Everything Falls Apart

I am living proof that it is better to be born to a family with money than to one without.  Recently I learned I have something called a white privilege card.  This is not new information for me, I’ve known that since grade school.  But now it has a really cool name.

 

In fact, I have an entire set of silver spoons.  My maternal grandparents’ silverware set.  You can tell just by looking at the box it is really old.  They don’t make stuff like that anymore.

 

Yes, I have had it easy, and yes, I am rubbing it in.  You can stop reading at any time if that is a problem.

 

But, it does raise an issue for me.  I have led a completely ordinary life.  I’ve done almost nothing you would consider interesting.  You’d get tired of hearing about Easy Street after a few paragraphs. 

 

Luckily, I have a couple of deep wells to draw from.  My parents.  Both of them lived through the Great Depression, and it affected each of them profoundly.  Then, an incredibly unlikely set of circumstances sprung from World War II.  Otherwise, my parents would have never even been on the same continent at the same time.

 

So yes.  Without the slaughter of something like 80 million people during the Big One, yours truly would not exist.

 

My mother’s story is also interesting.  But first things first.  All of this happened because my father was a totally geeked out math nerd.

 

We Americans have heard about how bad the Great Depression was in our own country.  Most of us don’t know that it was as bad or worse in other places.  Take Poland, for example.  Prior to the Depression, the Polish economy was largely based on agriculture.  When the bad times hit, wages fell by as much as half for the average worker.  There was chaos, hunger, and a sense of panic and helplessness.

 

My father’s family was profoundly affected by the changes.  But they had an advantage.  Before things fell apart, they had been very successful.  My grandfather owned a number of bakeries, and during the relatively stable years of the 1920s, he had begun to purchase real estate with his profits.  He and his family became members of the nouveau riche of Warsaw.

 

As a young man, my father attended the most prestigious schools.  He showed an immediate proclivity for learning.  Artur was a quiet child, not gregarious and outgoing like his father.  His teachers knew immediately that he had a knack for mathematics.

 

Piotr hoped his oldest son would follow in his footsteps and take over the family business one day.  After several conferences with the principal and teachers at school, he realized he had a totally different issue to deal with.

 

When Artur brought home the first note requesting a conference, Piotr assumed his son had got caught doing any number of the things he had got caught doing at that age.  That was not the case.  Artur’s teacher said, “Your son has already mastered the entire mathematics curriculum for Primary School and Gymnasium.  I’d like to have him placed in the Advanced Studies Program in the Secondary School.”

 

It took Piotr a couple of minutes to wrap his head around what the teacher was saying.  The thought of his 9-year-old son going to classes with children twice his age and three times his size made his head spin.  He looked at his son and said, “What do you think, Arti?”

 

“Poppa, I’m bored.”

 

Artur was only slightly more challenged by the classes at the Secondary School.  He bided his time until his parents allowed him to enroll at the University of Warsaw.  His principal had spoken with the admissions department and they said they would consider letting him take classes.  But Artur’s mother balked. 

 

She had reservations from the start about letting her son mingle with much older children.  There had been a few bullying incidents at the Secondary School to back up her side of the argument.  As a compromise, Franciszka agreed to let her son start attending the University when he turned 15.

 

Artur celebrated his ninth birthday a few weeks before October 29, 1929.  Otherwise known as Black Tuesday.  The day the stock market crashed in America.  Thus began the Great Depression.  The economic impact quickly rippled across the Atlantic and through Europe. 

 

Within a year, Piotr had closed all of his bakeries but one.  His real estate empire was in shambles.  By 1933, he’d lost every property he owned, except for the bakery and the house his family lived in.

 

Piotr would never rebuild his financial empire.  The Depression was bad in Poland, but nothing compared to what would happen next.  Piotr worked 16 hour days to make sure his family was fed and had clothes.  Artur pitched in, along with his brothers, sisters and mother.  As a family, they survived.

 

Artur turned 15, but there was no money for the University.  The economy had bottomed out and was showing anemic signs of recovery.  Yet, something much more ominous was happening.  Just to the west in Germany, Adolf Hitler had taken control of the government.  Piotr and his family barely noticed.  The long hours at the bakery did not leave them much energy to think about politics.

 

Gradually, Piotr came to terms with the idea of Artur leaving the bakery and focusing on his education.  Only one son was an oddball, the rest of the children would follow in their father’s footsteps. 

 

Deep down, Piotr knew his eldest son was destined to leave a mark on this world, and not in a bakery.

 

But sending Artur to college would be a challenge without money.  There were no scholarships during those difficult times.  When Piotr met with the Dean of Admissions, he brought with him the same weapon he always carried.  His knowledge of human nature.

 

If Piotr had offered a cash bribe to the Dean, he would have been thrown out of the office.  You rarely hear of people pulling off bribery with baked goods.  But that is exactly what he did.

 

Something Piotr had figured out a long time ago.  Humans like the smell of food.  When he walked into the lobby at the Dean’s office, he carried a tray of Szarlotka, a traditional Polish apple pie.  He handed it to the secretary.  She broke out in a smile.

 

Piotr had filled a box with baked goodies for the Dean.  Artur carried it.  When he sat down in the lobby, Artur lifted up the corner of the lid, as Piotr had instructed.  The freshly baked goods were still giving off heat.  Within a few minutes, the lobby smelled like a bakery. 

 

That was as far as Piotr could go.  He was just a baker.  He could tell the Dean was happy when he handed him the box of goodies. The rest would be up to Artur. 

 

Everyone shook hands in the Dean’s office.  The Chairman of the Math Department was also there.  After some pleasantries, the Chairman asked Artur how far his math studies had gone.

 

Before long, Artur and the Chairman were standing at the blackboard, writing down equations and talking really fast.  The Dean looked at Piotr and said, “Why don’t you and I go to the lounge and have some coffee?  It may take them a while to sort through whatever it is they are doing.  I think I’ll try one of your doughnuts.”

 

On the tram heading back to the bakery, Piotr asked Artur what he talked about with the Dean.  “We discussed Murray and von Neumann’s recent article on the Theorem of Rings of Operators.”  Piotr assumed they weren’t talking about the kind of rings he knew about.

 

That was how my father was able to attend the University of Warsaw.  No money changed hands for Artur’s tuition.  But the place smelled like a bakery fairly often. 

 

Within a year, sixteen-year-old Artur was handed a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, and he began graduate school.  The otherwise reserved young man slowly came out of his shell, at least in academic settings.  When the Dean asked him if he would like to teach the Introduction to Calculus class next semester, Artur surprised himself by saying yes.

 

It would not be considered appropriate for a graduate student, much less a 19-year-old, to publish a paper in Acta Mathematica.  His name was last on the author’s list.  The article posed some innovative ways to investigate an unsolved problem called The Hodge Conjecture.  It was considered both groundbreaking and controversial.  The article generated quite a bit of buzz in the world of mathematics.

 

Artur’s major professor, Dr. Nowicki, was listed as the lead author.  He was a humble man, and made it clear whenever he discussed the paper:  Artur was the heavy lifter.  It was his innovative thinking that led to the paper.  When people asked Artur to explain the source of his creativity, he’d say, “I’m the first person to combine the secrets of baking with theoretical mathematics.”

 

He didn’t have a clue, but two things would soon change Artur’s life forever.  First, a German scientist named Wernher von Braun read the article.  He recognized that one of the lines of discussion regarding the Hodge Conjecture had implications in the field of rocket aerodynamics.  

 

Then, on September 1^st, 1939, Nazi troops crossed the border and began systematically destroying the Polish military.  They were hopelessly outclassed.  When the bombing of Warsaw stopped on September 27^th, Artur and the rest of his family climbed out of the basement.  The bakery and much of the city was in ruins.  The treads of the Panzers made a heavy clanking sound as they drove across the cobblestone streets.  Poland had fallen, and World War II was in full bloom.