With the dedication of the beautiful Morton and Helen Yulman Theater and the rededication of the College Center as the Reamer Campus Center, Union enjoyed its second and third building dedications is less than four months.
The excitement of the Bicentennial year continued over Commencement weekend. We honored our own and
others Norton Reamer '58, a man whose work on behalf of Union has made a tremendous difference in the life of the College, was awarded the Founders Medal; Robert Bernhardt '73, Philip Beuth '54, Victor Fazio '65, Gordon Gould '41, and Estelle Cooke-Sampson '74 were given the Eliphalet Nott Medal in recognition of achievements in their respective fields; and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Commencement speaker, received an honorary degree.
Yet, it was the granting of an honorary doctor of humane letters degree to a man whose escape from Auschwitz helped save the lives of as many as 200,000 Hungarian Jews that drew the greatest notice-as it should have. Little known except to Holocaust scholars, Ceslav Mordowicz, a Polish Jew, was one of a handful of men who escaped from Auschwitz in the spring of 1944 with the purpose of bearing witness to what was transpiring there.
Despite increasing reports of Nazi death camps, the world was still largely disbelieving. The Nazis took diabolically elaborate measures to conceal the camps' true nature, not just to prevent international intervention but to lull the Jewish population into acceding to a cunningly-planned transport to extermination.
Such was the state of affairs when Mordowicz and another prisoner, both working at hard labor in a gravel pit, made their escape
from Auschwitz on May 27, 1944. Hiding for three days in an underground bunker in the gravel pit, near the guards' water supply, they waited until the search for them was given up, then crawled in the dark between the watchtowers, swam across a river, and fled.
The reports of these two men and two others who had escaped in April-the Auschwitz Protocols-had reached the Vatican, the White House, and 10 Downing Street. Although the Allies did not bomb Auschwitz, as Mordowicz and his fellow escapees urged, Hungary did stop the deportation of Jews, and about 200,000 of the country's 800,000 Jewish population were saved.
Subsequently, Mordowicz was apprehended again by the Nazis and returned to Auschwitz. Luckily unrecognized by his captors, he emerged at war's end with the distinction of not only having escaped Auschwitz but having bested it twice. He subsequently emigrated to Israel and now lives in Toronto, Canada.
It was at a Toronto synagogue that Union College and Ceslav Mordowicz came together quite by chance a matter of weeks ago. Stephen M. Berk, the Florence B. Sherwood Professor of History and a leading authority on the Holocaust, was delivering a lecture on Auschwitz when a woman rose during the question period and said “the man sitting next to me is Mr. Mordowicz.”
Stunned because he had no idea that Mordowicz was still alive, Steve suggested that we consider honoring Mordowicz. Since this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, nothing, in my view, could be more appropriate than to honor Ceslav Mordowicz. So we did.
It was a splendid end to a splendid weekend and a splendid year. Now on to Union's third century.