Einstein Wrote Back. John W. Moffat

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      Millions of children grew up during the Second World War in Europe. I don’t know how many of them had as disruptive a childhood as I had, moving from town to town and school to school sometimes several times each year. I don’t know how many others were subjected to such frightening and frequent bombing attacks and other horrors of war that they sustained permanent psychological damage. Millions of children today, in various parts of the world, still experience daily conditions of war, terrorism, natural disasters and famine. Once one gets beyond a sense of gratitude at having survived at all, it is natural to wonder how a wartime childhood helped shape the adult person one has become.

      My inferior, fragmented schooling, together with the panic attacks induced by many nights of fearing imminent death by German bombs, seemed to prevent me from pursuing a life in science— or any other academic field I might have chosen. Yet it may also be possible that the conditions of my childhood helped me to develop the self-reliance and strong personal motivation necessary to overcome those limitations. If I had managed to survive the war, all the dangerous travelling my parents and I had to do, the fierce bombings, the lack of opportunities to form long-term friendships, the constant moving from school to school, then surely I could continue to survive and make something of my life.

2

       TWO PATHS DIVERGED

      AFTER my humiliating interview with the gymnasium teacher, and after graduating from high school, I considered seriously what I should do with my life. If my fate was not to earn a university degree, I mused, perhaps I should return to my early talents as an artist.

      I had begun painting in earnest, outside the school environment, when I was fourteen, joining my father at his easel. While my father concentrated on abstract paintings, I painted abstracts and landscapes as well. Now, at sixteen, and unsure of how to proceed in my life without the advantages of a gymnasium education, I was again painting alongside my father in the evenings. This was satisfying to us both, and I believe it helped my father improve his outlook on life, as he was struggling to recover from tuberculosis.

      After leaving the military at the end of the war, my father had started an import-export business in Copenhagen with a businessman who had been a prisoner in a concentration camp in Germany during the war. The business failed, and my father found a job in a larger import-export business in Copenhagen. It was while he was working there that he contracted tuberculosis. One of the female employees, a German national who had moved to Denmark, had a severe case of TB as a result of the deprivations she’d suffered during the war. Unfortunately, the employees all shared the same coffee cups during breaks, and my father contracted TB, becoming an invalid for a year or more. This created serious financial problems for my parents. My mother was forced to work as a waitress in restaurants in Copenhagen, and I contributed to the household income by working days on any odd jobs I could find, such as being a messenger boy and washing windows in the apartment blocks in our neighbourhood in Valby, a suburb of Copenhagen. I also worked for several months as delivery boy for a florist in Copenhagen. My job was to go to churches prior to funerals and place a bouquet of flowers on the corpse lying in an open coffin. This evoked in me a dread of death as powerful as any of myexperiences and fears during the wartime bombing raids, as I stood in the quiet church contemplating someone’s dead relative and the fleeting years of life.

      When I was fifteen, I saw an exhibition of paintings by the Russian-French abstract painter Serge Poliakoff in a small gallery in Copenhagen, and was very impressed with his work. I was struck by the marvellous juxtaposition of brown, red and blue in his paintings, as well as the unique combination of abstract forms. I began to daydream of going to Paris to become an artist, taking lessons from Poliakoff if he would have me. Working at my odd jobs since leaving school, I managed to save enough money to journey by train to Paris. In contrast to my father’s experience, in which his father forbade him to go to Rome on an art scholarship, my father strongly encouraged me to pursue this dream.

      In my youthful ambition, I imagined my work being exhibited in major galleries in Europe and America. I was excited by the idea of living in Paris and becoming part of the bohemian artistic life there. I had developed a deep passion for my art, and could imagine no other life than the pursuit of beauty through painting.