best in Poland,” said Wacław Szybalski, who like Lem was born in 1921. Szybalski, a brilliant scientist from a noble family, moved to the United States in the 1950s and was a founding member of the postwar genetics community along with his friend James Watson, codiscoverer of the helical form of DNA, and others.
Lwów had a way of assimilating people from outside, whether Armenian and Italian merchants in the 17th century or Jews from Galician villages in the 19th and early 20th. In this it was more like an American city than Kraków or other tradition-bound Polish places. During Poland’s partition, academics and cultural figures suppressed by the Prussian and czarist regimes had reinvented themselves in the more easygoing, café-going society of Lwów. Weigl himself, notes Szybalski, was “born 100 percent Austrian and came from a family that knew nothing about Poland. It’s characteristic that he became a die-hard Lwówite.” Nostalgia for Lwów is quite palpable in those who left. Lem, who grew up in a mixed Polish-Jewish neighborhood near the Opera House, remembered riding to Stryj Park in a two-horse droshky, watching new Disney cartoons and movies at the Marysienka Theater on Jagiellonska Street, and above all Załewski’s Confectionary, where “great artists, Leonardos of confection, realized their vocation. . . . I remember pink pigs with chocolate eyes and every variety of fruit, mushroom, meat, plants; and there were fields, too, as if Załewski could reproduce the whole cosmos in sugar and chocolate, using shelled almonds for the sun and icing for the stars . . . Vesuviuses of whipped cream whose volcanic bombs were heavily candied fruit.” There was also Piascki, which sold the Mideast delicacy halva, and the Yugoslavia, which offered Turkish delight, baklava, and other Balkan treats, as well as kvass, a mild Ukrainian beer brewed from bread.
Akademicka Street was full of elegant stores and cafés, with rows of poplars lining a central promenade. It ended at the Hotel George, an 18th-century pink wedding cake of a building, and beyond the George stood the towering Adam Mickiewicz Column, which honored Poland’s great poet-patriot and was a natural meeting place for political rallies. To the north lay curving Legionów, the main shopping street and gathering spot in town. At night, electric signs for soap, chocolates, and electric lights blinked in the darkness on the five-story buildings along the street, where jugglers, fire-eaters, singers and musicians, organ grinders, talking parrots, and traveling family circuses entertained the crowds. At the Marysieka, near the Opera House, King Kong, The Mummy, and The Werewolf showed in the early 1930s. The city boasted 21 movie theaters in 1936.
Religious Jews lived mostly in a poorer section of town lying to the north and east of the Opera House, but other, increasingly assimilated Jews lived in mixed districts around the city. A Jewish entrepreneur, Mejer Balaban, brought the Eastern Trade Fair to the hilly green spaces of Stryj Park in 1921. It opened with an alarming bang when a Ukrainian nationalist tried to assassinate Marshal Piłsudski (recognizing the sound of gunfire, the old warrior ducked—two of the bullets wounded Lwów’s provincial governor). Despite its inauspicious beginnings, the fair was a much-awaited September custom for the youth, who trawled for free tchochkes and food from Hungarian, Romanian, and Russian stalls, while businesses showed off their new tractors and radios and building materials. By 1928 there were 1,600 exhibitors and 150,000 visitors, and state-owned Radio Lwów began broadcasting from the fair two years later. It became the most popular station in the country, with news, educational programs, and comical sketches by Jewish and Polish comedians. Piłsudski, forever grateful to the city for its defense against the Red Army, would call in to offer his thoughts about the best Lwów sausage stands. The radio personalities Szczepko (a Pole, Kazimierz Wajda) and Toko (a Jew, Henryk Vogelfänger), known for their racy Lwów slang, starred in movies such as Włóczgi (Tramps), whose theme song “Tylko w Lwowie” (Only in Lwów) became a kind of city anthem. Hundreds of other popular Lwowian songs could be heard in the parks and plazas, which were saturated with music.
Habsburg culture had left its stamp on the city in its classical architecture, in the formal dress of the men in their three-piece suits and canes, in the deferential and differential cap doffings and touchings required of gentlemen greeting acquaintances of varied social status, and, above all, in café culture. Every middle-class Lwowite had a regular café. Some were expensive, some known for their exquisite pastries or regional wines, but all had newspapers bound to wooden sticks. The café was the sine qua non of academic life. “Most of my colleagues slept in their apartments, worked at the university and lived in cafés,” one professor wrote of the early 1930s. “Lwów’s charm was in its leisurely atmosphere, its superficial quick friendships, its witty and spiteful gossip from which no one was safe and which no one took too seriously. For years the same people met at the same time at the same place in the same cafés, knowing each other’s troubles and affaires, discussing those of their colleagues but never inviting one another home.” On a typical lunch date, the professor sits with a friend “discussing physics, Bolshevism, and the love affairs of our acquaintances, when my companion looks at his watch. ‘It is twelve-twenty already. I have a lecture at twelve. I shall come again after the lecture.’” Slowly he gets up to pay his bill. The waiter automatically adds the usual tip. “Then my colleague shakes hands vigorously with me, we bow deeply and ceremoniously to each other and slowly he goes to his lecture.”
Many scientists had moved to Lwów during the partition of Poland because Vienna was kinder to Polish culture and innovation than Moscow or Berlin. In the 1920s, Lwów developed a particularly strong reputation in fine art, philosophy, the sciences, and mathematics. Its mathematicians worked in the cafés on Akademicka. Their favorite was at first the Roma, at Akademicka 26, and later the Szkocka (Scottish Café), across the street, though a few preferred Załewski’s, across the tree-covered mall from the Roma, which everyone agreed had the best coffee and pastries.
The Lwów school of mathematics was built initially around the work of logicians such as Jan Lukasiewicz, inventor of Polish notation, on which early computer memory designs such as Hewlett-Packard’s reverse Polish were based. In the 1920s, this recondite society included Stanisław Ulam, who later created the H-bomb with Edward Teller; the cone-headed, bottle-shaped Włodzimierz Stoek (“always in good humor and joking incessantly,” recalled a colleague, “he loved to consume Frankfurters liberally smeared with horseradish, a dish that he maintained cured melancholy”); the towering, very loud Bronisław Knaster, and Stanisław Mazur, a founder of game theory. Sometimes they were joined by Hugo Steinhaus, a polymath, polylinguist, and one of the only Jews in Poland who achieved a full professorship during the Polish republic without converting to Catholicism. Steinhaus owed this distinction to his international reputation, and to a family that included a brother i
n parliament and another who died fighting for Polish independence by Piłsudski’s side. That was about as Polish as a Jewish family could get.
One day in 1916, while strolling through a Kraków park, Steinhaus heard a young stranger and his friend discussing the “Lebesque integral,” a concept known only in the higher spheres of mathematics. Thus began the legend of Stefan Banach, blond, blue-eyed, tall, and heavyset, a self-taught street urchin and chain-smoker of uncertain paternity. Steinhaus took Banach under his wing and introduced him to influential academics, leading Lwów University to hire him in 1922. Banach shocked the Lwów bourgeoisie with his indifference to convention, his appreciation for beer and soccer matches, and his tendency to walk the streets at all hours in an undershirt. His circle met first at the Roma and then, when the latter stopped allowing him to pay on credit, at the Scottish Café. Some of these discussions, amid the smoke and clatter and laughter of the café, had an intensity, Ulam wrote,