The Thorny Road to Success: A Memoir

By Karl Maramorosch

Karl Maramorosch may be best known for his accomplishments as a top scientist, but the story of how he became such a success has never been tolduntil now.

Born in Vienna in 1915, his family moved to Poland, and he fled with his wife, Irene, to Romania in September 1939.

They spent four years in Polish refugee camps and were in Soviet-occupied Romania until October 1946, before coming to the United States in January 1947 on an immigration visa.

But they did not arrive unscathed: Maramoroschs father died in the gas chamber in Belzec in 1942, and his mother also died at the camp. His brother died in the Kolomyya jail on Yom Kippur in 1942. His wifes closest relatives died in Treblinka in 1942.

The inseparable couple refused to let any of that stop them from forging ahead: He began a scientific career that spanned more than sixty years, and she became a librarian at the New York Public Library, where she worked thirty years.

Maramorosch recalls the painful losses of the past and the brutalities of war, but he also celebrates his love for his wife and life in The Thorny Road to Success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491754092

Karl Maramorosch

Professor Karl Maramorosch works at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA.

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Copyright © 2014, 2015 Karl Maramorosch.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Cover Design by Maria Kwiecien and Adam Kwiecien

ISBN: 978-1-4917-5410-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-5411-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-5409-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014921953

iUniverse rev. date: 12/2/2015

Contents

Preface

Vienna

Childhood in Vienna, 1915–18

Poland

Childhood in Kolomyya

My First Childhood Friend, Antek Zebracki

Scarlet Fever

Anna Arneth

Piano Playing

Backyard of the House in Kolomyya

Inflation, 1924

Tonsil Operation

The Pokucie Exposition

High School in Kolomyya

The Konecki Affair

Other High-School Reminiscences

Paul Bubi

Reichert Microscope, 1928

Izio Greif, 1930–42

Rudolf Weigl Story—Lviv, 1933

En Route to Warsaw, 1934

At SGGW, Univeristy of Biological Studies in Warsaw

Dating Irene in Warsaw

SGGW Professors

Rachmaninoff: Concert in Warsaw

Professor Dziubaltowski

Uncle Hugo.

Uncle Jacques, Alfred Silvan, and Zdenka

Vera and Fritz Duic

Lela Canic

Korcula

Venice

Meeting Irene in Pulawy

Professor Kazimir Wodzicki

Other Professors and SGGW Students

Rented Rooms in Warsaw

Galler, 1935–95

Kimmelman Estate on Zbrucz River, 1937

Romania, 1939–46

Stefan W. Orenski, 1939–65

Two Weeks in Ripiceni, 1939

Driving Course in Braila, 1939–40

Nadel versus Nardel, 1944

Traian Savulescu

Vienna, Prague, Paris, and Stockholm, 1946

Arrival of Miriam Frisch in Romania, 1942

Two Boy Scouts from Warsaw, 1942

Mrs. Broda and Her Brother, the SS Man, 1942

The Pildes-Pilecki Tragedy, 1942

In Paris, October 1946

In Stockholm, December 1946–January 1947

Roy Olin Westley, 1945

Vacation in Mangalia on the Black Sea and $500 from Mr. Westley, 1946

USA

Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 1947–49

Dr. Gawadi’s Suicide, 1947

Growth Symposia: Silberschimdt’s Story, 1947

Sterilized Water, 1948

Rockefeller University, 1949–61

First Summer at Rockefeller Institute, 1949

Dr. Weyne Wooley, 1957

Toxicity of Cellulose Acetate to Plants and Insects, 1949

The Shocking Memphis Incident, 1951

Graves at Rockefeller University, 1952

George Konstantynovich Skryabin and Anne-Marie Murat, 1955–56

The Boiler Room Attendant

Overqualification

Learning a Few Lessons, 1952

Free X-Ray Test

Professor Thung’s Russian Experience, 1955

Grantsmanship

Professor Jerzy Splawa Neyman, 1958

Tulipomania and Rene Dubos, 1959

Les Skowronski

Clouds on the Horizon, 1958–59

Conference in Bradenton, New Jersey

David’s Painting of Lavoisier and His Wife

Technicians at Rockefeller University

Dr. T. D. C. Grace, 1966–68

New York Academy of Sciences

Biljana Plavsic

Stan Gross

Comparative Virology Conferences

Technicians at Boyce Thompson Institute

Opium Poppy

The Aster Yellows Saga

Dr. K. Starr Chester

The Streptomycin Story

My First Car, 1954

Health Insurance Plan (HIP) of Greater New York, 1948–56

Riverside Drive in Manhattan, 1949–56

My First and Second House in Scarsdale

Irene at the New York Public Library

Corn Stunt and the Demise of the Mayan Culture

Corn Stunt Spiroplasmas

The Unpublished Scientific American Paper

Dr. Armin C. Braun

Dr. Kurt Heinze

Folke Kihlstedt

Professor Joffe—Mycotoxins in Siberia, 1942

First Vacation in the USA

The Japanese Connection

Cold Spring Harbor Summers, 1951–59

Failed Experiments

Lech Ryval, Cold Spring Harbor, 1957

Zinka Milanov

Lady Miriam Rothschild

Cressy Morrison Prize, New York Academy of Sciences

Mr. Jo Blum

Rockefeller Foundation

Dr. Stephan Szopa, Dr. Brcak, and Dr. Vlk Valenta, 1958

Contributions to Boyce Thompson Institute

A Few Pitfalls 1949–59

Dr. Paul Weiss at Rockefeller University

Philippines, Food and Agriculture Organization, 1960

Food and Agriculture Consultancy: Cadang-Cadang Disease

The Kalinga Caves

Durian

Clark Field

Mindoro

Baron Helmut von Uexkuhl

The Cadang-Cadang Language Barrier

The Cotabato Sultan

Philippine Airlines

Solanum nigrum

Adrian C. Ace Williams

Istvan and Magda Hargittai

Mr. Maj

Perspectives in Virology, 1972

The Wolf Prize, 1980

Dr. Plat

Dr. Theodore O. Diener

Malaria Research, Entomology Department, 1983–89

The Passion of Traveling

Cincinnati APS Meeting, 1953

Europe, 1953

Mexico, 1955

Montreal, Canada, 1956

Europe, 1958

San Miguel Island, 1960

Unexpected Incidents in Legaspi

Visit to Cebu Island

The Romanian Ambassador

Bombay Curry

Kayangulam Experiment Station

Boyce Thompson Institute, 1960–72

The Samurai Armor

Israel: First Visit, 1960

China: Part 1, 1960

China: Part 2

China: Part 3

China: Part 4

China: Part 5, Canton

China: Part 6

China: Part 7

China: Part 8

China: Part 9

Montreal, Canada, 1962

Togo, 1963

Lagos, 1963

Nice, Italy, 1963

Kerala, India, 1963

Ceylon (Sri Lanka), 1963

Romania and Poland, 1964

Moscow, USSR, 1966

New Delhi, India, 1967

Halle, Germany, 1970

Puerto Rico, 1972

Palm Springs, 1972

Conferences and Travel during Subsequent Years

Sri Lanka, 1980

Cuba, 1984

Tucson, 1989

India, 2005

Egypt and Poland, January 2007

India, October 2007

Buenos Aires, Argentina, October 2008

Warsaw, Poland, September 2009

Odessa, Ukraine, September 2009

India, March 2010

Lviv, Ukraine, April 2010

South Korea, August 2010

Puerto Rico, March 2011

Wroclaw and Czeszow, Poland, May 2011: Fourth Weigl Conference

Neustadt, Germany, 2011

DiagMol, Warsaw, Poland, 2011

Budapest, Hungary, November 2011

Yalta, Ukraine, May 2012

Buenos Aires, Agentina, August 2012

Arusha, Tanzania, 2013

Chernivtsi, Ukraine, 2013

My Brother, Alfred

My Sister, Bronia

Roots of My Parents

My Mother

Blue Eyes of Some Schlesingers

Mother’s Trip with Bronia to the USA

Uncle Robert

Uncle Hugo

Uncle Illes

Alfred Schlesinger

Bertha Schlesinger

Erich Gottlieb

Alfred Gottlieb

Jacques Schlesinger

Roberta Bobby Schlesinger

Fritzi Schlesinger-Czapka

My Father

Grandfather Salomon

Freddy and Vladko Najer

My Daughter, Lydia

My Cousins

My Friends

My Publications

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Me in my office at home in Scarsdale, New York, 2014. Photo by Maria Kwiecien.

PREFACE

My memoirs are dedicated to the memory of my brother, Alfred. He worked as a physician in the ghetto of Kolomyya. On September 1, 1942, my father was shipped, along with eight thousand Jews, to be gassed in Belzec. Two weeks later, my brother was arrested, and his dead body was returned to the ghetto a few hours later. On October 14, my mother was shipped to the Belzec extermination camp with the remaining seven thousand ghetto inhabitants. My wife and I survived the Holocaust in refugee camps in Romania, but 138 of our closest relatives in Nazi-occupied Europe perished in Treblinka, Belzec, and Auschwitz.

I began writing The Thorny Road to Success in 1980. I added to it over the last few decades, and I made an attempt to provide a chronological order of events. I worked at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for two years, at Rockefeller University for twelve years, at Boyce Thompson Institute for twelve years, and at Rutgers University from 1974 till 2013, before moving to California.

Those I first have to mention in acknowledgment are my daughter, Lydia; Maria Kwiecien, who took care of my wife for 10 years and afterwards took care of me; Julio Aban, who proofread the manuscript; my friend Beatriz Alida Perez in Argentina; my niece Olga Gottlieb; my nephew George Gottlieb in Seattle; and my cousin Eugenie Smith in Vermont. I will mention numerous friends and workers in the different chapters. Mr. Gruder, secretary of the Wolf Foundation, suggested I write this memoir.

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My parents’ house, confiscated in 1939, which now serves as the Public Library of Kolomyya in Ukraine

VIENNA

Childhood in Vienna, 1915–18

I have no recollections of my first three years. I was conceived in 1914 in Soroki, my family’s eight-hundred-acre estate twenty-eight kilometers from Kolomyya and twelve kilometers from Horodenka.

In 1914, when World War I broke out and the Russian front approached Kolomyya, my father decided to leave Soroki. He left with my mother; six-year-old brother, Alfred; and five-year-old sister, Karla Bronia, for the capital city, Vienna. My grandfather Salomon left for Baden, near Vienna.

My parents told me I was born on January 16, 1915, in the Sanatorium Loew in Vienna. Dr. Eckstein performed my circumcision. I was fed a formula containing condensed milk. A nanny took me every day in the summer to the park for strolls. One day, a woman came to my mother and reported that I had fallen out of the baby carriage. The woman inquired about whether the nanny had reported the accident. Since this was the first my mother had heard about it, she immediately fired the nanny.

A few days later, in the same park, my mother spotted the nanny with another baby and its mother—the woman who had reported the alleged accident. In those days, it was difficult to find a good nanny, and the story about my falling out of the carriage was a trick by the other mother to get the nanny fired so that she could immediately hire her.

Emperor Franz Joseph died in 1916, and Emperor Karl became his successor.

My first recollection was our return to Kolomyya in 1918.

POLAND

Childhood in Kolomyya

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With my mother and my siblings, Karla Bronia and Alfred, in 1921

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With my cousins and Grandmother Caecilie in Vienna in 1921

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With my brother, my mother, my sister, Nana, Gustaf, and Pipitza Hohla

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With Karla Bronia and Alfred in 1923

In November 1918, I returned from Vienna with my family. I vividly recall how I went from the home on Franz Josef Strasse 7 (later named Ulica Aleja Wolnosci) to the nearby Herman restaurant. I was dragging my only toy, a small wooden engine on a string. Before turning the corner, I saw a boy who gasped with amazement at my toy. My mother told me to give my toy to the boy, which I did, but parting with it was painful, and that event remained in my memory.

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With Karla Bronia and Alfred in 1925

Around the corner, at the Herman restaurant, I greatly enjoyed eating, for the first time in my life, wild strawberries with whipped cream. This dessert remained my favorite.

My memories of my first years are limited. Only years later did I realize that the southeastern part of Poland was still in great turmoil when we returned there. The Ukrainian ataman (general) Petlura tried to create an independent Ukraine and occupied the area, including the town of Kolomyya. I clearly remember how the Romanian army liberated Kolomyya when they came to the town for four days and permanently expelled Petlura’s soldiers. During the time of the Ukrainian rule, my father traveled to the farm every week. The representative of Petlura, a peasant by the name Marusyk, mistreated and humiliated him. Marusyk took Father’s keys away; handed out the wheat, rye, corn, and potatoes; and sold them, but my father declined to denounce Marusyk to the Polish authorities when the occupation ended. Marusyk reciprocated this when, again, he took over the farm in 1939.

During 1924–28, I attended the nearby public school (Szkola Powszechna im. Mickiewicza). I liked my teacher, Mr. Ohanowicz (the name seemed to indicate he was perhaps of Polish Armenian background). I had great respect for him, but a few years later, I heard from a girlfriend of our maid, Anna Arneth, that—what a terrible thing—Mr. Ohanowicz had slept with the girlfriend. My warm feeling vanished, and I felt hurt by my former teacher’s behavior. I did not know whether he was married or a bachelor, but how could he have done this?

My First Childhood Friend, Antek Zebracki

My best friend in the early days of my childhood was Antek Zebracki. His sister, Ela Zebracka, attended the same class in high school as my sister. Both went to the gimnazjum (high school) for girls at the Ursuline Cloister in Kolomyya. This high school had been so poorly rated a couple of years earlier that the supervising high-school board in Lviv had threatened to close it unless the level of the student body drastically improved. The sisters in the cloister school decided to improve the level by admitting, for the first time, a few bright Jewish girls. One of them was my sister, and the other two were Donia Kantor and Mila Schaerf. Only years later did my sister tell me how she suffered because of anti-Semitic remarks made by some of the teaching Ursuline sisters. I remember only three of her Christian colleagues: Ela Zebracka, Bialowasowna, and Ada. The latter always kissed me whenever she came to visit Karla Bronia. She also kissed my brother, Alfred, and she seemed boy-hungry to me, a six- or seven-year-old child.

I sometimes misbehaved badly. Once, I was standing on one of the stone columns in front of the house and urinating, when Mr. Julian Urbanowski, chief of police and father of my school colleague Adam Urbanowski, passed by. A couple of days later, he met with my father (there were no phones yet in Kolomyya) and told him what I had been doing. My father severely punished me, and I never dared to do it again. He also once punished me by having me stand in the doorway of our living room for one hour. Guests were coming, and my parents were sitting with them in the large living room while I was standing in the doorway and crying.

Thanks to my strict father, I slowly changed my mischievous behavior and tried to emulate my well-behaved older brother and sister, who never misbehaved. When I was five years old, as Passover was being celebrated, Antek Zebracki asked me whether I was eating matza instead of bread, which I confirmed. Antek told me that the blood of Christian children was added to the matza, and I asked my father about it. He told me that this anti-Semitic story was invented in the Middle Ages and caused pogroms in France, Germany, and other countries. The following day, I explained to Antek that the story of the use of Christian children’s blood was invented in the Middle Ages and was not true. A day later, Antek told me he’d asked his mother, and she’d told him the story was definitely true, because she’d heard it directly from the Catholic priest, or z ambony, during a sermon in the local church.

The nearby house on Aleja Wolnosci 3 was badly damaged during World War I. While it was being rebuilt, the shattered terra-cotta stoves were discarded. I collected pieces of the tiles in various colors and hid them under the front terrace of our house. My other hiding place was in the huge acacia (Robinia pseudoacacia) next to the entrance of the house. When I came to Kolomyya in 1989, I went through the house, which had been confiscated by the Communist government and now was serving as the town’s public library. The hole under the front terrace was still there, and for a moment, I thought of crawling into the place under the terrace to retrieve the precious tiles. I did not dare to do this, because I was illegal in Kolomyya and had only a visa for Cernivtze.

When I was six, Antek and I started primary school at Szkola Powszechna Kopernika, only a few steps from our home. When I learned the alphabet, I was disappointed that Antek’s name had to be at the end and not at the beginning, because it was not A for Antek but was Z for Zebracki.

In 1921, when I was six years old, I went with my mother and siblings to Vienna, and we needed not only Polish passports but also Czech and Austrian visas. We obtained one set in Lviv, where we stayed overnight in a hotel, and we obtained the others in Warsaw. There, we met, for the first time, with relatives of my parental grandmother, two brothers named Rall-Shapiro. I met the two brothers for the second and last time in 1935, when I came to Warsaw to study at the University of Biological Studies (Szkoła Główna Gospodarstwa Wiejskiego, or SGGW). The Rall-Shapiro brothers lived on Twarda Street 15.

I was naughty as a child. If not for the strict attitude of my father, whom I feared, I would have become a juvenile delinquent. Among the minor things I often did, I would wait for Ela Zebracka to slowly pull her dress so that it would not wrinkle when she was just about to sit down in a chair. At the last moment, I would remove the chair, and the poor girl would fall to the floor, often hurting herself badly. I thought this trick was fun, but I only did it when my father was on the farm—that is, on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. He returned on Fridays and stayed until Monday morning.

Scarlet Fever

An epidemic of scarlet fever occurred when I was approximately eight years old. My brother was the first in our family to contract it, but he only noticed it afterward, when he started peeling. My sister had a mild fever but also hardly noticed it. I had a severe case. Dr. Levicki injected a large dose of some fluid into my stomach with a twenty-centimeter syringe, and it hurt terribly. My sister spent long hours with me, telling me stories and playing with me.

Anna Arneth

Anna came to Kolomyya as a girlfriend of some Austrian officer toward the end of the war and was hired as our maid. She was intelligent and fast, cooked well, and took care of the house and the three children. Not everything was clear about her. Once, a gold ring disappeared. My mother told Anna to continue looking for it until she found the ring. The following day, the ring reappeared, found by Anna. After ten years, she decided to leave, hoping to get married to someone in or near Zakopane. She told Mother that if everything went well, she would write, but if not, she would remain silent. We never heard from her, so unfortunately, her hopes did not materialize, and things did not go well for her after she left our household.

Anna had a boyfriend, a policeman named Mr. Rozalski from Stanislawow (Ivanfrankovsk). He was a good painter, I thought, and I liked him. After a few years, he borrowed all of the savings Anna had accumulated from tips from our relatives, often in US dollars, and disappeared forever.

Piano Playing

I started piano lessons when I was seven years old and knew how to read. My first teacher was Miss Wanda Bienkiewicz in Kolomyya. She was the daughter of the arts professor of the high school, who himself was a former student of Poland’s greatest painter, Matejko. Although I liked my piano teacher, I did not like practicing, and my progress was slow. At the end of each year, the students of Wanda Bienkiewicz and the advanced students of Mrs. Teresa Malinowska had to perform at a popis, or concert, in front of invited parents. During the first three years, I was the youngest pupil in the music school, and I played together with my teacher some easy four-hand compositions. The real advantage of it was that I did not have—or perhaps early in my life lost—any stage fright, and I started to like these public performances.

My practicing was curtailed; I could only practice till noon, because during afternoon hours, my grandfather Salomon, who was occupying the upper seven rooms of the house, took his afternoon nap. Neither I nor my sister, Karla Bronia, who took piano lessons with Mrs. Malinowska, were permitted to play the piano in the afternoon hours. The grand piano survived World War I in bad shape, with some keys missing and hammers broken. Mr. Sliwinski, the piano tuner who lived on Kopernika 10, worked for more than two weeks in our house, fixing the grand piano. It was a Czapka-Vienna instrument, and the firm Czapka was owned by Aunt Frieda’s family in Austria. Aunt Frieda was the separated wife of Uncle Hugo and the mother of my cousin Fredericke (Fritzi), who became a painter early in her life and died at age one hundred.

I recall how the piano tuner glued parts with a glue (karuk) dissolved in water, heated by his alcohol lamp. After he restored all of the hammers and replaced the missing wires and ivory keys, he tuned the piano for hours. I did not know that plastic would one day replace ivory. When I visited Fritzi, she showed me that for her Czapka grand, she had a supply of spare ivory keys in case one should ever break.

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With my wife, Irene, at the Yamaha baby grand in Scarsdale

Our Czapka grand was hard, which was an advantage insofar as practicing and developing a good technique were concerned, but I did not know that the old grand no longer could be brought to the exact pitch and was half a tone lower. Not having an absolute pitch, this made no difference to me. My mother, who once was an accomplished pianist, played only rarely in those days when I started my piano lessons. I recall how beautifully she played Chopin’s waltzes. She had a chest of drawers filled with piano music. There was no store in Kolomyya where one could purchase sheet music, and the best piano student of Mrs. Malinowska, Mr. Kopystyanski, often came to us to borrow Bach’s sheet music. He was in the same high-school class as my brother, Alfred, so he was six years older than me, and he was not only a wonderful pianist but also one of the best high-school students. Unfortunately, at the age of nineteen, he died of tuberculosis.

My piano playing improved vastly when I was around fifteen years old. I started to practice and could do so during afternoon hours after Grandfather Salomon died in May of 1929. But the main reason for my increased interest in piano playing was that I tried to impress a girl who had a lesson after my half hour with Miss Bienkiewicz. Her name was Miss Rozdolska. She was seventeen or eighteen, and I never spoke to her and knew her only from seeing her enter the room and wait for me to finish my lesson. Since I had to start by playing scales, then do an etude, and at the end play a sonata by Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven, the sonata was the piece I practiced most, because Miss Rozdolska would hear part of it. I got so good that several times, the adjacent door would open, and Mrs. Malinowska would come in to find out whether it was me or my teacher playing the part. At the year’s end, Miss Rozdolska and her older sister were both performing, and they were not remarkable pianists. They had a younger brother who, some years later, at the final performance of the piano school, played Chopin’s military polonaise.

Backyard of the House in Kolomyya

We traveled the twenty kilometers between Kolomyya and Soroki in a carriage with a pair of horses. The horses were kept in a stable in our court. There was also a cow in the stable, so we had fresh milk as well. In the courtyard, we had a well, as there was no running water in the town of forty thousand. Many people bought water from wells behind the city center. This water was called Klasztorna woda, or cloister water, because years earlier, there was a cloister in that location. This water was distributed by a large horse-drawn barrel, but we had our own supply. One year, my father had a large sign posted on our well: "Wode brac wolno az do odwolania (One can take the water until no longer permitted"). I asked why this inscription was placed in our courtyard and was told that otherwise, people would acquire the right to take our water forever, even if there would be less water in the well. Placing the inscription was a legal way of assuring that access from other houses could be restricted, if required. When I visited the house in 1989, the well was long gone and the place cemented, because Kolomyya had running water, introduced during the Soviet period, after 1945.

Inflation, 1924

When the rapid inflation became rampant in Poland, my father went one day to Soroki and, while there, sold a large amount of hay. He got the full payment in Polish marks (marki), and when he returned on Friday, he went to town to buy, among other things, two packs of cigarettes. It turned out that the large amount of money received on Monday was sufficient to buy just one pack of cigarettes on Friday of the same week. My father, who until that day had been a heavy smoker, did not purchase the cigarettes at Zimbler’s store, next to the city hall, and never smoked a single cigarette. Before that happened, he would sometimes walk with me to Zimbler’s, where he waited outside the store while I went in with a twenty-mark paper note. The pack was eighteen cents, and my father let me keep the two cents in change as pocket money. All this changed soon, when Wladyslaw Grabski became Polish prime minister. He changed the currency to the Polish zloty, and five zloty equaled one US dollar. Ever since, my father only sold wheat, rye, maize, barley, or potatoes for US dollars. In 1936, when Uncle Robert came to Kolomyya with Aunt Hansi and Roberta, Robert asked my father about the prices of wheat. My father immediately told him the price of a bushel in dollars. Uncle Robert was amazed how my father was able to make the conversion so fast, only to be told that there was no need for a conversion, as all transactions were made in US currency.

Tonsil Operation

I often had a sore throat, and there were, of course, no antibiotics or any sulfa drugs to relieve the infection. My tonsils had to be removed. I was six years old when this was done by Dr. Lewicki, a surgeon and the director of the Kolomyya hospital. He did the procedure in his office without anesthesia. My mother went with me to his office, and I had to open my mouth as wide as I could. Dr. Lewicki put a large instrument into my mouth and clipped one of my tonsils. It hurt terribly, and blood was all over. I cried and asked my mother to take me home and come back a day later for the second tonsil. In my mind, I decided to run away from home through Aleja Wolnosci to the River Prut and hide across in the forest on the Oskrzesiniecka Gora (a mountain or, rather, hill where the Carpathian foothills, Podkarpacie, started). My mother agreed, but Dr. Lewicki said that I would run away and that the second tonsil had to come out right away. Again, I had to open my mouth, and the pain was even worse. The doctor told me I could eat ice cream now, but in winter, when this cruel operation was performed, there was no ice cream anywhere in Kolomyya. At least my frequent sore-throat illnesses were gone with my tonsils. Years later, when Lydia’s tonsils were properly removed by Dr. Coleman in New York, I found out that mine were only clipped.

The Pokucie Exposition

In 1922, the enterprising Mr. Pistyner, who lived only two houses away from us on Aleja Wolnosci 7, arranged a fair, which was called Wystawa Pokucka (Fair of Pokucie). Kolomyya was known as the capital of the Pokucie area in southeastern Poland. Entrance to the fair was free, and I went there several times during the days the fair was open. In one of the tents erected in the courtyard was a table, and on it was a square box and a large, round plastic dish. The dish was called a speaker, and the box was a radio. Sounds—voices and some poor-sounding music—were coming out of the speaker. I suspected that the reception was through some hidden wires, and I crawled under the table, trying to discover the wires, but I found none. I was convinced that the explanation was wrong—there was no way the voices were received through the air from as far away as the city of Lviv, some three hundred kilometers away. The sound must have come through a phone line, I thought—perhaps hidden in the legs of the table.

When nobody was around, I managed to move the table, but I found no wires. After I came home and related my observations, my parents told me that indeed, there was such a thing called radio, invented in Italy by Marconi. I went again the next day and rechecked the room for possible wires but found none.

In another part of the fair, a man had a cockroach running around in a small jar. He opened a folded piece of wax paper in which there were tiny crystals. He placed one crystal in a small vial with water, and immediately, the water turned purple. Then, with an eyedropper, he placed one drop of the colored fluid on top of a live cockroach. The insect immediately stopped moving, and I was amazed that it was actually dead, killed by the colored drop. The man explained that from the small packet of crystals, many liters of colored fluid can be prepared and thousands of cockroaches killed.

I had a total of fifty groszy with me, which was my weekly, or perhaps monthly, allowance. I bought the crystals, which the man called permanganate, and brought them home, and I proudly presented them to my father. Unfortunately, my father was not impressed and told me that while the crystals’ killing effect was assured, one would have to catch the cockroaches first in order to wet them with the permanganate droplets. I was given to understand that I’d wasted my savings, but I kept the permanganate crystals for many years.

The last day of the fair, I found another item I liked, and with my remaining savings, fifty more groszy, I purchased it, but I did not report this at home. It was a small pill box, three centimeters in diameter, full of finely powdered pepper. Through a small pinhole, an almost invisible cloud of the powder could be released by squeezing the box. Everybody who was nearby would immediately start sneezing! I took the bottle first to school and tested it in my class with excellent results. I did not dare to release the spray during the lectures, however. But I also took it to the music school. At that time, Mrs. Malinowska and Miss Bienkiewich, the latter my own piano teacher, had decided that a music school had to teach not only piano but also solfège, singing, and history of music. The history, taught by Miss Bienkiewich, whom I liked, was okay, but I strongly disliked the solfège teacher. I had the feeling the dislike was mutual.

I stood in the second or third, the last, row when we sang. With my outstretched arm, behind my neighbor, I released the deadly powder. Immediately, those who were affected stopped singing and started sneezing. After the effect was over and the choir could resume singing, I again squeezed the magic box, and the poor teacher was desperate. I repeated my mean performance week after week and was not discovered, but the teacher had to resign and return to his normal duties as singing teacher in the Ukrainian high school.

The sneezing powder was not my only mean device. I found out that the fruiting bodies of roses contained tiny hairs that caused terrible itching when placed in someone’s shirt behind the neck. We had a proverb in Ukrainian: "Etchi pechi po za plechi" (the rose fruit was called etchi pechi, and poza plechi means behind the back). In addition to my using this unpleasant substance with friends of my sister and brother, I also used, during summer, crushed spikes of barley, and they too made people uncomfortable if surreptitiously inserted behind their necks. No doubt that only thanks to my strict father did I not end up as a juvenile delinquent. My cousin Trude, who lived in Zagreb, had vivid recollections of my behavior in those years, although she only saw me briefly during my visit to Zagreb and Vienna. Trude’s mother threatened me with a rolled-up towel, which she held in front of me and called, in German, "das Geknulte." Trude, who became a great-grandmother, died a few years ago in New York.

When I was ten years old, Uncle Robert came to Vienna with Aunt Hansi and my cousin Roberta. He invited his European brothers and sisters to Vienna, where we all met. My father remained at home in Kolomyya at that time. Uncle Robert had one of the first sixteen-millimeter movie cameras, and he photographed all of the relatives in the Stadtpark. In the pictures, I was clearly the enfant terrible—difficult to control and making faces while all of the others were orderly in walking toward the camera. After Uncle Robert died, my cousin Alfred Silvan stored his fifty reels of film at his summer house on Lake George. After a flood, he thought all of the films were ruined and wanted to discard them, but I persuaded him to donate them to me. At the Salvation Army store, I purchased an old sixteen-millimeter Kodak projector for twenty dollars to screen the films. Uncle Robert photographed mostly the scenery on his vacation trips to Yellowstone, Glacier National Park, and other places. The photos were in black and white, and there were only a few pictures of relatives. I cut those out, spliced them, and had them professionally transferred to a video cassette.

High School in Kolomyya

After four years of primary school, I had to pass an exam to be admitted to the high school. In Kolomyya, there was only one Polish high school, Kazimierza Jagiellonczyka. There was also a Ukrainian high school in the same building, but it had a separate entrance. The breaks were at different times, so the Ukrainian and the Polish students never met in the schoolyard during breaks. This separation was necessary in order to avoid ethnic clashes. I found the exam, at the age of ten, difficult.

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High school graduation in 1933, first row:

Ludwig Bergman, Izio Greif, Antoni Ripel,

Director Boron, Chair Bobin, K. M., Izio Rozenman

During my first exam, I faced questions I had not anticipated, and while I had no difficulty with most, I had trouble when told to write the number 100,001 on the blackboard. I was unable to figure out how, and I almost failed the whole exam because of my errors with the many zeros. I passed and was admitted to the first grade only because my examiner was Professor Dembski, teacher of Latin. He was a former high-school colleague of my father in the same high school (gimnazjum). Being a friend of my father and having had both my sister and brother as his students, he let me pass.

High school was not free, as it is in the United States. In fact, it was expensive, and only middle- and upper-middle-class families could afford to send their sons to high school. In my class, there were twenty-eight students, and in the parallel class, there were also twenty-eight students. The classes were labeled A and B. Antek Zebracki was in the B class, and I was in the A class. We still saw each other during breaks in the schoolyard, but our close friendship vanished slowly.

In my first high-school class, I had a female teacher for natural history. We had to make a large model of a split broad bean. I thought my plastic model was not bad, but my teacher disagreed. She showed it to the class and ridiculed me in front of all of the others. I wanted to cry and barely was able to hold my tears, but I decided to have nothing to do with natural history in the future.

My grades at the end of the year were good, but my father, who was ambitious, wanted me to perform better. My brother was always the best in his class, and so was my five-years-older sister. My father decided to hire a tutor to improve my grades. The tutor, Zygmunt Bober, was a colleague of my brother. After a few months, he told my father that I no longer needed his help, but my father insisted that Mr. Bober, a serious seventeen-year-old man, should continue to tutor me. Thanks to him, I greatly improved my handwriting. He insisted that letters be written clearly, following his own beautiful handwriting, and that all be exactly tilted in the same direction. In 1990, Zygmunt Bober read in a Polish newspaper that I had been in Poland as a guest of the Third Congress of Scientists of Polish Origin. He wrote to me, asking whether I was his former student. My name, like my brother’s and father’s, was Marmorosch in high school, but the newspaper article had spelled it as Maramorosch.

The reason for this difference required my search when I was finishing high school, and for the baccalaureate (matura), I had to bring my birth certificate to school. Mr. Bobin, head of my class, took it and exclaimed, So your name is not Marmorosch but Maramorosch?

No, I replied, it is Marmorosch.

No! Your birth certificate is for Karl, not Karol, Maramorosch!

I tried to convince Mr. Bobin that this was an error, because the family name was definitely Marmorosch, but he replied that only what was written on the birth certificate was valid. When I came home, I related to my father what had happened, but he did not seem concerned about it. He told me he had a certificate of identity and then showed it to me. It stated that Marmorosch, Maramorosch, and Marmarosz were identical. I took this certificate to high school, but Mr. Bobin said that this certificate had been made for my father. Only if I could produce one for myself would he be able to enter the name Marmorosch for me on my baccalaureate certificate. I went to Mr. Fruchter, who kept the birth entries of the Jews in the town of Kolomyya. He opened a large volume and found that indeed, my grandfather had been entered as Salomon Marmorosch. But when he came to the year 1876, when my father was being registered as having been born to Salomon and Mali née Rall-Schapiro on August 26, the entry was for Jacob Leib Maramorosch. Mr. Fruchter explained that this error most likely had occurred in 1876, because the office of his predecessor had been located across from the office of the first Kolomyya lawyer, a man by the name of Maramorosch. The lawyer was the last member of a Polish nobility family of Armenian Catholics, and the Jewish official saw the spelling of this lawyer’s name every day when he was coming to work. He probably thought my grandfather had misspelled the name on the note forwarded to him, and he entered the family name the way he was used to seeing it every day across the street.

The office of the lawyer was in a one-story house that, before 1939, had belonged to my father’s close friend Mr. Lonio Funkenstein (also a lawyer). I tried in vain to obtain an identity certificate for myself. Only the mayor of Kolomyya, the district leader (starosta), could issue one. Mr. Sanojca, who was also a member of the Polish parliament at that time, refused to issue such a document, and I remained forever Karl Maramorosch—the only member of the Marmorosch family. My father, my late brother, and other members of the clan have been known by the name Marmorosch. In Poland, there were three families of Armenian Catholic background with the name Maramorosch and one, a cavalry captain (rotmistrz) in Tarnopil, who was of Jewish background but Roman Catholic. The three others were owners of estates near Krosno and Halicz. A chaplain at the Armenian cathedral in Lviv was from one of these families.

The Konecki Affair

One day, in the last year of high school, someone brought to my class a postcard-sized photograph just before Easter. It showed an egg next to a horseradish carved in the shape of a human penis. Under it was the inscription Alleluia. My colleague Tadeusz Konecki was a good cartoonist. His parents had to send him to the Polish high school in Kolomyya from Bukovina. He grabbed the photograph and, in a couple of minutes, reproduced it on the blackboard. Everybody thought this stunt was funny, and we did not think it was religious blasphemy. At that moment, one of the teachers entered the class, although it was still during the break, and Konecki was just starting to erase his artwork. The teacher was horrified by the drawing and ran out of the room, and Konecki was immediately called to the office of the director, Mr. Boron. First the director and shortly thereafter the school chaplain interrogated him. Threatened with expulsion from the high school, he tried to recall who’d brought to school the postcard he’d used for his artwork. He realized this was now a serious matter, and at first, he did not say from whom he’d gotten the original photograph. A day later, after the priest and the director kept him for hours in the director’s office, he divulged that Milo Deutsch had brought the postcard to the class. Milo was called to the office and promptly expelled from the school only four months before the baccalaureate. This was not the end. The photographer who’d produced the postcard was taken to court and accused of offending the Catholic religion. He was convicted and spent four months in jail in Kolomyya. Milo Deutsch never got his baccalaureate (matura). He survived the war and died in Switzerland.

Other High-School Reminiscences

Among my other friends was Antoni Rippel. His father was drilling for oil in Sumatra and sending money to Mrs. Rippel and her two sons. The father also sent Sumatra butterflies, and when I saw them, I arranged with Antoni Rippel to exchange some of them for duplicate stamps from my collection. I did not know how to place dry, folded butterflies in a moist chamber first and afterward open the wings and pin them properly. Instead, I had to break the wings and glue them onto the thorax. I had a collection of several beautiful, large tropical Sumatra butterflies by the time I was eighteen. Antoni Rippel and I were both planning to study medicine. Both of us went to Lviv, and he passed the entry exam and, in five-plus years, finished and became a physician. He later declared that he was a Volksdeutscher and, as such, was repatriated to Germany.

With the help of my excellent tutor Bober and the prodding of my father, I became one of the best students in my class in high school. At one time, my grades in math were slipping because we got a new teacher whom I disliked for no good reason, and I stopped caring for his subject. When my father noticed the poorer grades, he immediately found a tutor, Mr. Seidman, a mathematics teacher in the Szapirowka, the new Jewish school for girls. I liked Mr. Seidman, although he seemed rather old—thirty-six years. What impressed me about him was that he and his father, owner of a store with kitchenware, were amateur photographers. Mr. Seidman had an enlarger that was built in Kolomyya as a copy of a Leitz enlarger but was much less expensive because of the low cost of labor in the town.

I got permission to take this enlarger home and later had one built by the same mechanic. The lens for it came from an old camera. Seidman’s father had a collection of dyes, made by Borrows Wellcome in the early 1930s, to stain the enlargements sepia, blue, brown, etc., and I got the whole set as a present from my tutor. By the middle of the last year—that is, eighth class of high school—I was either the best or the second best in math, after Leon Bergman. In fact, at the baccalaureate exam, I finished the test before anybody else and some thirty minutes before Leon Bergman.

My tutor, despite his old age of thirty-six, decided one day to get married to his first cousin, a Miss Seidman. This seemed unusual to me. Their marriage was in the same year as my sister’s. Her marriage was also to a first cousin, Alfred Gottlieb, and was performed by the same rabbi, Rabbi Laub, who lived on Aleja Wolnosci 9.

When I was in high school in 1929 in Kolomyya, one day, an anthropologist came to study the students in all of the classes. I became interested in his boxes with glass eyes of different colors. After he finished with our class of twenty eight students, he asked me if I could assist him in other classes. I do not remember what I did during the hour to be selected for this task, but I was glad to do it, and Mr. Bobin, our teacher responsible for the class, excused me. I worked for more than a week with the anthropologist. He found three or four students in different classes who had a Mongolian lid. He told me that this was most likely an inheritance from Hungarian ancestors, and in fact, it turned out that these students had Hungarian grandfathers. One student had one blue and one brown eye, something I probably would not have paid attention to. Shortly thereafter, I went to Lviv to visit my brother and sister, who were studying at the university there. My sister was studying history and staying with a family named Nemrow. Mr. Nemrow had several daughters but no son, and one of his daughters had one blue and one dark brown eye. The oldest, Henrysia, later married a physician, Dr. Seller, a laryngologist. He settled in Kolomyya, and I once went to him for a prescription.

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Dr. Seller

When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Dr. Seller left with the Soviet army, and his wife remained in Kolomyya. When the liquidation of the ghetto started, she was taken by train to Belzec on September 2 but managed to jump from the train and return to the ghetto a few days later. She was rounded up again on October 11, when the transport of seven thousand, including my mother, was taken to Belzec. Again, Henrysia managed to escape, but she was killed in December 1942. Her husband survived and returned with the Red Army to Kolomyya. By that time, he was married to a Russian and lived later in Katowice in western Poland. He corresponded with me for a while in the 1950s.

Around 1929, my family got our real radio and a speaker. The tubes were outside of the set, and the whole outfit was expensive, as I recall hearing from my parents. In the late 1930s, a superheterodyne radio set manufactured in Poland, in Vilnius (now the Lithuanian capital), replaced the old radio. The new set needed a battery similar to batteries now used in cars, and these batteries had to be reloaded frequently. They were called accumulators in Polish.

When I came to Lviv in 1929, my brother and sister took me to the first two movies that had sound. The first was Sonny Boy, with Al Jolson, and the second was Show Boat. These made a great impression on me, as until then, music was provided by a pianist who played on an upright piano, and there were inscriptions when people were talking. Of course, all films were black and white. The first color film I saw was in Bucharest; it was a German propaganda film about the city of Prague, Die goldene Stadt (The Golden City). All Germans were shown as good people and all Czechs as bad criminals. The next I saw in New York City at Stanley Cinema on Forty-Second Street in 1947, Zolotoy cwitok (The Golden Flower), a Russian legend about a flowering fern found in a forest.

In 1929, a new history teacher, Mr. Oszywa, was appointed in the high school. He and his wife occupied an apartment in the student house near the high school, where he became the successor of Mr. Zaczek, former supervisor of the student house. Mr. Oszywa wanted to learn English, and he purchased a set of records made by Linguaphone. The firm advertised widely in Poland, but their set of records was expensive. To induce people to purchase the records, the firm announced that one lucky buyer would win an all-expenses-paid trip abroad. One day, Mr. Oszywa announced that he was the lucky winner—the only one in all of Poland who had the good fortune to win this trip. He left for several weeks, and when he returned, he displayed hundreds of color postcards in the high school, changing the display every week. Postcards of London, Paris, and numerous Italian cities he’d visited evoked the admiration and envy of the students, who could hardly believe Oszywa’s luck.

In 1999, I read in the Polish edition of Reader’s Digest the moving story of a girl from Kolomyya by the name Wertheimer who survived the Holocaust. The author mentioned that thanks to Professor Dov Noy, whom I have known for several years, she found her brother. Dov Noy told her he got the information from Mr. Oszywa, who survived the war and lived in London.

Paul Bubi

My best friend in high school was Paul Bubi. I promised him I would not mention his real family name. His father was managing a large farm in Gody Turka, owned by Paul’s grandfather, who also was the owner of breweries. Paul was with a family as a boarder for several years, and he lived on Aleja Wolnosci, only three houses away from me. He was born in Vienna one month earlier than me, on December 18, 1914. We had a lot in common, and we both spoke fluent German. When we both were sixteen years old, we found out that one of our schoolmates, Mojzesz Bergman (no relation to Leon) from Kuty, was permitted to cross into Romania at the border whenever he wanted, because families in Kuty had relatives in Wyznica on the other side of the Czeremosz River. It was an old custom to permit border crossing to family members. Bergman told us that if we wanted, he could get us permits for crossing into Romania for a few days’ duration.

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Paul Bubi

In those days, it was difficult to obtain passports, and a passport was also expensive. Bergman assured us that he would be able to get permits at no cost, and the temptation to cross into Romania was so great that we immediately started to make plans for an excursion. Aunt Bertha, Uncle Joseph, and their daughter, Carla, were living in Chernivtsi. Their two sons, my cousins Alfred and Erich, were in France at that time. We went to Kuty and looked up a lady in the office of the mayor. She already knew from our colleague that we would request permits as permanent inhabitants of the town of Kuty. Without questioning us, she issued the proper documents. We walked to the Czeremosz River, crossed the bridge, and found ourselves in Wyznica. In front of stores were baskets of oranges for one-tenth of the price at which oranges were selling in Poland at that time. We changed a few Polish zloty to Romanian lei, got tickets for a bus that was leaving in a few minutes, and, one hour later, arrived in Chernivtsi. I remembered the address, Strada Marasesti 8, and we rang the doorbell of the large one-family stone house where my relatives were living. Carla went with us to the Prut River, showed us the city, and went with us to a large park where I took a few photographs, and we slept overnight in Chernivtsi, in the home of my uncle. He had a room in which he had trophies from hunting—antlers, stuffed birds, etc. We spoke German the whole time, and when I woke up in the morning, I realized that I was thinking in German, not in Polish. Less than forty-eight hours of using only German resulted in my as well as Paul’s change of Polish (which was the only language we always used) to German. A year later, at seventeen, Paul became infatuated with a slim blonde girl, Maryncia Borten. The love affair resulted in Paul’s lower grades in school, and while he remained an avid reader, he neglected homework and spent afternoons and evenings with Maryncia.

Both of us became good figure skaters in winter. The earlier severe and long winter of 1928/29, one of the most severe winters of the century in Europe, gave us the opportunity to improve our skating skills vastly. I had a season card for the Rosenrauch skating rink, an artificial lake made from a large area dug out for a brick factory. The owner, Mr. Rosenrauch, maintained the surface in proper shape so that we could skate for as long as the ice cover of the lake would permit it. In the spring of 1929, I went skating for the last time on May 15. This was also the month when my grandfather Salomon died. My grandfather never gave his grandchildren any presents. I doubt he ever gave presents to my father when my father was a child. Once, my father and I split an orange. My father ate only one slice and refused to take more. I asked him why he wouldn’t have more, and he told me that as a child, he’d once gotten an orange and eaten the whole thing, and his father had scolded him for so doing. Ever since, my father would only eat a single slice of an orange. I was afraid of my grandfather, and I was not permitted to practice the piano when he was sleeping upstairs at home in the seven-room apartment above ours. Grandmother Mali died in 1922, when I was seven, and I barely remember her. The first time I saw both my father and grandfather cry was at the funeral of Grandmother Mali.

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Paul Bubi in Bulawayo

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Paul Bubi and his wife, Francine, in Bulawayo

When I visited Paul in Bulawayo, he showed me his logbook. He joined the Polish division of the French army on October 10, 1939, at Coetguiden and was in the Second Division of the infantry, Third Regiment, as a cadet officer until July 1940—the so-called armistice in France. He escaped from France to Spain but was interned in a terrible Spanish concentration camp in Mireola, where he was imprisoned for four months. He escaped from Mireola to Portugal and Gibraltar. On April 28, 1941, while in Britain, he joined the Polish forces as part of the Royal Air Force. His RAF pilot’s log showed him starting pilot training in 1943 and completing the first stage of his navigator-pilot training at European Flight Training in March with an above-average assessment.

He was sent to Canada in October 1943 to complete his navigator training at the No. 1 Air Observers School in Malton, Ontario, and he finished in March 1944. On returning to the United Kingdom, he undertook familiarization training on flying the Wellington with 111 bombers in July 1944. This was followed by a commission course to the Halifax bomber in October 1944 and the Lancaster bomber in November 1944. He flew to Ludwigshafen and, in December, joined the No. 300 Polish Squadron. On February 8, he flew to Dresden, a ten-hour flight round trip and then to Politz on a eight-hour flight. The March 9 operation included Dresden, Kassel, Dortmund, Gelsenkirchen, Nuremberg, Bremen, and Hamburg. Operations continued, bombing Berlin, Helgoland, Bremen, and Berchtesgaden.

The war in Europe was coming to an end, and operations included dropping sand bags to help in the Netherlands, evacuating prisoners of war, and dropping supplies to Holland. These flights continued till May 7, when the Germans finally surrendered. Paul completed 211 flying hours of operation.

Paul died in Bulawayo a few years ago.

Reichert Microscope, 1928

In 1925, my father took his only vacation ever. Persuaded by a physician that he should take care of his frequent stomach troubles by spending three to four weeks in Franciscove Lazne (Franzensbad) in Czechoslovakia, he went there and followed the so-called cure, which consisted of drinking the curative alkaline water and eating toasts (Zwieback in German). When he came back, he brought for himself a leather jacket, which he wore on the Soroki farm for the following ten years, till 1935. He donated the jacket to my sister, Karla Bronia, when she got married to Alfred Gottlieb. Karla Bronia wore the jacket in Bojan on the farm till 1939. When I escaped with Irene from Soroki on September 18 and arrived in Cernauti and Bojan, Karla Bronia gave me this jacket. I wore the jacket in Romania and came with it to the United States in February 1947. I never threw out this leather jacket, though it’s discolored and no longer useful—because I never discard anything. It hung in our house in Scarsdale till 2014.

My father brought also a present for me—a telescope made of brass—and I treasured it greatly. In its cover, I discovered a small mirror with two screws. After a while, I found out that this mirror could be attached to the widest tube of the telescope, converting it into a microscope. It was my first microscope, and I was able to look at blades of grass and single hairs using the light thrown from below by the mirror. When we fled from our farm in 1939, I left the small telescope in a drawer in Soroki.

I was anxious to have a real microscope, and my dream was fulfilled a few years later. My mother went to Vienna, where she purchased a Reichert microscope. There was a high duty on importation of microscopes to Poland, but my mother was able to avoid paying this duty when she crossed the border. She had the wooden case with the microscope visible on the upper rack in the train, but she had removed the oculars and objective lenses, which she kept in her handbag. The customs officer asked her what she had in the wooden box, and she replied, A toy for my child. She did not know that the duty