From suffering, adversity, to the Nobel Prize

By David Pratt

David Pratt
David Pratt

KINGSTON, Ontario, Canada — When Elie Wiesel died on July 2, a voice was stilled that had spoken for the voiceless millions who perished in the Nazi concentration camps.  In May 1944, Wiesel was deported from Romania to Auschwitz at the age of fifteen, and was liberated from Buchenwald eleven months later.  It was ten years before he began to write of his experiences.  His short book, Night, eventually sold more than ten million copies in the United States.  Wiesel became a spokesperson for human rights, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

How many potential or future Nobel laureates perished in the Holocaust is a melancholy question to which we can never know the answer.  One who survived was the Hungarian Imre Kertésj, who was awarded the prize for literature in 2002. Like Wiesel, he survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a teenager.  Paradoxically, he wrote “I experienced my most radical moments of happiness in the concentration camp.  You cannot imagine what it’s like to be allowed to lie in the camp’s hospital, or to have 10-minute break from indescribable labor.”

Further east, other future Nobel laureates suffered oppression in the Soviet Union.  Menachem Begin, later Prime Minister of Israel, was sent to a labor camp in Siberia after the Soviets occupied eastern Poland.  His imprisonment brought about deeper spiritual awareness.  “Faith takes better care of man, when things go badly with him, than man does of his faith when things are well with him.”  Released when Germany invaded Russia, he made his way to Palestine.  He was awarded the Peace Prize for his role in making peace between Israel and Egypt in 1978.

Joseph Brodsky (Literature, 1987) was from a later generation of Jews persecuted in the Soviet Union.  As a young poet in Leningrad, he was arrested for “social parasitism.”  When the judge asked him about his right to call himself a poet he said, “I thought, well, I thought it came from God.”  He was sentenced to five years’ hard labor.  In 1972 he was forced into exile, and immigrated to the U.S.

The roll of honor is lengthy.  It includes Roald Hoffmann (Chemistry, 1981), who spent part of his childhood in occupied France; Nelly Sachs (Literature, 1966) who barely escaped from Germany to Sweden; Walter Kohn (Chemistry 1998) who escaped from Austria to Britain; François Englert (Physics, 2013), who survived hidden in orphanages; and François Jacob (Medicine, 1965) who fought with the Free French through Africa and Europe, suffering bomb wounds that ended his dream of becoming a surgeon and led him into medical research.

A large group of Jewish scientists and scholars, some 2600, settled in Britain and the U.S. after the Nuremberg Laws expelled them from German universities.  At least 47 Nobel laureates in the United States, and 27 more in Britain, were Jews who had fled anti-Semitism in Europe.  Fritz Haber (Chemistry, 1918) protested against the new laws.  In his letter of resignation from his position as Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, he wrote “For more than forty years I have selected my collaborators on the basis of their intelligence and their character and not on the basis of their grandmothers, and I am not willing to change.”  He died in exile a year later. The result of Nazi rule was that the United States replaced Germany as the world’s scientific leader after World War II.

These cases testify to the ability of many Jewish laureates to overcome adversity.  Not all kinds of adversity are violent and life-threatening. Many Jewish laureates were born to European immigrants to the United States, and were often the first in their families to attend university.  Two institutions in New York were important in their careers.  One was the Bronx High School of Science, which produced 8 Nobel laureates, far more than any other secondary school in the world, 7 of whom were Jewish.  The other was City University, which is credited with 13 Nobel laureates, 11 of whom were Jewish.  Several graduates said that it was only the free tuition of City University that enabled them to pursue post-secondary education.

Arno Penzias (Physics, 1998) wrote about growing up poor.  “Unless you’re poor, you don’t know what poor means.  It means you get up in the morning and start killing cockroaches in the bathtub.  It means wearing old clothes that make the other kids laugh at you…”

Even those laureates who grow up in privileged circumstances experience struggle in their adult lives.  Nobel Prizes are awarded for breakthroughs in fields of endeavor, and those scholars and scientists who break new ground almost invariably incur criticism from the guardians of convention.  As Paul Lauterbur (Medicine, 2003) put it, “There’s a saying among scientists, that you don’t know you’ve got a really good idea until at least three Nobel laureates have told you it’s wrong.”  Many laureates struggle for years against criticism and sometimes derision to have their ideas accepted.

Jews constitute 0.2 per cent of the world’s population but have earned 22 per cent of Nobel Prizes.  This phenomenon shows no sign of declining.  In the twenty-first century, 25 per cent of Nobel Prizes have been awarded to Jews. Collectively, these accomplishments constitute an affirmation and celebration of the human spirit.

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David Pratt is a writer living in Kingston, Canada.  His latest book is Nobel Laureates: The Secret of Their Success.  Comments intended for publication in the space below MUST be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and by his/ her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the United States.)