Barely 20 years old at the start of the war, Tineke and her mother (the other woman in the photo) went into the business of hiding Jews in their house in Amsterdam, building a hidden compartment in the attic of their home and procuring forged documents to help refugees flee the country. She is the young woman in the first photograph. Pais was aided in his extended concealment from authorities by his former fiancée, Tina Strobos, who went by the name Tineke Buchter at the time. The wartime ID card of Abraham Pais, exempting him from exportation to a concentration camp, reproduced in A Tale of Two Continents, by Abraham Pais (Princeton Univ. Since he was a physicist, and therefore of potential value to the Germans, he was issued a card that exempted him from being deported to a concentration camp in Germany ( second image), but for 5 years he had to wear a star of David in public that identified him as a Jew, and as the crackdown on Jews grew more intense in 1943 (hundreds of thousands of Dutch Jews were sent to German camps, and most of them did not survive), Pais ultimately had to go into hiding. His wartime experience was harrowing, as detailed in his autobiography, A Tale of Two Continents: A Physicist’s Life in a Turbulent World (1997), which I had owned for many years but had never read until preparing this essay. He was in fact the last Jew to get a PhD in the Netherlands until 1946. The occupying Germans issued a decree that Jews would be excluded from Dutch higher education, and Pais had to work frantically to pass the requirements for his PhD before that ban took effect. He studied physics in the Netherlands, his final years of study at Utrecht made more difficult by the German invasion of Holland and Belgium. Abraham Pais, with Tineke Buchter (later Tina Strobos) at left and Tineke’s mother Marie Schotte at right, photograph, 1941 (Wikimedia commons)Ībraham Pais, a Dutch-American Jewish theoretical physicist and would-be historian of science, was born May 19, 1918.
0 kommentar(er)
