Leopold Infeld's life journey: from the Krakow ghetto through collaboration with Einstein to protests against anti-Semitism and censorship in Poland
In blessed memory of my teacher and friend, physics professor Jan Gnosser-Grunzweig (1925-2020), born in Krakow and a Holocaust survivor
In 1948, Leopold Infeld's book "Whom the Gods Love" was published in New York, telling the story of Évryste Galois. The title of the book was part of the saying of the ancient Greek comedy author Menander, "He whom the gods love dies young." The hero of the book died at the age of twenty. It was a biography of the great French mathematician Évryste Galois, who died in a duel in 1832, but managed to write several pages of algebraic equations thirteen hours before, which made him one of the greatest mathematicians thanks to the "Galois group", "Galois field", "Galois theorem". The story of this book began in 1940 in an American town where Infeld and his friends experienced the fall of France to the Nazis. They talked about how freedom cannot die in the country that gave it birth, and mentioned the freedom fighter Évryste Galois. But Infeld also remembered his native Poland, which was occupied by the Nazis in 1939. The author of the book on Galois was not a professional writer, but a professional physicist.
Leopold Infeld was born in Kazimierz, the Jewish ghetto of Kraków, in 1898. His father was a leather merchant, and although the family lived better than many others, their living conditions were still difficult. Leopold graduated from a religious Jewish school. He wanted to study at a university, but his father did not agree that he should go to a gymnasium to prepare for university. His father wanted his son to enter the family business, so he sent him to a trade school. But when Leopold passed his matriculation exams in 1916 with very high grades, his father relented and allowed him to enter the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where his son graduated with a doctorate in 1921. Leopold tried unsuccessfully to continue his studies at the Academy of Sciences, but from 1921 to 1930 he only managed to teach physics in Jewish high schools.
Anti-Semitism rises in Poland in the 1920s
With the outbreak of World War I, the situation of Polish Jews deteriorated significantly: many of the men were drafted into the army, and the open anti-Semitism of the Russian Empire's government also oppressed Polish Jews. According to the Polish Constitution of 1921, already in independent Poland, Jews were guaranteed a national education; discrimination on religious, racial, or national grounds was prohibited. But Jews were not given broad cultural autonomy in the country. During the preparation of the 1921 constitution, Jewish parties demanded respect for the multinational character of the new Poland. But the constitution, which was prepared, determined that the new state was a national state.
The Polish parliament left in force most of the discriminatory laws passed before Poland's independence from Tsarist Russia. Since 1923, there had been a numerus clausus (closed number), an unofficial practice that limited Jewish studies in secondary and higher education institutions. As a result, the number of students and pupils in Jewish educational institutions continued to decline. Discrimination against Jews in institutions of higher education was prominent, for example, there were so-called "Jewish benches" in the last rows of university halls, also known as the "bench ghetto." Employment of Jews in the public sector was limited. This was state anti-Semitism.
Infeld managed to become an assistant at the University of Lviv in the Department of Theoretical Physics only after the regime of Józef Piłsudski abolished the discriminatory laws of Tsarist Russia. But anti-Semitism dominated various circles of Polish society. In April 1934, an organization called the National Radical Camp was founded, which demanded the assimilation of the Slavic minorities in Poland and the expulsion of Jews from the country. Its members beat Jews and carried out acts of terror. In June 1934, the organization was banned, but continued to operate underground. Hard times for Jews came in 1935, after the death of Piłsudski, who had kept the chauvinists out of power and built a republic of many nations. Laws specifically aimed against Jews multiplied. As in Germany, Polish anti-Semites, usually supporters of the National Democratic Party, demonstrated in front of Jewish shops, calling for people not to buy anything from Jews.
Infeld left Poland. In 1933-1935 he worked at Cambridge University in England, where he collaborated with Max Born, a German Jew who had escaped the Nazis, who later won the Nobel Prize, and published papers with him on nonlinear electrodynamics. In 1936, before leaving for the United States, where he worked from 1936-1938 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton with Albert Einstein, Infeld said goodbye to the Krakow ghetto and his school: “I wandered through the ghetto of my city. On summer mornings, through the open window of the school, I could hear the voices of Jewish boys singing the words of the Torah in chorus. […] The windows of the school were open, the windows of the first floor of a gloomy house. […] I saw tired, thin, hungry faces with burning dark eyes, and for the first time in my life I felt a poetic touch in this gloomy scene of the ghetto.”
"You have nothing more to look for in Poland"
In the United States, Infeld recalled: "I arrived at Princeton in September 1936. Five months later, my collaboration with Einstein began to succeed; we understood each other perfectly and achieved even partial success, although the problem of formulating the equations of motion was far from being completely solved. It was time to think about what would happen in the upcoming academic year 1937/38. Clouds were gathering over Poland. The Association of Assistants of the Jan Casimir University of Lviv bothered to send me a registered letter informing me that I had been removed from their honorary ranks. My chances of finding a job in my country were zero. I decided to talk to Einstein about my financial situation. […] I knew that Einstein would want to help me. But I also knew that his options were quite limited. […] [Einstein said]: 'Under the present circumstances you do not need to return to Poland. We are working well together, we have already achieved serious results. I would like you to stay here for another year. "I think it won't be difficult to get a scholarship next year too." But they refused to extend the scholarship."
Collaboration with Einstein
In 1938, together with Einstein and Bensch Hoffmann (a Jewish immigrant from Poland, a future professor at the City University of New York), Infeld obtained from the equations of general relativity equations of motion of a system of bodies in a gravitational field with a higher approximation than Newtonian. In 1938, Einstein and Infeld published the brilliant popular book The Development of Physics. From 1939 to 1950, Infeld held a professorship at the University of Toronto. In 1950, he returned to Poland, held a chair and was director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Warsaw. In 1952, he became a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
When he returned to Poland, there were few Jews but a disproportionate amount of anti-Semitism. He was welcomed, but there was an anti-Semitic campaign against intellectuals in the neighboring Soviet Union, which was also felt in Poland.
In 1964, Infeld signed a protest of 34 leading intellectuals against government censorship in Poland. Jajewski, who was his student in Warsaw, recounted the last years of Infeld's life: "I did not talk to Infeld about politics when he was at the height of his political power. I talked about it towards the end of his life. He was completely disillusioned with the regime, disillusioned with its policy towards science and culture, and disgusted with official anti-Semitism.
In March 1968, the police dispersed a protest march that marched with slogans that Infeld had signed four years earlier. The communist regime responded to the demonstration with an anti-Semitic campaign, calling the Jews, who were in high positions, Zionists and enemies of the Poles, blaming them for the government's failures in economic and social policies, and calling for "foreigners to be sent to Zion." Władysław Gomołka, the first secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party, called them the "Fifth Corps." 8,300 people were expelled from the Communist Party - almost all of them Jews. Jewish emigration from Poland began. Infeld died in Warsaw on January 15, 1968. Two months after his death, the state anti-Semitic campaign began. It became clear that the Polish homeland did not need the love of Jews for it.
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