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Resilient memories

Detailed descriptions of the horrors suffered by Jews at the hands of the Nazis and the remarkable resilience of those who survived make Bernice Lerner's dissertation, Transcending Terror: A Study of Holocaust Survivors' Lives, an arresting read.

Michael Klein told Lerner that shortly after a crowded cattle car in which he and his mother had traveled for five hot summer days passed a sign reading Auschwitz, his mother asked a train conductor dressed in black what would happen to them. He silently made the classic throat-cutting gesture with his finger. And when his mother asked a peasant woman outside the stopped train for water, he remembers her saying, "My Christian conscience wouldn't allow me to give a Jew water."

George Zimmerman, on the other hand, recalls his father imploring a fellow prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau to make the identification number tattooed on his ten-year-old son's arm as small as he could. And Samuel Stern says he regularly defied Nazi orders as a six-year-old in the Ravensbruck death camp. If he saw a woman near collapse during the hours-long evening Zell Apell, or roll call, Lerner writes, he would approach her and lead her away, because "a woman walking back to her barracks with a child would not, as a rule, be stopped."

Years later, as a student and professor of mathematics and biology, Stern would often champion unconventional ways of understanding and solving problems. In a high school chemistry course, he remembers, "Most people would, following the outline we were supposed to follow and following the instructor's instructions . . . take . . . three or four weeks to solve a particular problem. . . . I don't remember spending more than one or two days. . . . That's where I learned to beat systems."

13 April 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations