Nechama Tec, professor emerita of Sociology at UConn Stamford, where she began teaching in 1974, died August 3. 

One of the world’s preeminent Holocaust scholars, Tec brought her unique perspective as a Holocaust survivor and a sociologist to the field, challenging previous approaches and spotlighting stories of rescue, resistance, and resilience in her work.

Born in Lublin, Poland in 1931, she was eight years old when the Germans invaded, and lived for three years under an assumed Christian identity during World War II. With the aid of Catholic Poles, her sister and parents also survived the war by hiding in homes and evading German detection. After World War II, she immigrated to the United States with her husband Leon Tec, a child psychiatrist, where they had two children, Leora and Roland. Tec studied Sociology at Columbia University, where she earned her bachelor’s (1954), master’s (1955), and doctoral (1963) degrees.

Tec started her teaching career at UConn Stamford in 1974. At the same time she also began to write her Holocaust memoir,  Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood, published in 1982. In her memoir, Tec began to examine why certain Christian Poles helped save Jews, while also bringing greater attention to the experiences of Jews who had survived the war in hiding. Her subsequent book When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland (1986), would also explore the topic of rescue in greater detail. 

In 1990, Tec published In the Lion’s Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisen (1990) which recounts the remarkable experiences of a young Jew who survived the Holocaust by passing as half German and half Polish and in so doing managed to rescue hundreds of Jews and Christians. Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (1993) would become her most well-known publication, highlighting the incredible story of Tuvia Bielski and the Bielski brothers, Jews in Belarus who organized a band of partisans that helped save over twelve hundred lives in family camps deep in the forests of Eastern Europe. Defiance was made into a feature film, starring actors Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber, in 2008 and helped to correct mistaken perceptions of Jewish passivity by detailing a remarkable story of resistance and rescue for a broader audience.  

Resilience and Courage: Women, and Men, and the Holocaust (2003) made a major contribution to the field of Holocaust studies by examining the complex issue of gender in the Holocaust, through hundreds of first-person accounts comparing the different experiences of women and men during World War II. In her 2013 book, Resistance: Jews and Christians who Defied the Nazi Terror, Tec set out to refute the notion that “Jews marched like sheep to the slaughter” by demonstrating acts of resistance (large and small) in the ghettos, camps, and forests.

Beyond a remarkable career in academia and the classroom, Tec was a member of the advisory board of the Braun Center for Holocaust Studies of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and of its International Advisory Board of Directors of the Foundation to Sustain Righteous Christians. In 2002, she was appointed by the President to the Council of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington D.C. Tec also served on the Academic Advisory Committee at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 

She was the author of over 70 articles in major journals and was also the recipient of numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination, a First Prize for Holocaust Literature by the World Federation of Fighters, Partisans and Concentration Camp Survivors in Israel, a Christopher Award, an International Anne Frank Special Recognition Prize and the National Jewish Book Award for Holocaust writing.

PHOTO: Nechama Tec