Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

August 14, 2023

Remembering Nechama Tec, the Survivor-Turned-Scholar

The historian behind the movie Defiance.

Born in Lublin in 1931, Nechama Tec survived the Holocaust by hiding with a Catholic family. She immigrated to Israel in 1949, married, and later moved with her husband to the U.S. Although she is best known among American Jews for her autobiography Dry Tears, which tells the story of her wartime experiences, she was also an accomplished sociologist who wrote several groundbreaking scholarly studies of the Shoah. She died on August 3 at the age of ninety-two. Richard Sandomir writes:

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