Ludwik Landau

Ludwik Maurycy Landau (31 May 1902 in Tomaszów Mazowiecki 29 February 1944) was a Polish economist and statistician, a member of the Polish resistance movement in World War II, and a victim of the Holocaust.

Life

Ludwik Maurycy Landau was born into a family of intelligentsia in Tomaszów Mazowiecki on 31 May 1902. After graduation he was employed at the Central Statistical Office and at the Institute for Research into Business Cycles and Prices (Instytut Badań Koniunktur Gospodarczych i Cen) and the Institute of Social Economy (Instytut Gospodarstwa Społecznego). His study on social income in Poland around 1929–1933, co-authored with Michał Kalecki, was pioneering.

Landau's 1936 firing from the Institute for Research into Business Cycles and Prices (together with Kalecki and Marek Breit) was seen as politically motivated and engineered by a senior member of the Polish government, the economist and politician Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski.

During the German invasion of Poland and the siege of Warsaw, Landau took part in civil defense. During the subsequent occupation, he continued his research. He participated in underground education programs and worked with the Polish Underground State, preparing reports on the status of the wartime Polish economy. He supported the wartime Polish Socialist Party – Freedom, Equality, Independence, helped design their early wartime manifesto on the economy, and in 1940–1942 edited their underground newspaper.

From the start of the occupation, Landau kept a diary discussing the effects of the wartime conditions on the Polish people, including the country's Jews. The diary contained valuable statistical data. It survived the war and was published in three volumes (1962–1963) as Kronika lat wojny i okupacji (Chronicle of the Wartime Occupation); it has been called "an important source for understanding living conditions during World War II from a social-science perspective".