Mother's Love and a Nobel Prize
(Originally posted 2013)
It was a great privilege to meet and photograph Nobel prize winner Roald Hoffmann earlier this year. As Roald recounted his story of surviving the Holocaust as a young child, the heroic tale of his mother captured my attention. I could not help but be drawn to this woman who in the midst of extreme adversity created an environment of love, nurture and intellectual stimulation for her young child.
After Germany invaded Poland and occupied the town of Złoczów, Roald’s family was placed in a labor camp. Roald’s father, Hillel Safran, was an engineer with a detailed knowledge of local infrastructure and so was an asset to the Germans while working in the camp.
As the situation worsened Hillel made arrangements for his wife Clara and son Roald to be hidden by a Ukrainian school teacher they had befriended in a village not far from their town. Along with two uncles and an aunt they were hidden in the attic and then storeroom of the local schoolhouse for the last fifteen months during the war.
In this cramped and difficult situation Roald’s mother, Clara made the best of a bad situation. A school teacher by training, Clara found herself confined in the attic storehouse of the school with books, paper and pencils at her disposal and a young son with many hours to fill.
Roald Hoffmann (then Safran) explains how his mother taught him to read using the school books that were stored in the tiny storeroom:
‘Mother invented endless geography games. I learned latitude and longitude at age six. She would say to me, “Tell me how you would go from here to San Francisco”. I had to describe the route in excruciating detail. It was not enough to say take a train. I would have to explain where I would catch it, where it went. I would have to describe all the surrounding bodies of water, whether to go through a canal or on the sea. And which sea. She invented a game called “Wet or Dry”. She would specify a latitude and longitude and I would have to tell whether it would be on ocean or dry land. This made for a longish game. But I’m still good at geography’
This resourceful and determined mother was not going to let incarceration imprison the mind and spirit. Could Clara have imagined that those many hours spent stimulating the intellect of her young charge would produce a future Nobel prize winner?
Whilst this young mother was in hiding Hillel Safran remained at the Labour camp. The Germans valued his skills and Hillel made use of the relative freedom of movement that his position afforded him to work with a resistance group that was planning a breakout. He was able to smuggle weapons into the camp. Unfortunately Hillel along with other leaders of the resistance group were betrayed. This led to their arrest, torture and execution in June 1943.
A friend who witnessed Hillel’s execution informed Clara of the terrible news via a letter to sent to the house. One can only imagine the sorrow of that dreadful moment. Clara poured her grief onto the pages of her husband’s notebook. In this notebook her husband had written notes from a book he was reading on relativity. How apt that the son of this young couple would become a chemist and poet.
The fifteen months in hiding did not mean that Clara avoided the harsh treatment of the Germans. During their time in the labour camp Clara received a terrible beating from one particularly sadistic labour camp director. Not content with just physical brutality, these perpetrators of terror also engaged in psychological torment. When Roald was four or five some of the drunken SS man wanted to show off and scare the people. They made the Roald sit on the dog house while they used it for target practice. They shot and killed the dog while saying to Roald’s mother, “Don’t be afraid, lady. We’re not going to shoot your son.”
Roald describes his mother as a strong, small woman:
”My uncles were weak from not being able to move after 15 months of confinement. When we walked to the Russian lines at the end of the war, the men had great trouble. Mother, however, carried me for three kilometers to the Russian lines. Mother was leader of this small group of five. Her brothers, lifelong, listened to her.”
Roald was aware of the incredible danger that lay beyond his hiding place. Although he was confined in difficult circumstances Roald remembers being surrounded by family and cocooned in an atmosphere of love.
What a legacy for a young mother to pass on to her child and what a joy it must have been for her to see her son succeed in the land that adopted them after the war. This small brave woman remarried, immigrated to New York in 1949, had another child in her forties and lived to the grand age of almost 95.
View Roald’s story
