Marian Rejewski - Back in Poland

Back in Poland

On 21 November 1946, Rejewski, having been on 15 November discharged from the Polish Army in Britain, returned to Poland to be reunited with his wife, Irena Maria Rejewska (née Lewandowska, whom Rejewski had married on 20 June 1934) and their son Andrzej (Andrew, born 1936) and daughter Janina (Jeanne, born 1939, who would later follow in her father's footsteps to become a mathematician).

Rejewski could after the war have worked in academia and was urged to do so by Prof. Krygowski, who proposed a mathematics at Poznań or Szczecin. Rejewski was, however, exhausted psychically, in ill health (in the Spanish prisons he had contracted, among other things, rheumatism...). A grievous blow to him also was, not long after his return, in the summer of 1947, the almost sudden, after five days' illness (poliomyelitis), death of his 11-year-old son Andrzej. After that he did not want to part from his wife and daughter, as would have been necessary if he had accepted Krygowski's offer, which might... have promised him a rapid academic career in view of the postwar shortages in personnel, decimated by the enemy. In Bydgoszcz they lived with their fairly well-to-do in-laws (Mrs. Rejewska's father was a dentist).

Rejewski took a position in Bydgoszcz as director of the sales department at a cable manufacturing company, Kabel Polski (Polish Cable).

Between 1949 and 1958, Rejewski was repeatedly investigated by the Polish Security Service but never divulged that he had worked on Enigma; in 1950 they demanded that he be fired from his employment. He then worked briefly as a director at the State Surveying Company, then at the Association of Polish Surveyors. From 1951 to 1954 he worked at the Association of Timber and Varied Manufactures Cooperatives. From 1954 until his retirement on a disability pension in February 1967, he was director of the inspectorate of costs and prices at a Provincial Association of Labor Cooperatives.

In 1969 Rejewski and his family moved back to Warsaw, to the apartment that he had acquired in May 1939 with financial help from his father-in-law. (After the Germans suppressed the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, they had sent Mrs. Rejewska and her children to the west, along with other Warsaw survivors. The family had eventually found refuge with her parents in Bydgoszcz.)

Rejewski understandably took satisfaction from his accomplishments in breaking the German Enigma cipher for nearly seven years (beginning in December 1932) prior to the outbreak of World War II and then into the war, in personal and teleprinter collaboration with Bletchley Park, at least until the 1940 fall of France. In 1942, at Uzès, Vichy France, he wrote a "Report of Cryptologic Work on the German Enigma Machine Cipher." Before his retirement in 1967 a quarter-century later, he began writing his "Memoirs of My Work in the Cipher Bureau of Section II of the General Staff," which were purchased by the Military Historical Institute, located in Warsaw.

Rejewski must often have wondered, after the 1940 French debacle, what use Alan Turing (who had visited the Polish cryptologists outside Paris) and Bletchley Park, had ultimately made of the Polish discoveries and inventions. For nearly three decades after the war, little was publicly known due to a ban that had been imposed on 25 May 1945 by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

What little was published attracted little attention. Ladislas Farago's 1971 best-seller The Game of the Foxes presented a garbled account of Ultra's origins: "Commander Denniston went clandestinely to a secluded Polish castle on the eve of the war . Dilly Knox later solved its keying..." Still, this was closer to the truth than most of the British and American accounts that would follow after 1974. Their authors were at a disadvantage: they did not know that the founder of Enigma decryption, Marian Rejewski, was still alive and alert and that historical confabulation was therefore hazardous.

With Gustave Bertrand's 1973 publication of his Enigma, substantial information about the origins of Ultra began to seep out to the broader world public. With F.W. Winterbotham's 1974 best-seller The Ultra Secret, the dam began to burst. Still, many authors likewise aspired to best-sellerdom and were not averse to filling gaps in their information with whole-cloth fabrications. Rejewski fought a gallant (if into the 21st century still not entirely successful) fight to get the truth before the public. He published a number of papers on his cryptologic work and contributed generously to articles, books and television programs. He was interviewed by scholars, journalists and television crews from Poland, East Germany, the United States, Britain, Sweden, Belgium, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Brazil.

He maintained a lively correspondence with his wartime French host, General Gustave Bertrand, and at the General's bidding began translating Bertrand's Enigma into Polish. A few years before his death, at the request of the Józef Piłsudski Institute of America, Rejewski broke enciphered correspondence of Józef Piłsudski and his fellow Polish Socialist conspirators from 1904. On 12 August 1978, a year and a half before his death, he received the Officer's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta.

Rejewski, who had been suffering from heart disease, died of a heart attack at his home on 13 February 1980, aged 74. He was buried with military honors at Warsaw's Powązki Military Cemetery.