Famous Holocaust Survivors

Alexander Grothendieck (1928 – )

French Mathematician

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Grothendieck was basically a displaced person for most of his childhood mainly due to the upheavals of World War II. Born to a Russian-Jewish father who died in Auschwitz in 1942, he, along with his mother, transferred from camp to camp until they reached Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, where Jews were relatively safe from their Nazi pursuers. Following the war, he pursued a career in mathematics and made significant contributions to algebraic topology, algebraic geometry, number theory, Galois Theory and functional analysis, among others. He is very much considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century,

Simone Veil (1927 – )

French Politician and Lawyer

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Born Simone Annie Jacob, her entire family was transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 but only she and her sister survived when the camp was liberated a year later. As an astute politician, she served as the Minister of Health under Prime Ministers Chirac and Barre (1974 – 1979) and as a member of the European Parliament (1979 – 1982, 1982 – 1993). She was also appointed to the Constitutional Council of France in 1998 and elected to the Board of Directors of the International Criminal Court’s Trust Fund for Victims in 2003.

Bruno Touschek (1921 – 1978)

Austrian Physicist

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Since his mother was Jewish, Touschek was arrested by the Gestapo in 1945, but was able to escape the concentration camp, largely by chance. After finishing his physics studies, he began conceiving of the idea of radiation damping of electrons circulating within a betatron, a concept which is the very groundwork of all present-day powerful particle accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Wladyslaw Szpilman (1911 – 2000)

Polish Pianist and Composer

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Szpilman was an accomplished classical and jazz pianist before the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. With the rest of his family deported to Treblinka extermination camp where none survived the war, he managed to run away from the transport loading station when a friend pulled him from the crowd and shooed him away from the waiting train. He resumed his rudely interrupted career performing at the Polish Radio after liberation and composed many symphonic works and about 500 popular songs, a hundred of which are still very popular today. Szpilman wrote a memoir about his survival in Warsaw entitled “Śmierć Miasta” (Death of a City), which was subsequently republished in English by his son in 1998 as “The Pianist” that became the subject matter of the Roman Polanski’s 2002 multi-awarded movie of the same title.

More Holocaust-themed articles:

·        Heroes of the Holocaust & Their Stories of Courage 1

·        Heroes of the Holocaust & Their Stories of Courage 2

·        Six Classic Holocaust Literatures