Gerald Holton

Professor of Physics and of the History of Science, Emeritus, Harvard University

Emeritus member

Oh, to live again in a pleasant and informative evening in an Examiners Club meeting, among friends and colleagues old and new.

Looking back at age 100, as I do here, reveals the satisfying life of a tenured academic, a life that was possible in those years during a century that provided untold benefits, especially in the most advanced countries, in the sciences, medicine, arts, relation between different social groups, and much more. In short, as I have individually experienced it, it has indeed been a Celebratory Century.

But I must also acknowledge that another, more malevolent face of this same century that I have also experienced — the macabre darkness of the spirit, the rise of triumphant fascism in much of the world, the Holocaust, the second World War, the acquisition of humanity-destructive weapons, the untold millions left to starve as a result of perverse ideological-political ideas, and much more. That has been the face of a Tragic Century.

As I began to think of my response to furnishing here some brief account of my life, I felt in myself the fluctuation between these two centuries, as if they were interactive and interlaced, with negative and positive linked. Allow me to illustrate this with a look at a series of contradictory events, collaborating in the early decades of my life.

I was born to a young Viennese couple — father a lawyer, mother a physiotherapist – in 1922. They had accepted interesting work in Berlin, and I was born there. But this supposedly “blessed event” was delivered into turmoil: the Nazis there were essentially in charge of the streets, having killed already some 200 intellectuals, with the Foreign Minister Rathenau being gunned down a few weeks after I was born.  When Albert Einstein was found to be also on the list to be killed, he fled Germany for about a year.

In the aftermath my parents decided to return for safety to Vienna, with me and my younger brother Edgar—it was arguably my first experience as a refugee.

My childhood in Vienna came to an abrupt close at age 15, at about 8 pm on March 11, 1938, when the Austrian Nazis and Germany under Hitler took over Austria, essentially by radio.

I actually happened to see Hitler arriving in Vienna with his open cavalcade, appearing just below my father’s office at the Ringstrasse on March 15, 1938, being welcomed by the frenzied and jubilant Viennese population.

The usual consequences followed — my dismissal from the High School (Humanistisch Gymnasium), my father being forbidden to be a lawyer and having to go into hiding. My brother and I had to dare to go out, to try to get visas for the family at endless offices and at the American Embassy, to go to America.

Throughout, I felt to be going through a transition, leaving childhood behind and becoming an instant adult.

And in the evening and night of November 9 to 10, 1938, the Nazis launched their meticulously synchronized beginning of the Holocaust, throughout Vienna and some 200 other German cities. What next for my brother and me? And what of the roughly 1,600,000 boys and girls, targeted by the German government as “non-Arians”-- almost all of whom eventually were murdered or starved to death.                                                      

But just then, amid the disaster, there it was again—the intermingling of the two Centuries. For what happened next at this darkest point was essentially a miracle, one to save some of the children, including my brother and myself. Almost no country showed much interest in Germany’s Pogrom of November 9-10. But one Member of Parliament of the UK in London did: Philip Noel-Baker, a British Quaker. In an astounding speech, backed by a few others there, he convinced the British parliament at least to try to rescue 10,000 targeted German children by having them brought to the United Kingdom.

With the help of the British Quakers and some Jewish organizations in London, the problem of transporting the children (mostly in locked trains) from Germany was quickly accomplished, and children began to arrive in the UK within a couple of weeks. It became well known as the Kindertransport.

Within Germany, the selection of which children would be actually sent out had been mastered shortly. In many German cities lotteries were set up.  Until the quota was filled, a child applicant would be asked to draw a slip of paper out of a carton box, listing the possible destination.

So that is how my brother and I, otherwise immersed in disaster, experienced the face of the opposite, positive, side of possible existence. Against the odds, we were selected, told to pack one suitcase each and appear shortly at the train station in Vienna.

About two days later we disembarked in England, where the Quakers had set up reception places for the arriving children.  Neither my brother nor I knew English, nor had we any friend there, nor any money. But we were young, and saved.

Now to the rest, in short staccato manner. After a few weeks, we were released from the camp to enroll for studies in the local industrial school in the city of Oxford. There I received a diploma in electrical engineering by June 1940, having been cared for through all the years by Quakers. During this time, we were also fortunately joined by my parents, who had arranged their escape from Vienna.

Just then the United Kingdom was under siege by the victorious German army and air force. Winston Churchill was the new Prime Minister and was worried that there might be spies among the many German refugees who were then in England. He declared them all to be “Enemy Aliens,” and ordered them to report  to police stations with one suitcase, then to be incarcerated for the duration of the war at a large concentration camp set up on the Isle of Man. This order applied to all, whether composers, surgeons, teachers, etc.—including those persons who, some years before, had arrived in Britain on the Kindertransport.

Once more, an astonish flip of the sides: Just before being forced to appear for transport into the camp, the visa to go to America, which my brother and I had worked to obtain back in Vienna, came suddenly through for our use now.

So in June, 1940, Edgar and I and our parents arrived in New York, where, again, we knew no one. And yet again, somehow this was not to be the end.

We had arrived destitute; but entirely out of the blue, a letter came to me, sent by the International Institute for Education, which specialized (and still does) in bringing penniless but promising young people to colleges in America. 

Their letter, which I had no reason to expect, said, astoundingly, that Wesleyan University in Connecticut would let me be their student, free. For Edgar a similar arrangement was made in Florida.

Within two years at college I graduated with a BA and MA in Physics. It was obviously the first real step to a career, one that took on greater possibility after I was accepted as a Ph.D. student at Harvard’s Physics Department. I worked during the War years in Harvard’s research lab on improving radar and other non-violent means-- in accord with my continuing respect for the Quaker spirit. So by the time I was tenured, I could feel that I had freed myself from the feeling of being from time to time on a hook, like a fish wiggling under the influence of a negative Century.

At this point, I need to acknowledge my debt to a few of the many teachers and colleagues who took an interest in me personally and who nurtured my career. As I look back on them, I see the first of them to be the physicist Prof. Walter G. Cady when I was at Wesleyan.

Later, at Harvard, there was above all Prof. E. C. Kemble, my thesis supervisor Prof. P. W. Bridgman, and Prof. Philipp Frank. During long stints at the Institute for Advanced Study, I organized the large documentary Nachlass of Albert Einstein, prior to its publication. There, I benefitted from the skill and wisdom of his longtime secretary, Helen Dukas.

And for over two decades, I worked with the sociologist Dr. Gerhard Sonnert at Harvard on many published research projects, including one examining the fate of the children who, fleeing from Nazi oppression, came to the U. S. A., as well as another project on the reasons why many women scientists had not received the respect they deserved.

In listing all these collaborators with my work, I cannot fail here to mention that throughout I have been buoyed up by a feeling of love to them.

As to the private life in later years, it too showed itself in the form of a positive Century. Brother Edgar had been inducted during the war in the US Army to fight in Germany, and returned safely.

I found a main force in my life in my wife Nina (whom I in fact brought sometimes as guest to the Examiner’s evenings). She gave us two fine sons, Thomas and Stephan. And Nina and I were lucky soulmates for 75 years of happy marriage.

“Vale”