by Walter Lewin
I was also fortunate that at the time I got my degree, a whole new era of discovery about the nature of the universe was getting under way. Astronomers were making discoveries at an amazing pace. Some were examining the atmospheres of Mars and Venus, searching for water vapor. Some had discovered the belts of charged particles circling the Earth’s magnetic field lines, which we now call the Van Allen belts. Others had discovered huge, powerful sources of radio waves known as quasars (quasi-stellar radio sources). The cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation was discovered in 1965—the traces of the energy released by the big bang, powerful evidence for the big bang theory of the universe’s origin, which had been controversial. Shortly after, in 1967, astronomers would discover a new category of stars, which came to be called pulsars.
I might have continued working in nuclear physics, as there was a great deal of discovery going on there as well. This work was mostly in the hunt for and discovery of a rapidly growing zoo of subatomic particles, most importantly those called quarks, which turned out to be the building blocks of protons and neutrons. Quarks are so odd in their range of behaviors that in order to classify them, physicists assigned them what they called flavors: up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom. The discovery of quarks was one of those beautiful moments in science when a purely theoretical idea is confirmed. Theorists had predicted quarks, and then experimentalists managed to find them. And how exotic they were, revealing that matter was so much more complicated in its foundations than we had known. For instance, we now know that protons consist of two up quarks and one down quark, held together by the strong nuclear force, in the form of other strange particles called gluons. Some theoreticians have recently calculated that the up quark seems to have a mass of about 0.2 percent of that of a proton, while the down quark has a mass of about 0.5 percent of the mass of a proton. This was not your grandfather’s nucleus anymore. The particle zoo would have been a fascinating area of research to go into, I’m sure, but by a happy accident, the skills I’d learned for measuring radiation emitted from the nucleus turned out to be extremely useful for probing the universe. In 1965, I received an invitation from Professor Bruno Rossi at MIT to work on X-ray astronomy, which was an entirely new field, really just a few years old at the time—Rossi had initiated it in 1959.
MIT was the best thing that could ever have happened to me. Rossi’s work on cosmic rays was already legendary. He’d headed a department at Los Alamos during the war and pioneered in the measurements of solar wind, also called interplanetary plasma—a stream of charged particles ejected by the Sun that causes our aurora borealis and “blows” comet tails away from the Sun. Now he had the idea to search the cosmos for X-rays. It was completely exploratory work; he had no idea whether he’d find them or not.
Anything went at that time at MIT. Any idea you had, if you could convince people that it was doable, you could work on it. What a difference from the Netherlands! At Delft, there was a rigid hierarchy, and the graduate students were treated like a lower class. The professors were given keys to the front door of my building, but as a graduate student you only got a key to the door in the basement, where the bicycles were kept. Each time you entered the building you had to pick your way through the bicycle storage rooms and be reminded of the fact that you were nothing.
If you wanted to work after five o’clock you had to fill out a form, every day, by four p.m., justifying why you had to stay late, which I had to do almost all the time. The bureaucracy was a real nuisance.
The three professors in charge of my institute had reserved parking places close to the front door. One of them, my own supervisor, worked in Amsterdam and came to Delft only once a week on Tuesdays. I asked him one day, “When you are not here, would you mind if I used your parking space?” He said, “Of course not,” but then the very first day I parked there I was called on the public intercom and instructed in the strongest terms possible that I was to remove my car. Here’s another one. Since I had to go to Amsterdam to pick up my isotopes, I was allowed 25 cents for a cup of coffee, and 1.25 guilders for lunch (1.25 guilders was about one-third of a U.S. dollar at the time), but I had to submit separate receipts for each. So I asked if I could add the 25 cents to the lunch receipt and only submit one receipt for 1.50 guilders. The department chair, Professor Blaisse, wrote me a letter that stated that if I wanted to have gourmet meals I could do so—at my own expense.
So what a joy it was to get to MIT and be free from all of that; I felt reborn. Everything was done to encourage you. I got a key to the front door and could work in my office day or night just as I wanted. To me, that key to the building was like a key to everything. The head of the Physics Department offered me a faculty position six months after my arrival, in June of 1966. I accepted and I’ve never left.
Arriving at MIT was also so exhilarating because I had lived through the devastation of World War II. The Nazis had murdered half of my family, a tragedy that I haven’t really digested yet. I do talk about it sometimes, but very rarely because it’s so very difficult for me—it is more than sixty-five years ago, and it’s still overwhelming. When my sister Bea and I talk about it, we almost always cry.
I was born in 1936, and I was just four years old when the Germans attacked the Netherlands on May 10, 1940. One of my earliest memories is all of us, my mother’s parents, my mother and father and sister and I, hiding in the bathroom of our house (at the Amandelstraat 61 in The Hague) as the Nazi troops entered my country. We were holding wet handkerchiefs over our noses, as there had been warnings that there would be gas attacks.
The Dutch police snatched my Jewish grandparents, Gustav Lewin and Emma Lewin Gottfeld, from their house in 1942. At about the same time they hauled out my father’s sister Julia, her husband Jacob (called Jenno), and her three children—Otto, Rudi, and Emmie—and put them all on trucks, with their suitcases, and sent them to Westerbork, the transshipment camp in Holland. More than a hundred thousand Jews passed through Westerbork, on their way to other camps. The Nazis quickly sent my grandparents to Auschwitz and murdered them—gassed them—the day they arrived, November 19, 1942. My grandfather was seventy-five and my grandmother sixty-nine, so they wouldn’t have been candidates for labor camps. Westerbork, by contrast, was so strange; it was made to look like a resort for Jews. There were ballet performances and shops. My mother would often bake potato pancakes that she would then send by mail to our family in Westerbork.
Because my uncle Jenno was what the Dutch call “statenloos,” or stateless—he had no nationality—he was able to drag his feet and stay at Westerbork with his family for fifteen months before the Nazis split up the family and shipped them to different camps. They sent my aunt Julia and my cousins Emmie and Rudi first to the women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück in Germany and then to Bergen-Belsen, also in Germany, where they were imprisoned until the war ended. My aunt Julia died ten days after the camp’s liberation by the Allies, but my cousins survived. My cousin Otto, the oldest, had also been sent to Ravensbrück, to the men’s camp there, and near the end of the war ended up in the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen; he survived the Sachsenhausen death march in April 1945. Uncle Jenno they sent directly to Buchenwald, where they murdered him—along with more than 55,000 others.
Whenever I see a movie about the Holocaust, which I would not do for a really long time, I project it immediately onto my own family. That’s why I felt the movie Life Is Beautiful was terribly difficult to watch, even objectionable. I just couldn’t imagine joking about something that was so serious. I still have recurring nightmares about being chased by Nazis, and I wake up sometimes absolutely terrified. I even once in my dreams witnessed my own execution by the Nazis.
Some day I would like to take the walk, my paternal grandparents’ last walk, from the train station to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. I don’t know if I’ll ever do it, but it seems to me like one way to memorialize them. Against such a monstrosity, maybe small gestures are all that we have. That, and our
refusal to forget: I never talk about my family members having “died” in concentration camps. I always use the word murdered, so we do not let language hide the reality.
My father was Jewish but my mother was not, and as a Jew married to a non-Jewish woman, he was not immediately a target. But he became a target soon enough, in 1943. I remember that he had to wear the yellow star. Not my mother, or sister, or I, but he did. We didn’t pay much attention to it, at least not at first. He had it hidden a little bit, under his clothes, which was forbidden. What was really frightening was the way he gradually accommodated to the Nazi restrictions, which just kept getting worse. First, he was not allowed on public transportation. Then, he wasn’t allowed in public parks. Then he wasn’t allowed in restaurants; he became persona non grata in places he had frequented for years! And the incredible thing is the ability of people to adjust.
When he could no longer take public transportation, he would say, “Well, how often do I make use of public transportation?” When he wasn’t allowed in public parks anymore, he would say, “Well, how often do I go to public parks?” Then, when he could not go to a restaurant, he would say, “Well, how often do I go to restaurants?” He tried to make these awful things seem trivial, like a minor inconvenience, perhaps for his children’s sake, and perhaps also for his own peace of mind. I don’t know.
It’s still one of the hardest things for me to talk about. Why this ability to slowly see the water rise but not recognize that it will drown you? How could they see it and not see it at the same time? That’s something that I cannot cope with. Of course, in a sense it’s completely understandable; perhaps that’s the only way you can survive, for as long as you are able to fool yourself.
Though the Nazis made public parks off-limits to Jews, my father was allowed to walk in cemeteries. Even now, I recall many walks with him at a nearby cemetery. We fantasized about how and why family members died—sometimes four had died on the same day. I still do that nowadays when I walk in Cambridge’s famous Mount Auburn Cemetery.
The most dramatic thing that happened to me growing up was that all of a sudden my father disappeared. I vividly remember the day he left. I came home from school and sensed somehow that he was gone. My mother was not home, so I asked our nanny, Lenie, “Where’s Dad?” and I got an answer of some sort, meant to be reassuring, but somehow I knew that my father had left.
Bea saw him leaving, but she never told me until many years later. The four of us slept in the same bedroom for security, and at four in the morning, she saw him get up and put some clothes in a bag. Then he kissed my mother and left. My mother didn’t know where he was going; that knowledge would have been very dangerous, because the Germans might have tortured her to find out where my father was and she would have told them. We now know that the Resistance hid him, and eventually we got some messages from him through the Resistance, but at the time it was absolutely terrible not knowing where he was or even if he was alive.
I was too young to understand how profoundly his absence affected my mother. My parents ran a school out of our home—which no doubt had a strong influence on my love of teaching—and she struggled to carry on without him. She had a tendency toward depression anyway, but now her husband was gone, and she worried that we children might be sent to a concentration camp. She must have been truly terrified for us because—as she told me fifty-five years later—one night she said to Bea and me that we should sleep in the kitchen, and she stuffed curtains and blankets and towels under the doors so that no air could escape. She was intending to put the gas on and let us sleep ourselves into death, but she didn’t go through with it. Who can blame her for thinking of it—I know that Bea and I don’t.
I was afraid a lot. And I know it sounds ridiculous, but I was the only male, so I sort of became the man of the house, even at age seven and eight. In The Hague, where we lived, there were many broken-down houses on the coast, half-destroyed by the Germans who were building bunkers on our beaches. I would go there and steal wood—I was going to say “collect,” but it was stealing—from those houses so that we had some fuel for cooking and for heat.
To try to stay warm in the winters we wore this rough, scratchy, poor-quality wool. And I still cannot stand wool to this day. My skin is so sensitive that I sleep on eight-hundred-thread-count cotton sheets. That’s also why I order very fine cotton shirts—ones that do not irritate my skin. My daughter Pauline tells me that if I see her wearing wool, I still turn away; such is the effect the war still has on me.
My father returned while the war was still going on, in the fall of 1944. People in my family disagree about just how this happened, but as near as I can tell it seems that my wonderful aunt Lauk, my mother’s sister, was in Amsterdam one day, about 30 miles away from The Hague, and she caught sight of my father! She followed him from a distance and saw him go into a house. Later she went back and discovered that he was living with a woman.
My aunt told my mother, who at first got even more depressed and upset, but I’m told that she collected herself and took the boat to Amsterdam (trains were no longer operating), marched right up to the house, and rang the bell. Out came the woman, and my mother said, “I want to speak to my husband.” The woman replied, “I am the wife of Mr. Lewin.” But my mother insisted: “I want my husband.” My father came to the door, and she said, “I’ll give you five minutes to pack up and come back with me or else you can get a divorce and you’ll never see your children again.” In three minutes he came back downstairs with his things and returned with her.
In some ways it was much worse when he was back, because people knew that my father, whose name was also Walter Lewin, was a Jew. The Resistance had given him false identification papers, under the name of Jaap Horstman, and my sister and I were instructed to call him Uncle Jaap. It’s a total miracle, and doesn’t make any sense to Bea and me to this very day, but no one turned him in. A carpenter made a hatch in the ground floor of our house. We could lift it up and my father could go down and hide in the crawl space. Remarkably, my father managed to avoid capture.
He was probably at home eight months or so before the war ended, including the worst time of the war for us, the winter of 1944 famine, the hongerwinter. People starved to death—nearly twenty thousand died. For heat we crawled under the house and pulled out every other floor joist—the large beams that supported the ground floor—for firewood. In the hunger winter we ate tulip bulbs, and even bark. People could have turned my father in for food. The Germans would also pay money (I believe it was fifty guilders, which was about fifteen dollars at the time) for every Jew they turned in.
The Germans did come to our house one day. It turned out that they were collecting typewriters, and they looked at ours, the ones we used to teach typing, but they thought they were too old. The Germans in their own way were pretty stupid; if you’re being told to collect typewriters, you don’t collect Jews. It sounds like a movie, I know. But it really happened.
After all of the trauma of the war, I suppose the amazing thing is that I had a more or less normal childhood. My parents kept running their school—the Haagsch Studiehuis—which they’d done before and during the war, teaching typing, shorthand, languages, and business skills. I too was a teacher there while I was in college.
My parents patronized the arts, and I began to learn about art. I had an academically and socially wonderful time in college. I got married in 1959, started graduate school in January 1960, and my first daughter, Pauline, was born later that year. My son Emanuel (who is now called Chuck) was born two years after that, and our second daughter, Emma, came in 1965. Our second son, Jakob, was born in the United States in 1967.
When I arrived at MIT, luck was on my side; I found myself right in the middle of the explosion of discoveries going on at that time. The expertise I had to offer was perfect for Bruno Rossi’s pioneering X-ray astronomy team, even though I didn’t know anything about space research.
V-2 rockets had broken the bounds of the Earth�
�s atmosphere, and a whole new vista of opportunity for discoveries had been opened up. Ironically, the V-2 had been designed by Wernher von Braun, who was a Nazi. He developed the rockets during World War II to kill Allied civilians, and they were terribly destructive. In Peenemünde and in the notorious underground Mittelwerk plant in Germany, slave laborers from concentration camps built them, and some twenty thousand died in the process. The rockets themselves killed more than seven thousand civilians, mostly in London. There was a launch site about a mile from my mother’s parents’ house close to The Hague. I recall a sizzling noise as the rockets were being fueled and the roaring noise at launch. In one bombing raid the Allies tried to destroy V-2 equipment, but they missed and killed five hundred Dutch civilians instead. After the war the Americans brought von Braun to the United States and he became a hero. That has always baffled me. He was a war criminal!
For fifteen years von Braun worked with the U.S. Army to build the V-2’s descendants, the Redstone and Jupiter missiles, which carried nuclear warheads. In 1960 he joined NASA and directed the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, where he developed the Saturn rockets that sent astronauts to the Moon. Descendants of his rockets launched the field of X-ray astronomy, so while rockets began as weapons, at least they also got used for a great deal of science. In the late 1950s and early 1960s they opened new windows on the world—no, on the universe!—giving us the chance to peek outside of the Earth’s atmosphere and look around for things we couldn’t see otherwise.
