Adam was frightened and nervous when we landed, a young boy abroad for the first time and away from familiar surroundings. Johnny had come to meet us at the boat; on seeing Adam, he asked, out of his hearing, "Who is this fellow?" He had not heard my introduction and was surprised. There is a difference of thirteen years between my brother and me, and we do not look at all alike. Adam is taller than I, straight, blond, and with a pink complexion. I am somewhat dark and stockier. In appearance he resembles some of our uncles, while I look more like our mother. At the pier, Johnny appeared very agitated. People in the United States had a much clearer and more realistic view of events than we had had in Poland. For example, when it was time to obtain an exit visa from Poland, because I was in the Polish army reserve I had to first secure the permission of the army to leave the country. The officer in charge asked casually why I wanted to go abroad and raised no further question when I told him of my lecturing engagement in America. As a rule people in Poland had not felt the imminence of war, but rather a continuation of the state of crisis, similar to the one in Munich the year before.
We stayed in New York a few days, visiting cousins — the painter Zygmund Menkès and his wife — and a friend of the family who had given additional financial guarantees for Adam, who had a student visa. Actually, the plan was that my brother would receive monthly checks from home via our uncle's bank in England. We also saw young Mr. Loeb, an acquaintance of my cousin Andrzej, and when I talked to him on the telephone, he asked: ''Will Poland give in?" I replied that I was pretty sure it would never surrender, and there was going to be a war.
I left Adam in New York to go with Johnny to Veblen's summer place in Maine. Though we were gone only two or three days, Adam was very unhappy with me for having left him. On the way to Veblen's, we discussed some mathematics as usual but mostly talked about what was going to happen in Europe. We were both nervous and worried; we examined all possible courses which a war could take, how it could start, when. And we drove back to New York. These were the last days of August.
Adam and I were staying in a hotel on Columbus Circle. It was a very hot, humid, New York night. I could not sleep very well. It must have been around one or two in the morning when the telephone rang. Dazed and perspiring, very uncomfortable, I picked up the receiver and the somber, throaty voice of my friend the topologist Witold Hurewicz began to recite the horrible tale of the start of war: "Warsaw has been bombed, the war has begun," he said. This is how I learned about the beginning of World War II. He kept describing what he had heard on the radio. I turned on my own. Adam was asleep; I did not wake him. There would be time to tell him the news in the morning. Our father and sister were in Poland, so were many other relatives. At that moment, I suddenly felt as if a curtain had fallen on my past life, cutting it off from my future. There has been a different color and meaning to everything ever since.
On the way to Cambridge, I accompanied Adam to Brown University in Providence, registered him as a freshman, and introduced him to a few of my friends, including Tamarkin and his son. His English was quite good, and he did not seem to mind being left alone in college.
I became a compulsive buyer of newspapers, all the extra editions every hour, and easily went through eight or ten papers a day looking for news of Lwów, of the military situation, and of the progress of battles. Early in September I saw in the Boston Globe a large photograph of Adam surrounded by other young freshmen at Brown. It was captioned, "Wonders whether his home was bombed."
From the start, Adam did very well in school; a few months later, he was able to obtain a tuition waiver. Nevertheless we were finding ourselves in severe financial straits. The proposed income from Britain had been frozen — the English government stopped all outgoing money, and my salary as a lecturer at Harvard was hardly sufficient to put a younger brother (who was not allowed to work because he was on a student visa) through college. On previous trips, I had never thought of transferring funds or property from Poland. Now it could no longer be done. I went to see a dean of the College and explained my situation. His name was Ferguson, and I feared that with such a Scottish name he would be rather parsimonious. Fortunately he was not. I told him that if I could not get a little more assistance from the University, I would be forced to leave my academic career and look for some other means of support. He was sympathetic and was able to find two or three hundred dollars more for the year, which was a sizable help in those days.
From indications at department meetings, I gathered that my chances of staying on at Harvard on a permanent basis were poor, so I began to make inquiries about another position for 1940. An assistant professorship became vacant at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and I received a letter inviting me for an interview. I was not much interested in going to Bethlehem, but G. D. Birkhoff told me, "Stan, you must know that it is impossible in this country to get any advancement or raises in salary without offers from elsewhere. Yes, go have the interview at Lehigh." I replied, "Who will teach my class that day?" "I will," he said. I felt both embarrassed and honored that the great Professor Birkhoff would condescend to teach my class in undergraduate mechanics. Indeed, charmingly childish as he often was, and wanting to show the young students who he was, he gave a complicated and advanced lecture which, I later learned, they did not understand very well.
Bethlehem was covered with a yellow pall of acrid smog when I arrived for the interview — an inauspicious beginning. The chairman took me around the department and introduced me to a young professor there. It happened to be the number theorist D. H. Lehmer. As we entered his office, he was correcting a large pile of blue books and said to me, right in front of the chairman, "See what we have to do here!" This contributed to a negative impression and brought instantly to my mind a similar situation in Poland. When a chambermaid or some other servant girl was leaving a place of employment, she would take the new prospective maid aside and show her the less favorable aspects of the job.
This was the period of my life when I was perhaps in the worst state, mentally, nervously, and materially. My world had collapsed. Prospects for the reconstitution of Poland in any recognizable form were dim indeed. There was a terrible anxiety about the fate of all those whom we had left behind — family and friends. Adam was also in a very depressed state, and this contributed to my worries. L. G. Henderson, who was always friendly and helpful, gave me all the moral support he could. When France collapsed in the spring of 1940, the situation became so dark and seemingly hopeless that despair gripped all the European émigrés on this side of the ocean. There was the added worry that should German ideas prevail along with their military successes, life in America would become quite different, and xenophobia and anti-Semitism might grow here too.
During that period I lived in a little room on the fourth floor of the Ambassador Hotel. On the fifth, the Alfred North Whiteheads lived in a large apartment whose walls were curiously painted in black. I knew Whitehead from the Society of Fellows dinners. He and Mrs. Whitehead held a weekly "at home" evening to which they invited me. He was already quite old, but his mind was crystal clear, sharp, incisive, with a better memory than many of his juniors. I remember their fortitude and courage at the time of the bombing of London. Whitehead never seemed to give up hope that the war would be won in the end, and he lived to see the defeat of Germany.