The Poles were more fortunate, for during the crucial weeks of the destruction of Poland, many of their leading scholars had been able to escape north into Lithuania or south into Romania, from which countries they made their way to the west. When they arrived in the United States, the Polish organizations, working with the Polish Legation in Washington, found funds to allow them to continue their scientific work. To furnish a center for them and keep them from being lost in American life, an American branch of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in Krakow was formed under the distinguished historian, Professor Oskar Halecki. This was later reorganized as the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in the United States. During the war years, it received sufficient funds to publish a quarterly journal, the _Bulletin of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America_, and to issue several scholarly works on Polish subjects. Still later, when the Germans pushed westward, other Polish scholars, such as Professor Waclaw Lednicki and Professor Manfred Kridl, succeeded in reaching the United States. Most of these men have since found places in the American scientific world. Few distinguished Russian scholars arrived at this time and there was only one Ukrainian, Professor Nicholas Chubaty, who almost by accident, arrived in the United States for a meeting of _Pax Romana_, an international organization for social action under the auspices of the Catholic Church, and remained here after the outbreak of hostilities. The Southern Slavs and Bulgarians fared even less well. War produced, at first, relatively little effect upon Slavic studies as a whole or Russian in particular. It was not until 1940 that there came any appreciable increase in the number of students. Yet the general reaction of the public differed from that of 1914. Despite the growth of anti-Nazi and even anti-German feeling, there was no attempt to exclude German from the curricula of any important institution. There was no decline of students, but rather an increase. The same was true of Russian, and long before 1941, the governing bodies of institutions without Slavic departments began to think of introducing them. We can only mention certain instances of this development.[38] Professor Alfred Senn, a Swiss philologist from the University of Kaunas, who held several positions in other institutions, became Professor of German Philology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1938. During World War II, he offered courses in Russian, and in 1948 became Professor of Balto-Slavic Philology and head of the Department of Balto-Slavic Studies. As such, he was able to group around him a number of refugee scholars.