Roald Hoffmann (b. 1937) was hidden with his mother and other relatives from January 1943 until June 1944 in the attic of the schoolhouse in the village of Uniow (today Univ), Ukraine. Mykola Dyuk, who served as the teacher of the one-classroom school, lived with his wife Maria and their three children in the schoolhouse. From the attic window, six-year-old Roald could watch the village children. "I felt – I still feel – the pain of seeing these children being free to move while I couldn't leave," he told Yad Vashem in 2007, when he applied to have his rescuers honored as Righteous Among the Nations. "I had to keep quiet. That must have been difficult. It's a huge tribute to my mother – she kept inventing games to play with me for 15 months." Roald’s father was murdered, and after the war his mother remarried and the family began their journey westwards. Roald had to change schools many times as his family wandered from Krakow through Czechoslovakia to DP camps in Austria and Germany, finally reaching the US in 1949, where Hoffmann began his schooling in English – his sixth language at this point. Despite his travails, Hoffmann became an accomplished student and writer, and in 1981 won the Nobel Prize in the field of chemistry.
Last year, the wartime rescuers of another Nobel prizewinner were honored as Righteous Among the Nations. At the age of ten, Francois Englert, the son of Jewish-Polish immigrants to Belgium, was brought to the home of Camille and Louise Jourdan, the owners of a cafe-restaurant in the village of Lustin in the Ardennes. His parents were hidden in the same town, but for the sake of security, he was not told about their whereabouts. His mother sometimes came to see him, but always pretended to have arrived by train. Englert had no contact with the outside world; instead of going to school, the Jourdans arranged for a local teacher to give him private lessons. After a few months, when denunciation became a threat, the Englerts took Francois to the village of Annevoie, where they were sheltered by one of the residents and the local priest. The family survived the war, but all of their relatives in Poland had been murdered. Although his schooling had been disrupted by the Holocaust, Francois Englert excelled as a student, became a physicist, and in 2013 won the Nobel Prize. Looking back at the war years, he paid tribute to the extraordinary bravery of his rescuers:
"We were helped and hidden by people who did not even know us, people who in those times of darkness took the great risk of displaying generosity, humanity and courage… Without these wonderful people we could not have escaped the persecution and I would not be here to tell the tale."
This article originally appeared in the "Yad Vashem Jerusalem Magazine," volume 80.
