137 - Arthur I. Miller [84]
Two years passed. As the Germans invaded France, Hertha headed south to Marseilles, braving air attacks on refugee columns, German tanks, and the constant threat of arrest by the Vichy police. With the help of the legendary Varian Fry, the American Schindler, she managed to cross the Pyrenees into Spain and from there made her way to Lisbon. After obtaining an “emergency rescue visa” from the International Rescue Committee she arrived in New York City in September 1940. A year later Hertha was in Hollywood writing for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios. In 1942 she returned to New York City where she discovered her talent for writing books for children, usually with Catholic themes. She had always been convinced her escape from France was a miracle, which she attributed to the fact she had passed through the town of Lourdes.
The war years
Arriving in Princeton in 1940, Pauli spent his time working with Einstein on general relativity and continuing his prewar research. He also became close friends with the art historian and Kepler expert Erwin Panofsky, whom he had first met in Hamburg in 1928. Pauli quickly adapted to his new life. He bought a car and drove cross-country to visit colleagues and give lectures on his work. But this was also a trying time. Pauli’s German passport meant that he was stranded. At the institute he had difficulties finding funds to extend his stay, which had initially been planned for only one year.
In Zürich, officials and students at the ETH wrote demanding that Pauli return by the end of 1942. Otherwise, they said, his position would be in jeopardy. They regarded his leaving the country as a defection. Colleagues who were jealous of Pauli or had anti-Semitic feelings took the opportunity to vent their anger openly.
In the files of the ETH there is a letter that Paul Scherrer, supposedly Pauli’s friend and colleague, wrote to Arthur Rohn, the president of the ETH, in October 1941, saying he opposed allowing Pauli to continue his leave of absence. “Mr. Pauli is naturally having a very good time in the United States; but his productivity has suffered very much—as for all émigré physicists,” he wrote. It seems likely that the person who wrote to the police chief Heinrich Rothmund, advising him not to accept Pauli’s request for naturalization, was Scherrer and that Scherrer was probably causing Pauli further difficulties in maintaining his professorship at the ETH. He seems to have been more concerned about the future of the physics department in the event of a German invasion than the safety of the man he pretended was his friend.
To the end of his life, Pauli never knew of Scherrer’s treachery. What had happened to their previous friendship? Franca always noticed that at ETH functions and in group photographs Scherrer stole the limelight from Pauli. Scherrer’s manic need for self-publicity was well known and Pauli used to joke about it, rating people’s self-importance in “Scherrer Units.” Perhaps he felt he had to support Franca’s distrust of the academic hierarchy and drew away from Scherrer. As a result Scherrer began to resent what he saw as a lack of support from the department’s most important physicist.
Pauli replied to President Rohn that the ETH officials who ordered him to return were ignoring “the practical impossibility of the journey for me” and threatened to take legal action against the ETH. In response President Rohn hastened to secure Pauli’s position until 1948, the end of his second ten-year contract.
Pauli sometimes complained of being lonely at Princeton. “The past years have been rather lonesome, particularly ’42 and ’43,” he wrote to a former postdoctoral student, Hendrik Casimir, in Holland. His one-time colleagues from Europe were now at Los Alamos, working on the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb. Pauli was not, as he later made clear, a great enthusiast of the bomb project. But he was running low on funds and offered his services to the director of the project who happened to be one of his first postdoctoral students, J. Robert Oppenheimer.