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Oksana ZayachkivskaThe Recipe of Life From Henryk Beck
Remembering Henryk
Beck (1896-1946) on the 120th Anniversary of his Birth This year, 2016, commemorates the 120th birthdate of Henryk Beck
(1896-1946).
This year memorializes also the fact that he died 70 years ago. Henryk Beck
was a
gynecologist by profession and an artist by nature with a wide circle of
interests, including literature, music and painting. His narrative reflects a
unique journey showing his personal courage and truth. A great part of his life
was a struggle against political discrimination, fascism, and antisemitism.
Despite this, Henryk Beck overcame adversity and
tragedy by channeling to his vast creative energy that permeated his personal
and academic life. Even in present times, Henryk
Beck’s work and life story
presents a fascinating insight in the
interplay between medicine and art.
In particular, Dr. Beck’s great
spirit, grace and compassion gave him the
unique ability to see the beauty in
every moment of
his life. His
comittment to the truth in
both medicine and art was
not solely applicable to his
life in Poland
or Ukraine, but rather it transgressed the national boundaries, being universal in nature.
Professor Henryk Beck was an alumnus of the Medical
Faculty (1920) of the University of Lviv (formerly
known as Lemberg, 1772-1919, or Lwów,
1340-1772 and 1920-1939). Lviv is now situated in the
west of the Ukraine, and its university is today known as the Danylo Halytsky Lviv National Medical University. Dr. Beck held the post of
Professor of Gynecology and Obstetrics in the Medical Faculty of the Warsaw
(1921-1939) and the Wrocław University (1946).
He was not merely a scholar with first-rate credentials for having developed
new diagnostic methods or operative techniques in gynecology and obstetrics,
but also a man of great personal courage. Over the years, he emerged to be a
skilled doctor, a militant physician as well as an artist. Henryk Beck was born at the 8th of February 1896
into the family of Adolf Beck and Regina Mandelbaum. The Beck ancestors
originally resided in Amsterdam. They relocated to Cracow in the 18th
century and in 1895 Adolf and Regina moved to Lviv
with their one year-old daughter Sofia. Henryk spend
more than half of his life in Lviv and, together with
his family, was destined to collide with the upheavals posed by both the First
and Second World War. To understand Henryk
Beck’s personality and the vicissitudes of his life, we must transcend the
formality that masks his inner world, and take first a look to his family and
to the style of parenting in the home where he grew up and matured. His father,
Adolf Beck (1863-1942) was one of the greatest pioneers in the development of
electrophysiology and a co-founder of electroencephalography (EEG). The inquiry
into the scope of Adolf Beck’s life was not confined to pure medical and
biological concepts, but also to the world at large. During the Beck era,
empires were disintegrating, while war and totalitarian regimes continued to
dominate the daily life in Europe. For both the father and son of the Beck
family, academic and personal life was affected by the disintegration of
Galicia, the unique, multi-ethnic area that currently lies within the
boundaries of two countries, Ukraine and Poland. Moreover, after the Second
World War, Henryk Beck’s destiny connected him to the
Polish city of Wrocław (formerly Breslau, which
has been a part of Germany until 1945). In 1895, the 32-years old Dr. Adolf
Beck became head of the Department of Physiology and an appointed professor at
the newly renovated Medical Faculty of the University Franz I in Lemberg, Galicia, at that time under the Austro-Hungarian
monarchy. With great energy and enthusiasm, Adolf Beck organized the Physiology
Department in a very similar style to that of his alma mater, the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. His impact in
neuroscience was related to the accurate localization of sensory modalities in
the cerebral cortex, by employing electrical and sensory stimulation while
recording the electrical activity. The investigations of Adolf Beck were
integral in considering brain activity on a local level. But he also saw the
connection between elementary neural mechanisms and higher psychic activities,
which culminated into human culture and thought. Regarding to the recent
analyses of Marcin Sobiezczanki, Adolf Beck made a
huge conceptual leap in thinking in the earlier part of the 20th
century. Before the Second World War, there was a notion of the biology body as
a neurosystem, which was seen as a biological unit
interacting with its environment based on biofeedback mechanisms. This whole
complex of two-way communications between external and internal human
environments is a conceptual leap which was made by Adolf Beck. Here we see a
parallel analogy with the creative life of Henryk
Beck. The difference between both persons was evident: the father participated
in the highest academic functions, while the son was practicing his mission in
silence by art everywhere he could. It is important to note that the duties of Henryk’s father were not limited to science, teaching or
pedagogical work. He also arranged a local physiological society at the
Institute of Physiology of the university. He was reappointed Rector at Lemberg/Lwów in the
difficult years of World War I. Moreover, he displayed great diplomatic skills
under extreme wartime conditions, using his diplomacy to make a convincing case
for academic needs to the occupying authorities. He joined the efforts of those
colleagues who remained in the city to protect the university’s property.
However, in 1915 he was arrested by the Russian authorities and exiled. After
few months, Beck was released from the prison in Kiev, he authored a memoir of
the adversities he endured in World War I, which also served as a primary
source and chronicle of events of the university. He had a phenomenal memory
that retained the smallest details of the war in Lwów
and these sketches enlivened his book. Beck’s persistence and tireless work
ethics ˗ he did not interrupt his research even during the war and postwar
days ˗ were another element of his personality. Adolf Beck became a
visionary in the development of societal relations. As an ardent criticaster of
Zionists, he founded and headed the «Unity» organization, whose mission was to
ensure equality among people of various ethnicities and religions and
sentiments. This resonates even in the present day aspirations of the European
Union. In the absence of a detailed personal memoir, a true
understanding of Adolf Beck’s influence on his son Henryk
remains a challenge. From the memories of Henryk’s
sister Jadwiga Beck-Zakrzewska we know that the spacious
residence of the Beck family
in Asnyka (today’s Bohomoltsia) street, one of the most beautiful
Secession-styled streets in the
city, held a special creative atmosphere cherished by all the
members of the family. Music,
played by Adolf together with his wife
and children, was a daily ritual,
as were discussions
of books and news stories.
This created a unique and warm
family atmosphere that was crucial
in raising the children. According
to Beck’s son Henryk, his
father’s authority played a pivotal role in forming
his character: «...he moulded me». Thanks
to his father and mother, he received a good education and had a respect for
others which was based on national and patriotic traditions. Henryk Beck’s youth was very active. Besides art, he practiced
various sports and played football in the colors of the Lwów-team
«Pogoni». He was also a fan of technically-advanced
sports, like motoring, aviation and mountain-climbing, which created a certain
internal freedom observable in Henryk’s nature in his
interactions with the world. He actively took part in gymnastic shows and promoted
an active lifestyle. In later years before World War II Henryk
Beck discovered a new passion: car racing. Beck’s love of life was translated to art. His palette
showed striking color and composition and reflected his sense of his life,
nature and atmosphere. Henryk’s paintings honor the
beauty of nature, in the Carpathians and in the Tatras.
They depict the bustling avenues and streets of Lwów,
Warsaw, Cracow, and Gdańsk, and many other
famous places in the world. We still do not know whether they are from Henryk’s real experience or just from imagination. His art
helps us to go back to the times, the moods, and the close surroundings of the
Beck family. The family character
supported each member
to survive the
military conflicts, and to resist the ethnic repressions that had been
instituted by occupying empires against
the Ukrainians, Jews and Poles
of Galicia. The lyricisms, symbolisms, and striking
allegories of Henryk’s paintings served not merely to
embody his world, but also to reflect his intellectual and emotional state of
being. This aesthetic is also traceable in his poetry and prose. But medicine
to which his father introduced him, remained his overarching passion. Henryk started his earliest research in the laboratories of
the physiology department during the First World War. Due to a lack of staff,
he assisted his father in his research, subordinating his wide artistic talents
(music, drawing, capturing literature and poetic skills). Later, he made his
career-choice for medicine in the direction of obstetrics and gynecology. This
evolved mainly due to his previous contacts, experiences and conversations with
a longtime family friend, the outstanding obstetrician and gynecologist Professor
Adam Czyżewicz (1877-1962). This was Henryk’s godfather, who gave him a full-time job
as assistant in his Obstetrics-Gynecological Clinic in Warsaw. The successful
career and the union between medical practice and academic activities
(teaching, presentations, editing for journals and the Polish Society of
Gynecologists), expresses the high intellectual potential of Henryk Beck. His marriage to a colleague, the lovely
Jadwiga Trepka, filled up his life with love and
happiness. Their union was a combination of mutual love, understanding, and
support and these feelings and emotions are most apparent in his paintings of
this time. Like his father, Henryk Beck
had a keen sense of humor, which is present not only in doodles and caricatures
of his colleagues and various work situations, but also in the portraits of his
family, in his self-portraits, in urban landscapes as well as in his street
miniatures. His love for writing, produced some sets
of poems and epigrams dedicated to his friends and colleagues. In spite of its
unexpected and lighthearted title, several art pieces, included «Re»: from the
Latin recipiō («receive»).
It was Henryk Beck custom to write medical
prescriptions as a sort of life-vignettes giving further insight
in his desire
to capture the essence of
human conditions. Subsequent periods in Henryk
Beck’s life were not only marked by joyful events, but also by many tragic
incidents and circumstances. It was the start of the Second World War, and Henryk was associated with the defense of Warsaw. He
experienced not only work in a military hospital, but also his first losses, an
eastward retreat, a return to Lwów, and an arrest by the hands of the «new
authorities». Did Henryk Beck understand the changes
facing his city when he returned to his father at the end of 1939? Both father and son Beck must have been
incredulous and bitter to realize the similarities of the German and Soviet
regimes. The «Soviet period» of Henryk Beck’s
artistic chronicle is particularly notable, because his keen eye documented
episodes of exceptional truth in a time of ideological changes. In spite of
imprisonment and new circumstances, and thanks to his wife’s efforts, Henryk managed to elude a deportation to Siberia, to regain
his freedom, and to begin to seek work. His professionalism, erudition, and
charisma were always unequalled, and so already in July 1940 he found a
position as head of a gynecology department. What ensued afterwards were Nazi pogroms,
roundups, and murders, first news about the Bełżec
and Janowska camps, and the suicide of father Adolf
Beck. An illness, old age, and the wish to avoid the cruelties of the Gestapo
drove the old Adolf Beck to opt for suicide. In November 1942, Henryk and his wife returned to Warsaw, a city engulfed by
the flames of war. He went into hiding as Remigiusz Franciczek Grnonczewski to avoid
the ghetto. In the time of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Henryk Beck started work in a surgical hospital, and soon
became a chief-of-staff. However, the failure of the Warsaw Uprising
necessitated that Beck went into hiding in the ruins of Warsaw for 110 days. As
a member of the Warsaw «Robinson Crusoes», famished
and dehydrated, Henryk Beck took the pseudonym Dr. Bor and continued his medical practice. He provided
surgical help to the wounded and supported the morale of his comrades. Through
all this, as well as through other tragic and difficult moments of his life, he
never gave up painting. By pencil, chalk or coal, Henryk
continued to express his own clear and courageous vision of events taking place
around him. The vivid and tragic illustrations from «The Bunker of 1944»
documented the nature and irrationality of every violence,
and conveyed the pain of the time. By their thoroughness, emotions, and
truthfulness, Henryk Beck’s paintings were consonant
with his father’s book on the events of the First World War. As such, father
and son were unique storytellers of the two greatest tragedies of the twentieth
century, and brought the reality and the drama of wartime events closer to
future generations. In the postwar period, in February 1946, Henryk Beck and his wife moved to Wrocław. However, Henryk performed his duties as a professor and head of the
obstetrics and gynecology department for only a short period of two months. Due
to a massive heart attack Henryk Beck died a sudden
and unexpected death. He left behind a creative legacy that tells us the
reality of the age in which the Beck family lived in. It is Henryk
Beck’s art that supplies the full-colored background needed to reconstruct the
worldview of the interwar and the Second World War period. He taught us to be
strong against any life adversity in difficult times, to believe in the future
of your land, and to show that human activity can have a meaning even in the
worst circumstances. But many questions are
unanswered. We do not know
whether Henryk sensed the danger in his destroyed city in 1915 when
Adolf Beck was imprisoned and deported to an evacuation camp in Russia? What
emotions stirred in his breast in 1920 after graduating from the Faculty of
Medicine at the Jan Kazimierz University, when he immediately took part in the
Polish-Soviet War as a physician on a railway medical-facility and field
hospital? What were his feelings at 1939, at the outbreak of World War II when
on the 7th of September, he became surgeon-captain, the Head of the
Surgical Department in Warsaw and later in Brest and Bug, or when he returned
to his fabulous city where starting the «new» Soviet era, or in 1942 when the Janowska concentration camp was founded in Lwów? What were his final thoughts when, on the
point or arrest of his father by the Nazis, he gave poison to him in order that
he could commit suicide? We do not know the answers to these questions; but it
is said that «each question contains a part of an answer». Feeble attempts by
some critics to ‘adapt’ the figure of Henryk Beck to
convenient slogans are doomed to fail and remain so. Under all adversity, Beck
proved courageous, chose to do good, and honored
cooperation, facing all his adversities with a light in his soul. It is still
left to fully catalog Beck’s works, including his medical materials, poetry,
prose, and epistolary legacy, as well as his correspondence with parents and
colleagues. Much of this material can be found in the Central Medical Library
in Warsaw. The undertaking of this would represent a lasting tribute to the
memory of Henryk Beck, ensuring that future
generations should have a clear access in understanding his legacy. From the
idyllic family atmosphere and the honesty of
his art and
profession to the tumultuous events of hard
war-times, Henryk Beck’s language leaves us with
a final message: beauty, peace, humanism and patriotism
are the main
values of life. Today, when Europe is
trying to find itself and
re-affirm itself in core values,
Henryk Beck have offered us a fine example of
a noble purpose and he is indeed a person
worthy of remembrance. Beck Zakrzewska,
J.: A daughter’s memories of Adolf Beck.
In: Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis (Ed. M.A.B. Brazier), Suppl. 3: 57-59, 1973. Brazier, M.A.B: The historical development of neurophysiology. In: Handbook of Physiology
Vol. 1, Section 1: Neurophysiology (Eds. J. Field, H.W. Magoun, V.E. Hall), American Physiological Society, Washington D.C., pp. 47-58, 1959. Brazier, M.A.B. (Ed.): ‘Beck, A.: The determination of localizations in the brain
and spinal cord with the
aid of electrical
phenomena’. Acta Neurobiol. Exp. Suppl. 3: 1-55, 1973. Coenen, A., Zayachkivska, O., Bilski, R.: In the footsteps
of Beck: the desynchronization of the electroencephalogram.
Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology 106: 330-
335, 1998. Coenen, A., Zayachkivska, O., Konturek, S., Pawlik, W.: Adolf Beck, co-founder of the EEG: an
essay in honour of his
150th birthday. - Kraków
(Poland), Lviv (Ukraine), Nijmegen (The Netherlands) - Digitalis/Biblioscope (Utrecht), 2013. Jaworska, J.: Henryka Becka ‘Bunkier 1944 roku’. Żydowski Institut Historyczny, Ossolineum, Wrocław, 1982 [In Polish]. Kwapisz-Kulińska A. Jak żyć, pracować i kochać można. 2012-06-01
http://studioopinii.pl/alina-kwapisz-kulinska-jak-zyc-pracowac-i-kochac-mozna/
[In Polish] Lviv Interactiv.
Vul. Bohomoltsia, 04 – residential building
http://www.lvivcenter.org/en/lia/objects/bohomoltsia-4/. Marianowski L. I Klinika Położnictwa
i Ginekologii WUM. Towarzystwo
Lekarskie Warszawskie
http://www.tlw.waw.pl/index.php?id=24&newsy_id=166 [In
Polish] Pawlik, W.W., Konturek, S.J., Bilski, R.: Napoleon Cybulski – Polish pioneer in developing of
the device for measuring blood
flow velocity. Journal of Physiology
and Pharmacology 57 Suppl. 1: 107-118, 2006. Serwis informacyjny Biblioteki UMW. Gazeta Uczelniana N 2(217), Luty, 2016 http://www.umed.wroc.pl/gazeta_uczelniana/2016/217.pdf
[In Polish]. Sobieszczanki, M.: A
Word About the Creativity of Adolf
and Henry Beck (in press),
2016. Stanisław Kopf : «Sto dni
Warszawy» wyd, Książka i wiedza Warszawa 1977 na podstawie: Adam Stomczyński, W podziemiach zburzonej Warszawy, «Stolica» nr 6 z 1970. oraz Halina Jędrzejewska
Lekarze Powstania Warszawskiego 1VII – 2 X 1944 wyd.
TLW oraz Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego [In Polish]. Światowe wydanie akwarel Henryka Becka / Gazeta Lekarska, LUTY 11, 2016 http://www.gazetalekarska.pl/?p=21566
[In Polish]. Zayachkivska, O., Gzegotsky, M., Coenen, A.: Impact on electroencephalography
of Adolf Beck, a prominent Polish scientist and founder of
the Lviv School of Physiology.
International Journal of Psychophysiology 85: 3-6,
2012. Zayachkivska, O.: Remembering the 150th anniversary of the birth of
Adolf Beck (1863-1942). Physiology News, Apr: 12-13, 2014. Zayachkivska, O.: The world of
Adolf Beck by eyes of
Henryk Beck: total unofficial, BaK, Lviv, 2013. |
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