I would like to recall Zdzislaw and my early contacts with him in sixties, when these contacts were especially close.

A very important period for Zdzislaw was the academic year 1959/60 which he spent in Copenhagen. Very intensive studies on nuclear structure, collective model, effects of pairing interactions and connected problems, were being performed then in Copenhagen by Aage Bohr, Ben Mottelson and others, and this work was attracting many nuclear physicists from all over the world. Zdzislaw also joined this work. He studied, together with Daniel Bes, the effect of pairing interactions on nuclear deformation. This was a generalization of the studies by Ben Mottelson and Sven Gosta Nilsson done in the case of no pairing. The results of Bes and Szymanski, obtained for even-even nuclei in the rare-earth region, showed a good agreement with experiment, especially for well deformed nuclei around the centre of the region. This study, Zdzislaw, himself, has extended to actinides. Both papers have been published in Nuclear Physics 28 (1961).

The research done by Zdzislaw in Copenhagen has determined the topic and a general "philosophy" of his further studies. These were theoretical studies of nuclear structure leading to results which could be, at once or in a near future, directly compared with experiment. Thus, these were theoretical studies done in a close interaction with experimentalists.

In the second part of sixties, Zdzislaw started a cooperation with Sven Gosta Nilsson. The scope of the cooperation was to predict properties of spherical superheavy nuclei situated around the nucleus 298-114, which was expected to be a doubly magic spherical nucleus. To make the predictions realistic, one first needed to perform an extensive study of properties of actinide nuclei, to reproduce these properties which were already known. A large part of the results of these studies and these predictions have been presented in two large papers published in Nuclear Physics A131 (1969). Besides physicists of Lund and Warsaw, also Ray Nix of Los Alamos and Chin Fu Tsang of Berkeley at that time, took part in the cooperation.

At the beginning of seventies, the subject of the cooperation moved to high-spin states, the topic of this Conference. Works of Zdzislaw in this field are described by other people.

Speaking about Zdzislaw, one cannot omit his teaching activity. He liked to teach and to work with young people. He gave many university courses, monographic lectures, seminar talks, lectures at summer and winter schools in various places. Under his supervision, 13 people completed their Ph.D.: Adam Sobiczewski (in 1964), Malgorzata Zielinska-Pfabe (1969), Jan Blocki (1970), Jerzy Dudek (1972), Piotr Rozmej (1975), Wanda Stepien-Rudzka (1975), Wanda Dudek (1977), Witold Nazarewicz (1981), Marcin Cerkaski (1982), Tomasz Werner (1983), Andrzej Majhofer (1985), Janusz Skalski (1985) and Lukasz Kalinowski (1992). Zdzislaw gathered young people around himself, proposed to them attractive topics to study, involved them in his own studies and treated them as important, equal partners in the research. He also often invited them to his home. Very warm, friendly atmosphere of this home resulted that we, his students and coworkers, felt ourselves there as at our own home and our own family. We also noted there how important his family was for Zdzislaw. He expressed this by dedicating his book "Fast Nuclear Rotation" (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1983) to the family: his wife Wieslawa, son Pawel and daughter Anna.