I was the first in Kraków to get the master's diploma. When I enrolled at the university, one could pursue the old course, pre-master. I decided to do the master's degree. The second master in mathematics in Kraków was Stanisław Turski. He was two years younger than I. Zofia Czarkowska (currently Mrs Krygowska) was at the university along with me. I had a gifted classmate, Stefan Rosental, who however later became a physicist and finished his career as a vice-director of the Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.

After the Jędrzejewicz Brothers reform [introduced in 1932], Antoni Łomnicki submitted a geometry textbook for high schools. The Ministry gave me this text for refereeing, as I taught in high schools in Kraków. I did a very detailed report; I went over all the problems, I wrote which ones were too difficult. The author was anonymous, but I guessed it was Łomnicki. I remembered his geometry and trigonometry textbooks from Austrian times. However, the referees' names were made known to the author. When he read my report, Łomnicki sent me an offer to become an adjunct. He wanted to bring me where he was because of this report.

A native of Lwów, Łomnicki worked for over twenty years as a mathematics professor at the Lwów University of Technology. He prepared hundreds of engineers for their profession. I was his assistant. He was the first to instil in me the importance and responsibility of a professor's task. He was an unrivalled educator, one of the best I ever knew.

I even worked with Mazur. We wrote one paper together, which was never published. It was in spring 1939. When we finished it I asked Mazur to give me the manuscript and suggested that I would translate it into French for publication. He answered that perhaps we would have some better ideas and kept the paper.

Mazur invited Turowicz for ... a collaboration in Banach algebras. The collaboration started in the fall of 1938 and by April 1939 they obtained several (over 20) results, one of them now known as the Stone-Weierstrass theorem. A suitable paper was written by Turowicz and handed to Mazur for publication, but it was never published. The author has heard a rumour that Mazur and Turowicz had the Stone-Weierstrass theorem before Stone, and asked Turowicz about it. In response he obtained a long letter, asking not to publish it before Turowicz's death.

The discussion was useless in view of Mazur's habit of not publishing the results immediately. ... In 1940 I learned that the next volume of Studia Mathematica will appear, the only one published during the war. I asked Mazur whether we could include our paper there, but he answered that the volume was already closed and there was no more space. In 1941, after taking up Lwów by Germans, I left for Kraków and lost contact with Mazur.

Schauder was there, too. We talked together; he was a brilliant mathematician, but I think it was very difficult to work with him.

I was always a believing Christian and a practising Catholic, but before the war I never thought about taking the holy orders and becoming a priest. My decision was made because during the war I witnessed hellish wickedness and dreadful crimes. My reaction was the decision to become a friar and a priest. During the war nothing bad happened to me, so it was not a reaction to anything that had hurt me personally. I definitively made up my mind in autumn 1941. In 1942 I turned up at the monastery, but because of some technical problems I could not be accepted before the Germans left Kraków in January 1945. Then I was sure that my connections with mathematics had ended.

... in spring 1946, Tadeusz Ważewski came to the monastery and said that he desperately needed a lecturer at the Jagiellonian University and he wanted me. I answered that I did not have anything to say, the person who decided about everything here was our Father Superior. So he spoke to the prior and the prior told me: "If they need you, you have no right to refuse." Thus I started lecturing at the university again. The Benedictines are obliged to work, but nothing is said about what kind of work it must be. I became a mathematician from the beginning, I was publishing, so I was not engaged in priesthood. I was saying mass here, reciting my breviary, and I had other duties, but I had no parish. This is what it was like: I was a friar, a priest, and a mathematician simultaneously ...

Turowicz's thesis shows evidence of deep mathematical culture and revealed the rare philosophical sense of its author in treating a problem.

He commuted for our lectures from the monastery in Tyniec near Kraków, where he resided. He almost dashed into the lecture room, made the sign of the cross and filled the blackboard with legible text. If someone could take exact notes of it - and there were women in the class who could - then we had a 'textbook' for the exam.

At the beginning of the fifties Mazur told Ważewski that he had found our manuscript, and Ważewski repeated the news to me. Then I wrote to Mazur, suggesting that some of our results could still be published, and asked him to send me the manuscript, so that I could see which results are not yet published and prepare a suitable publication. Of course, I knew that the priority with respect to the generalisation of the Weierstrass theorem belongs now to Stone. Mazur never answered my letter; I was not surprised knowing that he had a habit of not answering letters. I regret not having published the "Weierstrass-Stone" theorem, but what can be done about it, it's lost. I know that after the war, Orlicz, when collaborating with Mazur, made notes and published a joint paper without asking Mazur for permission. Unfortunately I did not know that I should have done the same.

In the worst case you will become a martyr, and there's nothing you could desire more, is there?

... the list of the subjects you have worked on is impressive. You are the author of papers on differential equations, numerical analysis, game theory, logic, control theory, functional analysis, probability ... Few mathematicians could boast such a scope of interests ...

But is it something to boast of? This was possible in the 18th century, now it is rather unreasonable. In my opinion, my best paper - maybe the only valuable one - was the one about continuous, multiplicative functionals. [His Ph.D. thesis published as [14] ] I think it was the first paper in this subject; later on the Americans generalised my results. But I moved from Lvov and in Kraków nobody was working on it. I made friends with Professor Górecki from the Academy of Mining and Metallurgy in Kraków and we published many papers about control theory together. I wrote one paper about probability, however, I didn't work on this theory. Ważewski asked me about the proof of the theorem about the normal Gaussian distribution. I answered that Stirling's formula is used. He said "This is so important a theorem, that there must exist a simpler proof, without such tricks." He kept nagging me to prove it for so long that I started thinking it over and once, during a tram ride, I got an idea.

The 83-year-old priest leaves the monastery two or three times a year on special occasions. Any meeting he attends attracts many mathematicians who want to hear his stories. It is said that Professor Turowicz knew all the famous Polish mathematicians from the pre-war period. His excellent stories about mathematics and mathematicians of this time, coloured by interesting anecdotes, are listened to with bated breath.