the Nazi Lwów Ghetto, surviving with false papers. He would later recall: During that time, Lem earned a living as a car mechanic and welder, and occasionally stole munitions from storehouses (to which he had access as an employee of a German company) to pass them on to the Polish resistance. In 1945, Lwow was annexed into the Soviet Ukraine, and the family, along with many other Polish citizens, was resettled to Kraków, where Lem, at his father's insistence, took up medical studies at the Jagiellonian University. He did not take his final examinations on purpose, to avoid the career of military doctor, which he suspected could have become lifelong. After receiving absolutorium (Polish term for the evidence of completion of the studies without diploma), he did an obligatory monthly work at a hospital, at a maternity ward, where he assisted at a number of childbirths and a caesarean section. Lem said that the sight of blood was one of the reasons he decided to drop medicine. Rise to fame Lem started his literary work in 1946 with a number of publications in different genres, including poetry, as well as his first science fiction novel, The Man from Mars (Człowiek z Marsa), serialized in (New World of Adventures). Between 1948 and 1950 Lem was working as a scientific research assistant at the Jagiellonian University, and published a number of short stories, poems, reviews, etc., particularly at Tygodnik Powszechny. In 1951, he published his first book, The Astronauts (Astronauci). In 1953 he met and married (civil marriage) Barbara Leśniak, a medical student. Their church marriage ceremony was performed in February 1954. In 1954, he published a short story anthology, [Sesame and Other Stories] . The following year, 1955, saw the publication of another science fiction novel, The Magellanic Cloud (Obłok Magellana). During the era of Stalinism in Poland, which had begun in the late 1940s, all published works had to be directly approved by the communist state. Thus The Astronauts was not, in fact, the first novel Lem finished, just the first that made it past the state censors. Going by the date of the finished manuscript, Lem's first book was a partly autobiographical novel Hospital of the Transfiguration (Szpital Przemienienia), finished in 1948. It would be published seven years later, in 1955, as a part of the trilogy Czas nieutracony (Time Not Lost). The experience of trying to push Czas