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The Survivor

Dennis Piszkiewicz

    I got an email From Ken B. last Friday. I had not heard from him for about five years. That’s how some old friendships go.
    Ken Wrote, “I don’t know whether you’d heard, but I saw an obituary for Alex N. the other day. I always thought that Alex was one of the smartest, and nicest, guys in the department back in our UCLA days. Just thought I’d share the news.”
    “Amen,” I said to myself. “Alex was a great guy.”
    We knew Alex several decades ago. Ken and I were working at UCLA as research associates, and we were happy to have a friend on the faculty, in addition to our boss. Alex was a regular, joining us at coffee breaks and bull sessions.
    I wondered what Alex had been up to in the intervening decades, and I searched the web for his obituaries. I found several. The longest with the most detail was from a University of California web site. Alex’s obituary gave a bare-bones description of his childhood, but that brief section was also a revelation and a shock to me.
    Here is the key part of what it said: “Alex, an only child, was born on July 7, 1935, in ưo?dz?, Poland. His family moved to Warsaw, where his father was head accountant for a bank. ... Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939; and occupied the country. ... Alex’s father was killed during the War, but Alex and his mother survived by hiding in the Polish countryside. Alex was liberated with his mother in 1945. Throughout his life, Alex always avoided talking about that horrific period.”
    Over the years I’ve met a lot of veterans and refugees from World War II, and none of them ever talked about their wartime experiences. Nobody wanted to revisit the worst time in their lives.
    Alex’s obituary continued: “After the War’s end, Alex and his mother .... traveled to Israel where they stayed with other relatives who had emigrated there before the war. ... Alex, (at the age of 11) and his mother finally made their way to Australia, via ship. It was on that voyage that Alex commenced learning English.”
    This section from Alex’s obituary grabbed my attention because it revealed in terse, boring terms the terrifying circumstances of Alex’s childhood without explicitly describing them. Apparently, its author had missed the history lectures in college on World War II.
    Alex’s family was Jewish. His father was most likely murdered by the Nazis, a victim of the Holocaust. Possibly he died at one of the notorious death camps that Germany built around the occupied Polish countryside during World War II. Alex and his mother were Holocaust survivors.
    Alex spoke with a British accent, although I could not tell what part of the empire it was from. His pronunciation also had an undertone suggesting that English was not his native tongue. I thought it had a trace of eastern Europe in it. I recognized it because all four of my grandparents were immigrants from Poland. They had Polish accents in their use of English. That explained Alex’s British accent with its residual trace of Polish that I had identified as coming from eastern Europe. It also confirmed Alex’s history, which I never would have guessed.
    Alex’s obituary was about a thousand words long, and it summarized his academic accomplishments. He received most of his education in Australia. before migrating to the United States to earn his PhD. Alex then spent over a half century as a faculty member at first, UCLA, and later, at UC Berkeley. When he retired from his teaching career, he spent another twelve years as Director of the University of California’s 47,000-acre Natural Reserve System, which stretches across the state. He was an ultimate environmentalist.
    I lost track of Alex over the years because of a decade difference in our ages, different career paths, and geographical distances. He is gone now. He is survived by his Australian-born wife, a daughter, a son, and four grandchildren. He was a remarkable man. He accomplished much more in his long life than I imagined. I regret not having kept in touch with him, that, and I appreciate him now only after he is gone.

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