Trying to Understand, Making Bonds

In 2007, on the occasion of my 70th birthday, Bassam Shakhashiri organized a symposium for me at the Boston meeting of the American Chemical Society. The session was entitled “Roald Hoffmann at 70: A Craftsman of Understanding.” I began my talk with thanks to many. That section has been shifted to the end of this chapter. I was born in a happy young Jewish family in unlucky times, 1937. In that war, most of us perished, 3800 of the 4000 Jews of Złoczów, now Zolochiv in Ukraine. Among those who were killed were my father, three of four grandparents, three aunts, and so on. I just want to show you three photos which relate to that time, one old and two recent. The last 15 months of the war we were hidden by a good Ukrainian man–Mikola Dyuk, the schoolteacher in the small village of Univ. The first year we were in an attic of the schoolhouse, the second year in a storeroom with no windows, maybe 6 x 10 feet, on the ground floor. Here are two photos from 2006, when my sister, my son, and I visited Univ. Here is the attic in which we were hidden, with its one window. The storeroom, a passageway, another ground floor room are gone, rebuilt into a new classroom of Univ’s school. It’s a chemistry classroom. Such is fate. Under the plank floor we dug a bunker to sit in if the police came to the house. I was five and a half when we went in. And nearly seven when we went out. Here’s a photo of me, a few months after we came out. We survived. Some of us. Good people helped us, I tell their story. I am also the speaker for the dead—the three million Polish Jews who were killed do not have good stories to tell, or photos to show. We built a new life, in refugee camps where I read of Marie Curie and George Washington Carver, and then came to America in 1949.