Marian Adam Rejewski was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who reconstructed

the Nazi German military Enigma cipher machine in 1932.

Marian Rejewski was born 16 August 1905 in Bromberg to Józef and Matylda. After
completing secondary school, he studied mathematics at Poznań University.
In 1929, shortly before graduating from university, Rejewski began attending a secret
cryptology course organized for select German-speaking mathematics students. The course was
conducted off-campus at a military facility.
On 1 March 1929 Rejewski graduated with a Master’s degree in mathematics. A few weeks
after graduating, he accepted an offer of a mathematics teaching position at Poznan University.
After that, he started working part-time for the Chiper Bureau. They were interested in decoding
German radio transmissions which were broadcast using a new cipher system. These messages
were coded by an Enigma machine, but at the time even this fact was unkown to the Poles.
Their first assignment was to solve a four-letter code used by the German Navy. The
cryptologists guessed correctly that the first signal was the question, "When was Frederick the
Great born?" followed by the response, "1712."
On 20 June 1934 Rejewski married Irena Maria Lewandowska. The couple eventually had
two children: a son, Andrzej (Andrew) and a daughter, Janina (Joan). Janina would later become
a mathematician like her father.
Rejewski was able to pass his knowledge of decoding the Enigma messages to the British
and French at a meeting which took place in July 1939 in Warsaw.
After the Germany army invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, it advanced rapidly towards
Warsaw. Rejewski, along with others who had worked at the Cipher Bureau in Warsaw, was
evacuated to Romania. Rejewski, Rozycki and Zygalski managed to avoid being forced into a
refugee camp and they reached Bucharest where, after an unsuccessful attempt to get help from
the British embassy, they made contact with the French one. The three Polish mathematicians
were evacuated to Paris.
They moved around many of the cities of southern France avoiding capture. They
eventually decided to attempt to cross the Pyrenees to reach Spain. They did, only to be put in
prison. On 24 May they were released and sent to Madrid. From there they made their way to
Britain where they arrived 3 August 1943. Rejewski then joined the Polish Army, cracking German
hand cihers and remained there for the rest of the war. On 10 October 1943, Rejewski was
commissioned second lieutenant and a year and a half later, he was promoted to lieutenant.
Enigma decryption, however, had become an exclusively British and American domain; the
Polish mathematicians who had laid the foundations for Enigma decryption were now excluded
from making further contributions in this area. By that time, very few even knew about the Polish
contribution because of the strict secrecy.
On 21 November 1946, Rejewski returned to Poland to be reunited with his family.
Rejewski chose not to return to his position as a mathematician at Poznań University, as he was
still recovering from rheumatism, which he had contracted in the dank Spanish prisons. Soon after
his return to Poland, his 11-year-old son Andrzej died of polio. After his son's death, Rejewski did
not want to part, with his wife and daughter, so they lived with his in-laws. Rejewski took a position
as director of the sales department at a cable-manufacturing company.
Their life was, over many years, made extremely difficult by enquiries carried out by the
Polish Security Service. Rather remarkably, however, the Security Service never discovered his
role in deciphering Enigma code. Despite not finding this out, they demanded that he be
dismissed from his position which happened in 1950. He then held a number of positions before
becoming a bookkeeper in 1954. He held this position until he retired in 1967.

Rejewski, who had been suffering from heart disease, died of a heart attack on 13
February 1980, aged 74, after returning home from a shopping trip. He was buried with military
honors at Warsaw's Powązki Military Cemetery.