Romana M. Bahry

Research

The Kindraczuk Story

A paper of three pages, published in Vienna in 1912 and then forgotten for most of a century, and the granddaughter who went looking for it.

The discovery

In September 1912 the Vienna dairy journal Österreichische Molkerei-Zeitung published a short paper by a young chemist from Galicia, Wladimir Kindraczuk. Working in the bacteriological laboratory of Professor Willibald Winkler, he had studied huslanka, the fermented milk made by Hutsul shepherds in the Carpathians, compared it with yogurt, and described a bacterium he named Bacillus carpathicus. American bacteriologists cited the paper in 1924. In the decades of war and upheaval that followed, the discovery was forgotten.

The man

Włodzimierz Sylwester Kindraczuk was born on January 9, 1882, in Horodenka, in Austrian Galicia. He took a master’s degree in pharmacy in 1909 and a doctorate at the University of Lviv, where he worked in the laboratory of Bronisław Radziszewski. From 1915 to 1944 he was a pharmacist in Łańcut, in south-eastern Poland, and from 1925 the owner of the pharmacy Apteka pod Matką Boską. In 1918 he married Maria Antonina Kubaty, a pharmacy technician from Kraków.

The monument

During the epidemic of 1919 and 1920, more than 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers held in the internment camp at Łańcut died. Kindraczuk, who witnessed the deaths and the burials in mass graves, paid for a monument to them. Designed by the sculptor Serhii Lytvynenko, it was dedicated on February 20, 1921, and is considered the first Ukrainian military monument in Poland. It was destroyed under the Communist regime and restored in 2012. Its centenary was marked in February 2021. Historians have usually described the epidemic as typhoid. Bahry’s research identifies it as the Spanish flu.

Exile

In July 1944 Kindraczuk fled west to Austria. In 1951 he emigrated with his family to Hamilton, Ontario, and in 1960 he became a Canadian citizen. He died on January 30, 1969.

The search

He told his granddaughter about the discovery while she was growing up in Hamilton. She began to trace the story in the 1970s. In 2009 she found the 1912 paper on the shelves of the Gerstein Science Information Centre at the University of Toronto.

Her research took her to libraries, archives and genealogical societies in several countries. She led a seminar and two translation workshops at the Public Library of Sanok, Poland, in 2011 and 2013, presented the findings in Lviv and Warsaw, and published them in 2013 in Organon, the journal of the Institute for the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The biography followed in 2018.

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