Alfred Tarski’s first address was Koszykowa 51, apartment 14 (in Warsaw, of course). He was born there and lived with his parents until his own wedding. And while apparently Mr. Teitelbaum senior struggled to meet his wife’s expectations regarding lifestyle and financial comfort, the location was definitely prime enough. Just off Marszałkowska, which was one of the best streets in the city: wide, well-lit, full of expensive shops and cafés. The building itself must have been one of those tall, ornate townhouses you see in old photographs, and down the street even today.

The Fefermans state in Tarski’s biography that the Koszykowa 51 building does not exist anymore (page 8). It is true that many of the buildings in the area, even if not entirely destroyed during the war, were taken down afterwards to make room for communist construction projects. But some of the old buildings still stand, and what appears to be the back half of the Koszykowa 51 can be found, albeit hidden in a backyard created when the street was moved by some tens of meters to accommodate the large-scale buildings of the nearby MDM residential complex, whose construction started in 1950.

A comparison of pre-1945 maps, showing how the Koszykowa street ran originally, with what remains of the original building, suggests that the building was a large one and included not one, but two internal courtyards – of which one and a half remain today. The front third of the original building is missing. Here is that half-courtyard (the second one is accessible through the gate on the left; the gate is kept locked, so photos will come at a later time, when I have the guts to ring the doorbells of random people).

The plain walls do not do justice to what the building must have looked like in its original state – remember that here we are looking at what used to be the inner courtyard, not the elaborate front wall that would have faced the street.

Tarski moved out around the time when he got married, and settled in the north of Warsaw, where many of the white collar workers of the city were gathering in modernist apartment blocks. During the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the front part of Koszykowa 51 was used as a hospital for the Polish soldiers. Henryka Gąsiorowska, a teenager who lived in the building, worked there as a nurse and her account can be found in the oral history archive for the uprising.

– Where was the hospital?

Koszykowa 51. It was a house owned by a very rich Jew, eighty percent of rich Jews lived there. Those were three, four, five, six bedroom apartments. That house stands to this day. When they took the Jews to the ghetto, out of that house, the police sealed off all of the doors, they were allowed to leave only with handbags. This is where doctor Jankowski went to… (…) They started to arrange the ground and first floors, apartments 12 and 14.

Source (translation mine)

Apartment 14! In August 1944 Tarski’s childhood bedroom must have been filled with wounded soldiers. Later in her interview, the nurse talks about how in one of the ten rooms that the hospital consisted of there still stood a large, double bed, on which they laid multiple bleeding, burned boys. Could that be the bed of Tarski’s parents? They did move out of the city just before the war. However, for them to leave what was probably a large bed designed for a big city apartment to the next tenants would not be entirely impossible.

It is safe to say that in 1944 there were no philosophers – or logicians – left there. But things were very different some years earlier. For one, Tarski lived there until at least 1929. Dina Sztejnbarg and Eugeniusz Geblewicz – two names from my favorite table of contents – probably lived together under number 43. At least, it was her official address, and there was a bank account registered under both of their names in 1936. It’s a very dangerous business, making inferences about people’s private lives based on telephone directories and bank registers. Finally, from about 1931 or shortly before, Janina Hosiasson lived in apartment number 22, together with her philosopher-turned-historian-turned-socialist activist boyfriend, Antoni Pański (and, most likely, his mother – as suggested by those same telephone directories).

A full house! They were born at around the same time, and went to the same classes taught by the big shots of the Lvov-Warsaw School – whatever age differences there were between them were cancelled out by the First World War, which prevented some of them from entering university at the usual age. By the 1930s they all had their doctorates, and some had teaching positions at the university, while others were supplementing their incomes with teaching in high schools or translating Russell into Polish. Of course they fit well into the building full of teachers, business owners, and middle-level administration workers. But eventually, as if needing to always be close to each other, to be able to discuss empiricism and scientific realism well into the small hours of the morning, and then effortlessly slip into one’s own bed – they followed Tarski to the north. Including the (ex by then) boyfriend’s mom.