Touched by History : Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait has jolted families, jobs and hopes. : WARSAW : Polish Doctor Struck It Rich in Kuwait; Now He Is Starting Over

Dr. Andrzej Kobryn, 41, and his wife, Anna, 29, had worked in Kuwait city for more than four years. They are not sure whether to consider themselves lucky or unlucky that they happened to have been in San Francisco, attending a medical convention, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iraq.

In any event, said Kobryn, an organ transplant specialist, “we lost everything.”

Having been out of the country when Iraq invaded, the Kobryns and their two young children were at least fortunate enough to have been spared the trek across the desert made by hundreds of other foreigners, including scores of Poles, who were working in Kuwait.

On the other hand, Kobryn wonders if, had he been there, he might have somehow managed to retrieve the equivalent of about $30,000 in savings from his bank account.

“It’s gone now, I am sure,” he said, “along with all our clothes, jewelry and cars.”

Back in Warsaw, Kobryn’s wife has returned to work as a surgical nurse at a local hospital. But there is no place for Kobryn at his own former job.

Physicians in Poland are notoriously underpaid. When he left Poland for Kuwait in 1986, he was paid the equivalent of about $35 a month. His monthly pay in Kuwait, including fringe benefits and allowances, was, for him, a staggering $3,500--a hundred times as much.

It was, he admits, a strange job in a strange country--teaching organ transplant techniques to a handful of mostly millionaire students, most of them less than devoted to the idea of practicing medicine. The goal of the transplant unit was to bring prestige to Kuwait. It performed about 90 kidney transplants a year, with a 92% success rate.

Kobryn acknowledges that he and other expatriate experts working in Kuwait were “mere hirelings, but the money was fantastic . . . . Even the Bangladeshis sweeping the streets were making enough in a few months to return home and build themselves houses.”

Now Kobryn is looking for another place to emigrate for work. One possibility is South Africa. Prospects in Poland, for the foreseeable future, look bleak.

“We have only the clothes we had with us and Anna’s job,” Kobryn said. “Now we are starting over.”