Overview

Ludwik Rajchman, born in Poland in 1881, was an exponent of humanitarian intervention and a defender of colonized people, as adept in secret diplomacy as in organizing vast anti-epidemic campaigns. He inspired the creation of WHO and UNICEF, of which he was the first chairman. Progressive, but opposed to all dogmas, he was forced by McCarthyism to flee the United States and soon became an object of suspicion in the Soviet bloc, finding himself estranged from his beloved Poland. As well as re-telling the story of Rajchman's life, the author, who is Rajchman's great-granddaughter, uses family archives and documentary sources to provide glimpses of the major events that shaped the twentieth century.

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Reviews

It is a rediscovery of a utopian who believed in the efficiency of international institutions, in the troubled era of fierce nationalism. * Le Monde * Balinska's biography is peopled with a veritable pantheon of the first generation of international civil servants - from the Secretary-General of the League, Sir Eric Drummond, to Nansen, Monnet, and, as regards Britain, such notable internationalists as Philip Noel Baker, Lord Cecil, and Arthur Salter - who all worked closely with Rajchman and praised him highly. Monnet ascribed to him a rare 'sense of the universal', and the Irish nutritionist W.R. Aykroyd (a close colleague of Rajchman) observed that almost always he 'had the good of humanity at heart'. Balinska's study profusely demonstrates the truth of these lofty estimations, as well as of her subject's own profound conviction that co-operation can transcend personal, political, and national ambitions. * Medicine, Conflict and Survival *

Author Information

Marta A. Balińska, translated by Rebecca Howell and revised by the author. Ludwik Rajchman was the author's great-grandfather.

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