Medical Researcher who survived the Holocaust makes huge donation to Medical Research

A press release - Remicade Co-Inventor And NYU Professor Of Microbiology Jan Vilcek, M.D., Ph.D. Pledges $105 Million To NYU School Of Medicine - announcing one the single largest gifts ever to academic medical research, is also insight into how fortunate we all are that some European Jews survived the Nazi Holocaust and had the courage to leave stagnant Communist economies and come to the West.

According to a profile
in the New York Times by Richard Perez-Pena published on August 12th:

His Jewish family survived the long German occupation of Czechoslovakia and the Holocaust. Though they were forced from their comfortable apartment in Bratislava, and into a succession of smaller ones, they were, at first, passed over when many of Czechoslovakia's Jews were deported to concentration camps. When the campaign to round up and exterminate Jews intensified, they fled the city for the countryside.

"I spent the last year of the war with my mother in hiding, and my father somehow made his way through the front lines to the Russian Army," he said. "I was 11 at the time, and it still seemed like an exciting game of some sort. I was aware of the seriousness of the situation, but not completely."

The people who hid him were strangers in a village. "They were among those exceptional people who took great risks for others," he said. It was an experience, he added, that left a powerful impression about the value of helping people.

Years later, when Czechoslovakia was under Communist rule, his parents - his mother was an ophthalmologist and his father worked for a coal mining company - wanted him to become a doctor.

"I resisted it at first," he said. "I would have preferred another profession, but in a Communist country, the law was out of the question and economics was out of the question, because they were both too politicized."

After becoming a doctor and a research scientist, in 1964, when he was 31, Dr. Vilcek and his wife decided to escape.

"In those days you could not really leave, legally, so my wife and I received permission to visit Vienna for a weekend," he said. "We were able to get out that way, and we did not go back." In 1965, they settled in Manhattan, where they have lived ever since, and he went to work at N.Y.U.

Thank you, Dr. Vilcek!