Józef Marcinkiewicz

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Józef Marcinkiewicz (born on March 30, 1910 in Cimoszka, near Białystok, Poland - died in 1940 in Kharkov, Ukraine) was a Polish mathematician. [1]

He was a student of Antoni Zygmund; and later worked with Juliusz Schauder, and Stefan Kaczmarz.

Marcinkiewicz was taken as a Polish POW to a Soviet camp in Starobielsk. In 1940 he was murdered, together with 15,000 other Polish intelligentsia in the Katyn massacre on the mass murder site in Kharkov, Ukraine. His parents, to whom he gave his manuscripts before the beginning of WWII, were transported to the Soviet Union in 1940 and later died of hunger in a camp.

Their faith is described in his biography in the hidden way, that could have been understood only by those, who can read small allusions about Soviet terror:

War broke out a few days after Marcinkiewicz returned to Wilno. Zygmund writes On September 2, the second day of the war, I came across him accidentally in the street in Wilno, already in military uniform ... We agreed to meet the same day in the evening but apparently circumstances prevented him from coming since he did not show up at the appointed place. A few months later came the news that he was a prisoner of war and was asking for mathematical books. It seems that this was the last news about Marcinkiewicz. During his time in Paris and England, Marcinkiewicz had produced some mathematical work which he had written down in manuscript form. After returning to Poland he gave these manuscripts to his parents for safe keeping. Sadly Marcinkiewicz's parents suffered the same fate as he did and died during the war. No trace of the manuscripts was ever found.