The Age of Radiance (14 page)

The phone call from Sweden, then, would determine if Enrico Fermi was a laureate, and if he and his family were now to be refugees. Additionally, if he had to split the prize with one or more other physicists, the family would be starting their life over again under seriously reduced financial circumstances.

While they waited that evening, Italian radio described Germany’s
Kristallnacht
of the day before and explained the new laws: Jewish children and teachers were barred from public schools; Jewish professionals such as doctors and lawyers could only have Jewish clients; “Aryans” could not work for Jews as servants; and all Jewish passports were withdrawn.

Laura’s nonchalance about this state of affairs would prove to be misplaced. Though Mussolini consistently refused to hand over Italian Jews to the Germans, after his overthrow in July 1943, the Nazis occupied Italy and began murdering them, with over a thousand Romans sent to Auschwitz, including Laura’s father. Decades later, daughter Nella Fermi tried to find out what had happened:
“I think that my mother was having a lot of guilt about leaving her father behind [and going to America]. My grandmother had died of natural causes some years before we left, and there were 2 sisters and a brother who were still in Italy, so it wasn’t as if she was abandoning him altogether to himself. I’m not sure when they learned about it. I know that at some point, my mother told me that they had heard . . . that he had been taken by the Nazis, but . . . I think that it might have been a way of protecting me, rather than the strict truth. . . . She said that he had died on the train. My aunt, my father’s sister, was practically running an underground railroad in her basement, and she had gone over to persuade him to come and stay with her, and he had other friends and connections who were not Jewish who he could have stayed with. . . . It was really easy to hide in Rome . . . largely because the population was simply not behind it. [But] he thought that being a high-ranking naval officer . . . he was an admiral . . . that he had given his life to the service of his country, and he was a gentleman of the old school and was convinced that they would not bother him. . . . About three or four years ago, I talked to a man who had done some research into the subject, and he seems to have come up with some very conclusive evidence that my grandfather made it as far as Auschwitz. He was one of the first to go in the gas chambers.”

The telephone finally rang. For his work with slow neutrons and his discovery of element 93, Enrico Fermi, at the age of thirty-seven, had won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Even with such an immense honor, no one would have thought at that moment, least of all Fermi himself, that in a mere three years, he would join an elite group who would revolutionize the academic and scientific fabrics of the United States. Before the rise of Fascism, while European scientists, backed by their countries’ military research budgets, were able
to pursue fundamental scientific research, American science was wholly a backwater (though its engineers created the telephone and the lightbulb). What changed science in the United States for all time was the immigration of nuclear physicists displaced from Europe. By creating a safe haven for rejected genius, America transformed herself from an R&D Appalachia to the center of everything nuclear, and then of everything in science. In the years to come, joined by a phalanx of genius, Enrico Fermi would invent and perfect the engine that would create nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and the Atomic Age.

O
n December 6, the family took the forty-eight-hour train to Stockholm, and at the ceremony on the tenth, they learned that Enrico would not have to share the reward monies with another physicist. In October of 1933, they had dined with King Albert of Belgium and Marie Curie (Laura:
“She would not take notice of insignificant wives like me”), and at the Nobel ceremonies, Laura danced with Crown Prince Gustavus Adolphus, so it is easy to understand her misgivings on leaving this life. But it quickly became apparent that the Academy and Bohr were right to notify Fermi in advance that he was a candidate, for, in the wake of the award, instead of pride at a hometown boy who made good, the Italian press was filled with criticisms of Enrico for not wearing a Fascist uniform, not giving the Fascist salute, and for shaking the king’s hand, which was thought unmanly. He was attacked by the more extreme of the press for
“having transformed the Physics Institute into a synagogue.”

The Fermis went directly from Sweden to Southampton, sailing for Manhattan aboard Cunard’s RMS
Franconia II
, a ship so luxurious she would ferry Winston Churchill to Yalta, and whose first-class smoking lounge was a detailed re-creation of a classic English hotel lobby, down to the aged-oak paneling and the brick inglenook fireplace.

One evening while crossing the Atlantic, Laura and the children were waiting for an elevator. Its doors opened to reveal a strange man in a red-and-white suit, who immediately invited them to a party he was having that night, where every child aboard would get presents! Giulio and Nella looked at their mother with a mix of shock and awe. Enrico liked to say, grandly, that they were off to establish the American branch of the Fermi family . . . but to Laura’s mind, here was one more example of how far they had to go. Recently, Mrs. Fermi had been mortified to learn that one of
her lifelong beliefs was wrong—she’d always assumed Abraham Lincoln was Jewish since, in Italy, only Jews were named Abraham. While her husband enjoyed the professional embrace that came with being a laureate, she would now have to explain to her new American children who, or what, Santa Claus was.

O
N
January 2, 1939, the Fermis checked into the King’s Crown next to Columbia University’s main campus and immediately ran into another hotel resident in the lobby—Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard (
SILard
). It was a happy coincidence as the two scientists had been writing to each other for the past three years. In the period when Fermi discovered slow neutrons, Szilard had patented a method for starting a nuclear chain reaction. Now, pure happenstance had brought them together . . . the two scientists who would, in time, jointly create the foundation of nuclear power and atomic weapons. With Leo, Enrico would achieve his greatest triumph; and with Leo, Enrico, the most genial man in the community of physics, would stop speaking for months at a time.

In Hungarian,
szilard
means “solid,” yet Leo was anything but—he was an occupational gadfly, outrageously frank and forthright, to the point of being uncivil, undiplomatic, and obnoxious. One telling incident: In the 1940s, Szilard wrote his memoirs,
My Version of the Facts.
He showed the manuscript to Los Alamos Theoretical Division chief Hans Bethe, but explained he had no plans to publish. He just wanted God to know the facts. When Bethe asked,
“Don’t you think God already knows the facts?” Szilard replied, “But He may not know my version.”

Leo’s parents, Louis and Tekla Spitz, changed their name to Szilard two years after his birth on February 11, 1898, in Austria-Hungary to comply with a government campaign to unify its disparate ethnicities including the Jews. This simple attempt at social engineering resulted, because of birth order, in their children having different surnames: Szilard, Szego, Salgo, and Spitz. The family lived in a stucco art nouveau villa, kitted out with stained
glass and wooden turrets in Budapest’s Garden District. Leo’s notorious personality revealed itself early. When his grandparents tried to teach the young boy to say “please,” he refused, explaining,
“It is beneath my dignity.”

Fluent in German and French by the age of ten, Leo never learned to swim, or ride a bicycle. Drafted to fight in the Great War, he was stricken with Spanish flu and recuperating in a sanitarium when the armistice was signed. At that moment, Hungary had been headed up by a Jewish Communist, Bela Kun, for a disastrous 133 days. The peace treaty of 1920 carved up the nation, Kun was thrown out, and the right-wing Miklós Horthy became regent to the nation’s now-powerless king. Horthy remained in charge until 1944, beginning a history of Hungarian anti-Semitism from on high, which exploded when the Nazis in time replaced him with the virulently Jew-hating Arrow Cross.

On July 24, 1919, in the wake of Horthy’s rise, Szilard went to his neighborhood’s Reform church and officially changed his religion from “Israelite” to “Calvinist.” Two months later in September of 1919, a gang of students blocked the twenty-one-year-old Leo and his brother, Bela, on their way to engineering classes at Budapest’s Technical University, screaming, “You can’t study here! You’re Jews!” When the Szilards tried to continue to their classes, the gang beat them up.

Leo immediately applied for an exit visa, which was difficult to get, as the Szilard brothers had joined various student political organizations and were considered “dangerous” by the new regime. But finally, Leo was released. With a suitcase full of books and practically his entire family’s life savings hidden in the soles of his shoes, he rode a steamship up the Danube to Vienna. On board, a man asked why Leo was so sad, and he replied morbidly that he was
“leaving his country, perhaps for good.” The man explained that he himself was a Hungarian who’d lived in Canada for the past four decades, and that “as long as you live, you’ll remember this as the happiest day of your life!”

What should then have been a one-day train ride from Vienna to Berlin took a week as the engine kept running out of coal, and Leo kept running out of food. In March 1920, Bela joined him, and the brothers shared a room with an equally impoverished landlady in the economic free fall of the Weimar Republic. They continued studying engineering at the Berlin Technical School, but since that institution offered no physics classes, Szilard decided to attend the Wednesday colloquium of the German Physical Society, held at Friedrich Wilhelm University, which counted among its regulars the titans Albert Einstein of relativity, Hans Geiger of the counter, Max Planck of the
quantum, Lise Meitner (whom Einstein called
“our Madame Curie”), Max von Laue of superconductivity, and Fritz Haber of man-made fertilizer. The Berlin colloquiums had a well-defined protocol: On its front bench sat five Nobel laureates who argued over ideas and experiments as the presenting lecturer’s theory was refined, destroyed, or anointed. In the back sat students like Szilard. Almost imperceptibly, Leo moved from the back to front, until he was close enough to casually chat with the front-row immortals. Ordinary men might’ve been intimidated, but not Szilard, who told Max Planck when they first met,
“I only want to know the facts of physics. I will make up the theories myself.”

At both schools, Leo met other Hungarian exiles, including physicists Dennis Gabor (who would invent the hologram), Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, and mathematician Janos von Neumann (
NOY-man
). These young expatriates together generated a slew of inventions, such as an electrically charged chair that would speed barbering by making the customers’ hair stand on end, a “Bride-o-Mat” vending machine for love letters that the romantically inclined could not receive at home, and magnetic hosiery that would keep a woman’s stockings up. The mix of odd-yet-useful would be a hallmark of Szilard’s future, as the gadfly’s most regular income would flow from his many patents.

It was the greatest time to be a physicist in the history of matter, and anyone who even casually studies this period always ends up pondering the same mystery:
Budapest
. Three of the great creators of modern science—the coinventor of the nuclear reactor (Szilard), the coinventor of the hydrogen or fusion bomb (Edward Teller), and the coinventor of the modern computer (von Neumann)—all grew up in the same town of Pest a few kilometers from one another and would all end up working together in the United States. There, they would be known alongside fellow physicist Eugene Wigner as the Hungarian Quartet. The Quartet more accurately should have included mathematician Theodore von Kármán and been a Quintet, but who doesn’t yearn for a Beethoven allusion with their Atomic Age history?