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Dan Kennedy (1:09)

Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. This podcast is brought to you by Audible.com, the Internet's leading provider of audiobooks with more than 100,000 downloadable titles across all types of literature. For the Moth listeners, Audible is offering a free audiobook to give you a chance to try out their service. You may like to consider listening to Dropped Famous Men and Women as I Knew Them, written and read by actor Frank Langella. Journey With Frank into the private worlds and privileged lives of movie stars, presidents and royalty that's Dropped Names, Written and read by Frank Langella. Available on Audible. To try Audible Free today and get a free audiobook of your choice, go go to audible.com themoth that's audible.com themoth the story you're about to hear by Roald Hoffman was recorded live at the Moth as part of our annual collaboration with the World Science Festival. Last year, the theme of the night was Dark Stories of Stars Aligned. We're excited to announce that the Moth will be back at the World Science Festival this year on May 31. The theme of that night will be too close to the stories of flashpoints, and tickets for that show and other World Science Festival events are available now@worldScienceFestival.com here's ROL.

Roald Hoffman (2:39)

When the war began, I was four years old. What war? We all have our wars. Mine was World War II. You can tell from my age I was born to a happy Jewish family in a very bad place to be born at that time and at the wrong time. And that was southeast Poland. And in July 1941, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, ran over the town where we were in that first week. There were many losses. My grandfather was killed. The Ukrainians in town rounded up the people, drove them up to the castle where SS Einsatzgruppe, say, killed 2,000 people. Things did not get better. We stayed in that town a little while and then later went to a labor camp called Latskaya. This was essentially slave labor to fix blown up bridges and roads. And my father was a civil engineer, was valuable to the Germans because he had built those roads. And so he had some privileges in the labor camp where we all were. He could pass in and out. And the only documents we have from the war, in fact, are some passes which, say the Jew Hillel Safran can pass out of this camp. We were in this camp. Sometimes it was good, sometimes it was bad. Here is a story that my mother tells. One day, two German officers came into the camp and perhaps looking for some to scare us. And they said to my mother, tell the boy to sit on a doghouse. There was a doghouse. And one of them said, I'm going to shoot the dog. And the other one said, what if Klaus misses? And they all left. And I went and sat on a doghouse. One of them pulls out his gun, takes one shot in the air. The dog runs out, shoots the dog with a second shot just centimeters away from where I was. The situation got very bad. In time, there were people were being sent to the extermination camps. No one wanted to believe it, but my father and mother believed it. They found someone to hide us. They found a friendly Ukrainian schoolteacher in a nearby village who offered to hide us. And one dark night, we walked out of the camp. You could bribe the guards. This was not an extermination camp. And we walked to that schoolhouse and went into the attic. We did not leave that school house for 15 months. That was January 43. In the attic. This was a one room schoolhouse. The village had maybe 200 souls. Maybe 30 kids were there. The front room was a one room schoolhouse. In the back. The teacher lived. Above was the attic. That's where we were. Food was brought up once a day in a pail. Slops were taken away. There was one window. There were slats in the window. And we put a cloth over it. At night, we rarely lit a light. And I sat by that window in the attic. I slept on a straw mattress. There was a bag of peas as a pillow. I looked out that window and I could see children playing outside. It was a schoolhouse after all. And I could hear them during recess, running. But I knew I couldn't be with them. Among those children were actually a few Jewish boys who were kept at the orphanage at the monastery at the end of the road in this little village of Univ. And they were kept there under false identities. The monks saved them, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic monks. One of those boys I finally found and we established. We had been in the same town 60 years later. Later became a foreign Minister of Poland. Adam Daniel Rothfeld I played games. My mother played, taught me how to read. She invented all these games. There were geography books there. This was a schoolhouse. They were stored up there. And she taught me latitude and longitude. And we played these games where she would say. She would give me a latitude and longitude. And I would have to say whether it was wet or dry. And the final. The skill thing was she would try to find a lake in the middle. Like the great lakes of the Aral Sea. So I would fall down. She asked me, how do you go from here to there? Like, how do you go from unia of the village where we were to Montevideo or to California? And I would have to name every sea along the way. Some of those passes around Denmark have pretty hairy names for a little boy. And I would do that. I would play endlessly. And I had to keep quiet in. There were actually four people initially an uncle and aunt. My mother and I. My father would join us later. Uncle and aunt had a two year old. I was five years old, almost five years of four and a half when we went into the attic. And the uncle and the aunt had a two year old at the time. And it was judged that I would keep quiet. But the two year old would not be able to keep quiet in the attic. And she was given to a Polish family to keep. And neither the Polish family nor the little girl survived the war. I would up there, I would play these endless games once in a while. In the beginning of our stay, my father would come to visit. One time he brought some candy. And I can't imagine now what it must have cost to find some candy in that time of war. But he found it one day he did not come. And a letter was slipped under our door saying that his attempt to break out of the camp. We had another uncle in a partisan group in forest. And they were smuggling weapons into the camp. My father remained in the camp as the head of an attempt to break out. And the one his attempt was betrayed. And the letter said that he was tortured and then shot. In town my mother cried. She tried not to cry when I was there, of course, and to hold some of her feelings in. I only learned later. She wrote some of her thoughts in a little notebook which had actually belonged to my father. And in which he kept notes in the labor camp on a book on relativity theory that he was reading. The book was in German. His notes were in German. And in that book, she wrote later, her feelings was one of the few places she had to write. Eventually it got too cold up in the attic. The attic was open to the outside. There were holes in it. And we couldn't survive another Ukrainian winter. And we moved down to a storeroom on the first floor. A room about maybe 8 by 10ft. And there we were. By now we were five. My uncle had come in from the forest. And in that room we lifted up some of the floorboards. We dug out some of the earth to build a bunker, a hiding place, because occasionally police came to the schoolhouse. And we dug out this place so we could go in there and hide in the worst times. And then the floorboards would be moved over and a cupboard moved over that I still remember the smell of the wet earth. It's something you don't forget. We stayed in there, and all this time I felt enveloped by a. What I would call a cocoon of love. There was this tremendous love around me even as there was this danger, terrible danger out there. Eventually, the Russians came back driving Studebaker trucks. And we could hear the artillery in the distance. The offensive had stalled not too far from the town and from where we were. And one day, it was also a night in June 44. This is a long time before the war ended in Europe. But this is when we were freed by the Red Army. We walked out from that schoolhouse and walked across muddy clay fields after rain. And my mother carried me. I was seven at this point. The two women supported the men. The men's legs were swollen from lack of motion. We walked across to the German lines where a soldier gave us a ride and is truck into town. And I could see some of the German bodies lying in the road. We were refugees in Europe then for a while we left Poland. My mother remarried after the war and I then had a sister born already in this country. We came to this country. We lived happily ever after. I went to PS 16, Brooklyn, and to Stuyvesant High School. The Same school that Eric went to and just seven blocks from here. And we were happy. We kept all the time in touch with the family who had saved us or the man. Eventually they passed away. We keep in touch with the children to this day, in the next generation. In 2006, five years ago, my sister and I and my son Hillel, who was named as my father was, Hillel went back to that village and to the town. And the schoolhouse was still there and the attic was still there. The schoolhouse was expanded and rebuilt, but the attic was still there. And we climbed into the attic and it was very important that my son be there because at the point that we climbed in, into that attic five years ago, he had a five year old, my grandson Sam. And so as I watched my son, as we touched hands, I could. I could feel that he knew what it meant to be a five year old shut in that attic. We climbed down and wanted to see the place where the storeroom was. But the school had been rebuilt. The storeroom had been rebuilt into a classroom. That's what Igor Duke, the. The son of the people who had saved us, said. And I look at this classroom and on the wall is Mendeleev's periodic table of the Elements. Now I'm a chemist. I became a chemist almost by accident. I'm a good chemist. It took my mother 25 years to get over the fact that I didn't become a real doctor. And I look around this room and there's some chemical equipment and there is some more stuff on the walls about acids and bases. And this same room in which we had been hidden 62 years before, that was now a chemistry classroom. Now there were in this town altogether 4,000 Jews, 4,000 Poles, 4,000 Ukrainians. Of the 4,000 Jews, maybe 200 survived the war. Four children among them. Those children are all in the United States. We had done well, but what about those hundreds and hundreds of children who had not survived, who did not even have that cocoon of love to hold them together, Whose deaths were solitary? Who will tell their story? Who will speak for the dead?