My Grandfather, Dr Sándor Polgár (1876-1944)

Written by Anna Menzl

Published in the periodical Kitaibelia[1], Vol. 21, No. 2 (2016) – edition commemorating Sándor Polgár, 1 July 2016 

Botanical research and teaching were the two main focuses of my Grandfather’s work. His own botanical publications and the memoirs of colleagues and students bear witness to this. His work as a teacher, his interest in his students and his social attitude, especially towards poorer students, have been described by others. Many of his students chose science as a career and achieved considerable success in this field. For example, Leslie Zechmeister (Caltech), Ernő Winter, Bálint Zólyomi. Over the years, I have also had the pleasure of meeting some of his lesser-known students, all of whom remembered my Grandfather with great respect and even affection. They unanimously emphasised my Grandfather’s extraordinary diligence, sense of duty and high moral standards. Over the years, colleagues and pupils have often become friends, and in several memoirs they have praised his human character.

Dávid Schmidt writes about Dr Sándor Polgár (1876-1944) in a scientific paper entitled “140 years since Dr. Sándor Polgár was born” – excerpt [2]

Dr Sándor Polgár was the most important botanist of Győr county. The most outstanding achievements of his work were in the fields of floristics, plant geography, taxonomy and adventive flora research. His work, The Flora of Győr County, published in 1941, was one of the most modern monographs of its time and is still widely cited today. He identified and described one of the rarest perennial plants of our country, Ornithogalum ×degenianum. He was an intensive herbarium collector, with more than 20,000 collected sheets. As a teacher at the Hungarian Royal State High School (now Révai Gymnasium – ed.) he taught for 35 years, where his practical methods and love of the subject helped to instil a sense of responsibility for nature in generations.

“For anyone with even a small appreciation for the beauty of flora who makes repeated trips to the fields of the tumbleweed or corispermum, or to the neighbouring poplar woods, each trip rewards his efforts with a new discovery.” This sentence reflects the spirit of Sándor Polgár and his relationship to his chosen science. He was understanding and open-hearted towards his students, in whom he fostered a love of nature through his practical teaching methods. As a botanical researcher, he was a true scholar organising and publishing his professional work with extraordinary diligence and thoroughness.

I was born during the 2^nd WW, so I have no personal memory of my Grandfather. What I tell you here I have heard from the few surviving family members, mainly my mother and her contemporaries. They, too, just as my Grandfather’s students, invariably spoke of Sándor or “Master” with great respect and appreciation. As a private person, of course, his family knew him best.

Both my Grandfather’s and my Grandmother’s (née Margit Csillag) families had lived in Győr and Komárom counties for generations, where they felt at home.

My Grandfather was born in Győr, while his father, Farkas Pollák, was recorded in Győr and Bőny already in 1844. According to the family’s knowledge, he was a judge in Bőny for a time. When, at the beginning of the 20th century, Jews were obliged to produce documents to prove their Hungarian identity, the documents revealed that Farkas Pollák had taken part in the Hungarian War of Independence in 1848 and had served under Klapka in Komárom (General György Klapka, a legendary military figure of the War of Independence – ed.). I know from the registers of the Győr Jewish Community that Farkas Pollák changed his name to Polgár in 1876, when the law allowed it (Order 6487/900 of the Ministry of the Interior of the Hungarian State). His wife, my Grandfather’s mother, Katalin Teller, was from Komárom (town along the river Danube, 40 kms eastwards from Győr – ed.).

My grandmother was born in Ászár (village 36 kms south-east from Győr), from where the family and 7 children later moved to Győr. So, in my childhood I often heard about the settlements of this area, Bőny, Mór, Ászár, Kisbér.

Both of my Grandparents lived in Győr until their graduation from high school. My grandfather, like his brother Viktor Polgár (father of the reknown journalist Dénes Polgár, 1912-2009), was enrolled in the Benedictine High School, which was the best secondary school in Győr at that time. Since there was no girls’ high school at that time, my Grandmother, her sisters and her cousins were just “observers” at the same high school, i.e. they attended classes in the back of the classroom without being called upon to speak and took the school-leaving exams individually.

After graduation, my Grandfather continued his studies at the Budapest University of Sciences (now ELTE – ed.), while my Grandmother prepared for a teaching career at the Budapest Secondary Teacher Training Institute, which, as a married woman, she later, much to her regret, was not able to pursue.

At the university, my Grandfather was an assistant to Sándor Mágocsy-Dietz (botanist, university professor, 1855-1945 – ed.). In 1900 he obtained a degree in natural history, chemistry and geography and in the same year he began his teaching career in his hometown, at the Hungarian Royal State High School (today’s Révai Gymnasium – ed.). He submitted his doctoral dissertation on “Aquatic and riparian vascular flora of the Győr region” as a teacher.

My Grandparents had a wide range of interests. In the early years of their marriage, they were keen to travel around Europe. They stayed in Salvation Army houses, according to their means.

Later on, after 1909, when their first child, my mother, was born, my Grandfather continued his botanical travels. This took him as far north as Heligoland (island in the North-Sea belonging to Germany – ed.) and as far south as Crete. These trips were, of course, much more complicated and difficult in the early 20th century than they are today. For my Grandfather, the foreign language environment was not a problem, as he was fluent in German and French, in addition to his excellent knowledge of Latin. He also read literature in other languages.

His wide-ranging interests extended beyond his own profession to other fields, where his way of thinking was surprisingly progressive. He read and understood the works of Ortega y Gasset. The Spanish philosopher, who denounced Franco’s rule and was forced to emigrate, was a contemporary of my grandfather and represented the modern school of philosophy. Since at that time there were hardly any Hungarian translations of Ortega y Gasset’s works, I assume he read them in German.

He loved music. His taste was also progressive. His favourite opera was Bizet’s Carmen, which at that time did not correspond to the common taste of the bourgeoisie. But my grandparents were also active in the music scene, so it is not surprising that they invited Béla Bartók to their home when Bartók was in town for his last concert in Győr (Bartók emigrated to America in 1940 – ed.).

His trips with colleagues and students have already been reported on by Adam Boros (Ádám Boros, 1900-1973, botanist – ed.) and others. Family trips were mostly to the Bakony (hilly region to the north of Lake Balaton – ed.); botanical observation was also important on these trips. A frequent destination was the Cuha stream valley, which we often did as children, also following his example, starting from Vinye-Sándormajor, where we filled our bottles with fresh water at the spring. In addition to hikes, family paddling trips on the many rivers in Győr also provided opportunities for botanical observation.

You wouldn’t think that even a factory’s harsh surroundings could harbour botanical curiosities. But my Grandfather discovered that adventitious plants had appeared in the courtyard of the oil factory, a short walk from their Bisinger sétány apartment in Győr. The seeds of these plants had somehow found their way to this area with the other oilseeds.

My Grandfather drew the attention of his students to other areas of nature besides botany. A letter from 1905, in which he sends a scorpion found in Győr to the zoological department of the National Museum for identification, shows this. The scorpion was found by one of his students in the courtyard of a house in Győr.

He, his wife and family lived a quiet, almost modest life. Besides my mother, they had two sons, Imre and Ferenc. Imre died in infancy.

His physician son, Dr Ferenc Polgár, was taken to the Russian front in 1942 as a forced labourer, from where two different death reports were received. It is not known where he actually died, because the so-called “dog tag” (an ID card necklace according to the Geneva Conventions) was taken away from him in Hungary amongst vicious remarks.

His son’s death broke my Grandfather completely. He did not know at the time what destiny was in store for him and my Grandmother as well as the whole Győr family. His botanist friends, Sándor Jávorka, Rezső Soó, Bálint Zólyomi, Gusztáv Moesz, Zoltán Zsák and Ádám Boros, together submitted a petition for exceptional treatment for my grandfather. As I know from my mother, the permission was granted, but someone “mislaid” it and it was only found after the war.

So, after much humiliation, my Grandfather, his wife and other family members were killed in Auschwitz in 1944.

His brutal death at an early age still fills me with infinite sadness.

Zurich, January 2016

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Edited and translated into English by Péter Krausz

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[1] The periodical Kitaibelia in botany and nature conservation publishes original papers on floristic, botanical-geographical, taxonomic, nomenclatural, ecological, conservation botanical and scientific-historical topics in the Pannonian Ecoregion (Carpathian Basin). Founded in 1996, the title of the journal is dedicated to Pál Kitaibel (1757-1816), the most distinguished and versatile Hungarian botanist. Publisher: The Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Debrecen

[2] Published in the periodical Kitaibelia, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2016) – edition commemorating Sándor Polgár, 1 July 2016