ABSTRACT
I. THE BEGINNINGS My first contact with chemistry occurred in September 1942. It was a difficult year. In March my family was expelled from our small house, Maidanek Street 15 in the eastern suburb of Lublin; the Germans formed there a provisional smaller ghetto for the Jews. We and our neighbors stayed for a fortnight in the Lublin churches while Jewish teams cleaned the flats left by the Jews; then we got an empty flat in the former ghetto, still smelling of sulfur dioxide. The Jewish teams were burning in the streets the furniture, books, and other belongings of the Jews who were earlier mostly transported to the death camps in Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor in the East; the flames reached the second floor of the buildings.
