Abstract
In 1954 I was offered a teaching position in the Department of History at Indiana University in Bloomington. This was largely due to the fact that my former Cambridge tutor Norman J. G. Pounds was organizing a center of Russian and Eastern European studies at IU. He brought in not only historians but also language teachers. So two Poles, Feliks Jabłonowski and Wacław Soroka, came with their families to Bloomington as teachers. I was very pleased for I felt rather isolated in the typically Midwestern Hoosier milieu. The Polish contingent grew significantly when in 1957 the graduate school admitted the first Polish student in my field. Her name was Anna Maria Cienciala. The name was not unfamiliar. The Cienciala family was well known in Teschen, Silesia (Zaolzie), for propagating the Polish culture endangered by German and Czech expansion. Anna’s father, however, was appointed director of the Polish Naval Agency in 1927 and moved to Gdańsk (then the Free City of Danzig), where Anna was born in 1929. She spent her childhood in Gdynia attending the school of Sister Ursulines. Her upbringing was very patriotic, and she spent most of her holidays in Poland. In those days Danzig was, in the words of Marshal Piłsudski, “the barometer of German- Polish relations.” Anna was aware of the growing tensions. She later recalled a characteristic episode while walking with her sister in Gdańsk. Naturally, they conversed in Polish, and when a uniformed German Nazi admonished them, “Deutsch sprechen,” she responded, “Dass ist doch eine Freie Stadt.”
