From the Vistula to the Canadian Great Lakes: A Life’s Journey

The book is a memoir of Lucjan Krause, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Windsor in Canada. Born in Poznań in 1928, as a scout and Home Army soldier, he took part in the Warsaw Uprising and after its failure was sent to a POW camp in Germany. The first part of the book focuses on this period in his life and presents a vivid description of many dramatic events from an eyewitness perspective. In 1951, after graduating from the University of London, Lucjan Krause emigrated to Canada and was awarded his PhD in Physics at the University of Toronto. Afterwards he created a vibrant experimental centre for atomic and molecular physics at the University of Windsor. In the past fifty years numerous physicists from Toruń and other Polish scientific centres have participated in research conducted there as postdoctoral fellows. It was possible thanks to the cooperation initiated in 1963 by Lucjan Krause and Aleksander Jabłoński, the Head of the Physics Department of Nicolaus Copernicus University. The second part of Lucjan Krause’s book presents his account of this cooperation which allowed many Polish physicists to conduct experiments with the use of advanced equipment, not available in Poland at that time. In this way, Professor Lucjan Krause contributed significantly to the development of physics in Poland. Thus, Professor Lucjan Krause’s memoir represents not only an essential contribution to the history of the development of atomic physics in the last four decades of the 20th century in Canada and Poland, but also provides insight into Polish-Canadian scientific relations.