Tuesday 14 July 2009

Holocaust survivor gets PhD for thesis on roots of Auschwitz

Daily Dose of Holoc


At the ripe age of 81, a Holocaust survivor from Haifa has received a PhD for a thesis showing how Auschwitz-Birkenau began as a camp for coerced laborers working for a mismanaged Nazi industrial project.

"My life never had much of a linear or logical course," Eliezer Schwartz said when asked why he decided to enter academia so late in the game.

Before he began researching the Nazi concentration and extermination camp in Poland, Schwartz worked for many years as project head and urban planner for Solel Boneh, the Israeli construction giant.

When Schwartz retired at 75, his three grandchildren advised him to write a doctoral thesis, which he wrote with pen and paper. "Computer skills are a bit much for me now," he said.

His non-academic, very practical life experience gave Schwartz a special edge over more bookish historians when writing his thesis for the University of Haifa.

This practical experience came in handy when he started his thesis about how an industrial park that was built 3 kilometers from Auschwitz may have affected the famous death camp.

Schwartz, whose only scholastic achievement prior to the age of 45 was a high school diploma, found that mismanagement at the industrial complex which the German concern I.G. Farben was trying to build near Auschwitz, required tens of thousands of slave workers, most of them Jewish. More


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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

File under Political thriller-Hebrew.