The small boy peered through the slats of the only window in the attic roof. It was a cold and dark evening – the moon had not risen yet. He was looking for any signs of movement, any shadow at the edge of the woods that would indicate that his father was close by. He was waiting for his father, Hillel Safran, to appear on this night in early April 1943. That night, Roald and his mother, Clara, were to wait in vain, for his father would never again return to their hiding place in the attic of Mykola Dyuk’s schoolhouse.
That boy was Roald Hoffmann (born Roald Safran on July 18, 1937, in Zolochiv, Ukraine), an American theoretical chemist who won the 1981 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Over the course of a highly productive scientific career, Dr. Hoffmann has attained over 20 major scientific awards. In 2017, Ukraine issued a postage stamp in honor of Dr. Hoffmann’s 80th birthday and his Nobel Prize.
Dr. Hoffmann is also a prominent figure in the philosophy of chemistry and scientific ethics, a poet, essayist and playwright. He is also a Holocaust survivor. He is now the Frank Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, emeritus, at Cornell University.
Roald Safran and his family of five were sheltered in Mykola and Maria Dyuk’s one-room schoolhouse that was also the residence of the Dyuk family. Mykola Dyuk was a schoolteacher in Univ, a small farming village of about 200 people located 20 miles southwest of Zolochiv [Złoczów during the Polish occupation of western Ukraine]. Univ is also the site of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic monastery [lavra] where Klymentiy Sheptytsky was the prior from 1926 and set up an orphanage for boys.
Cornell University
The Ukrainian postage stamp honoring Roald Hoffman.
Roald is a strange name for a boy born in the western Ukrainian part of Poland that we know as Halychyna [Galicia]. As Dr. Hoffmann tells it, he was named after the famous Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen, who was the first to reach the South Pole in 1911.
Perhaps his father, Hillel, had remembered as a boy himself that Amundsen was in the news as the first to fly over the North Pole in 1926 and hoped that, one day, his son would become an explorer. Alas, he was never to know that his son, Roald, did eventually become a world-famous explorer – of the microscopic inner world of molecules, atoms and electrons.
The history of Zolochiv is a familiar one to any western Ukrainian, and is representative of hundreds of small towns across western Ukraine. Its population of 12,000 in 1939 was roughly divided into three equal groups of Poles, Jews and Ukrainians. The Poles ran the municipal administration and treated the Ukrainian populace harshly.
Since its settlement in 1180, Zolochiv had withstood intensive periods of war, savagery and barbarism in each century of its existence. The period between 1939 and 1948 concentrated 500 years of barbarism, as invading hordes of Bolshevik and Nazi savages fought for control of Ukraine.
What is often left out in that terrible World War II history of western Ukraine are the precedents – that in 1930 the Poles cracked down hard on the Ukrainian nationalist dissident movement, causing even more resentment against the Poles, and those who served them.
What is often ignored is that the Poles abrogated the terms of the Versailles Treaty of 1919, which gave western Ukraine autonomous status, the right of self-governance, and the ability to teach and conduct affairs in their own language. For 15 years before World War II, Ukrainians rightfully resisted what they viewed as unlawful Polish oppression.
Soon after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, the Soviets swept through western Ukraine and took control, arresting and imprisoning all the known Ukrainian nationalists who had resisted Polish occupation, their sympathizers and the town intelligentsia.
Ukrainians knew who they were dealing with, for just seven years earlier the Bolsheviks had launched their barbaric Holodomor [Great Famine] campaign in eastern Ukraine, imposing their collectivization policy. The result was the mass starvation of over 5 million people during the period 1932-1934.
Two years later, the Germans marched into Zolochiv in June 1941. As the Russians retreated, they gratuitously murdered 650 nationalists, sympathizers and intelligentsia in the Zolochiv palace. Soon after, it was the Nazi’s turn for slaughter. Dr. Hoffmann noted that “in the first week of the war, the SS Einsatzgruppe C shot 2,000 Jews at the same castle where the Soviets had killed hundreds of Ukrainians days before. By the end of the war, there were no more than 200 Jews left. I was one of perhaps five children from Zolochiv who survived.”
Hillel Safran was interned in a German labor camp that was set up nearby, mostly for Jews and other townspeople with useful skills. The camp was in a town the Poles called Lackie Welkie – today Chervone – about five miles west of Zolochiv. The entire Safran family, including young Roald, spent most of 1942 in that labor camp.
Hillel was useful to the Germans for he was a civil engineer, with a degree from the Lviv Polytechnic University, and had worked for the municipal public works department since graduating in 1935. The camp laborers repaired roads, bridges and infrastructure that was destroyed by the Russians as they retreated in June 1941.
A year later, between August and December 1942, the Germans began deporting over 5,000 Jews from the surrounding region to the Belzec extermination camp and began rounding up the remaining Jews into the Zolochiv ghetto. Hillel understood what was happening, and in December1942 bribed the guards to allow his family to leave the labor camp.
He enlisted Mykola Dyuk to shelter his family, along with three other family members. At first, Hillel Safran, who worked on many projects in the area, was able to visit his family several times during the period of January-March 1943.
At the same time, he and another worker were planning an escape from the labor camp. In late March 1943, news got out that the Zolochiv ghetto was to be liquidated, and the remaining 6,000 or so Jews were to be sent off to extermination camps.
Courtesy of Roald Hoffman
Roald Hoffman and his mother, Clara, in Warsaw in 1945.
Roald’s father could not visit that fateful night on April 2, 1943, for Hillel Safran was one of the leaders of two resistance groups in the labor camp that were planning their escape. One group made its breakout, but was betrayed. All were caught and shot. Hillel’s group stayed behind, having planned a different escape route and a time when circumstances were deemed to be more favorable. Unfortunately, their plot was quickly uncovered and Hillel and all of his followers were executed in April 1943.
One can barely imagine how extraordinarily difficult the first winter months in the attic were for Roald and his mother, two uncles and an aunt. It was a hard winter and freezing in the attic. Later, the summer was to become insufferably stifling in the attic, with no ventilation – the single small window in the attic had to be covered at all times. There could be no heat, nor lights, little food and limited movement, lest the floor boards creak, and no voices or noises. Below them was the schoolhouse, and every day school was in session just below their hiding place.
This cloistered, claustrophobic life was unimaginably difficult for an active boy of 6. Decades later, in an interview for Scientific American, Dr. Hoffmann noted: “I’m a watcher – I look at how things interact. It interests me.” He spent the long lonely and quiet days of his early childhood in the attic, watching the world outside and wondering what lay beyond his limited line of sight. Since the slats in that window were slanted down – he could not see the sky nor the sunsets – only the grass, rain, mud, falling leaves, snow and the outhouse at the edge of the woods. Roald explored the world through his imagination and the images in the geography book that his mother, Clara, read to him.
Through that small portal to the outside world he noted the changing light, as clouds darkened the sky, the changing seasons, the schoolchildren below running freely and playing in the schoolyard, and the occasional farm and forest creatures scurrying about. Dr. Hoffmann once remarked that “knowing without seeing is at the heart of chemistry.” In his hiding place, Roald and his family spent 15 months “seeing without knowing” what was happening to the rest of his family, his friends and the world outside Univ.
For months, Roald’s family lived in fear and danger that they would be discovered or betrayed. “Every day we looked death in the eye.” And every day, for 15 months, the Dyuk family risked their lives to shelter the Safran clan until the Red Army showed up in July 1944. Maria Dyuk tended to the daily needs of the Safran family – cooking, washing and caring. For their sacrifices and heroism, Mykola and Maria Dyuk are among the 2,400 Ukrainians honored by Israel as “Righteous Among Nations.”
Not far from the schoolhouse where the Safran family was hiding, the prior of the Univ Lavra [monastery], Klymentiy Sheptytsky, brother of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, was secretly hiding Jewish boys among those in his care at the small orphanage that he founded in 1926.
Kurt I. Lewin, whose father was Lviv’s last rabbi and who would later become a renowned businessman, and David Kahane, later chief rabbi in the Israeli Air Force, were both harbored by Metropolitan Andrey in Lviv. Later in their lives, both men would write about their experiences, Lewin in “A Journey Through Illusions” and Kahane in the “Lvov Ghetto Diary.”
Klymentiy was arrested by the Bolsheviks in 1947. Though he was already 77 years old, he was sentenced to 25 years of hard labor, and died on May 1, 1951, in Vladimir Central prison, 160 miles northeast of Moscow. This is the prison where Jewish refuseniks and dissidents such as Natan (Anatoly) Sharansky and Yosef Mendelevitch were also held 25 years later.
The Soviets closed the monastery and turned it into a shelter for the elderly, and later into a psychiatric hospital. In order to completely erase the memory of this sacred place, they renamed it ‘Mizhhirya’. For his sacrifices, Klementiy was beatified by the Catholic Church, and was awarded the title of Righteous Among Nations by Israel in 1995 for saving Jews.
In August 1944, the Safran family followed the advancing Red Army to Krakow, where Clara met Paul Hoffman and married him in 1945. The new Hoffmann family ended up in a displaced persons camp in Germany and arrived in New York City on Washington’s birthday in February 1949. Roald attended Stuyvesant High School, where he won a prestigious Westinghouse Science Scholarship, and then went on to study at Columbia University.
At Columbia, Roald Hoffman wasn’t sure that he wanted to be a chemist, and he seriously considered switching his major to art history. Nevertheless, he was persuaded to continue in physics and chemistry, and obtained his doctorate in chemistry at Harvard University in 1962, working under Prof. William Lipscomb, who subsequently won his own Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1976.
Dr. Hoffmann’s Nobel Prize lecture, delivered in Stockholm on December 8, 1981, was titled “Building Bridges between Inorganic and Organic Chemistry.” It was an explanation of the unique bonding properties of organic and metallic compounds. What made his discovery so unique as to merit a Nobel Prize? A Japanese scientist, Kenichi Fukui, was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize that year for discovering, quite independently, the same phenomenon.
Basically, using quantum physics and knowing the structure of atoms and electrons in molecules, Prof. Hoffmann found a way to make what he calls “very poor quality but very useful” quantum calculations, which yielded approximate predictions of how chemical interactions would proceed between unrelated molecules and compounds. As, for example, between organic and inorganic [metallic] molecules and atoms. This has led to major breakthroughs in a variety of new compounds – from lightweight materials for automobiles, aircraft and stealth bombers, to solar panels and new classes of polymers.
It is these kinds of calculations that most other experimental chemists use today for exploring new reactions and synthesis problems. Some of Prof. Hoffmann’s students provide theoretical blueprints for creating very interesting but inherently useless molecules. At other times, the blueprints solve such highly practical puzzles as how the various components of electronic chips form chemical bonds with each other.
Dr. Hoffmann wrote a commentary that appeared in the August 24, 2006, edition of the International Herald Tribune. He described his experiences during the war, along with his thoughts on revisiting Zolochiv years later:
“I traveled to Zolochiv in Ukraine, the town I left as a small boy. I was returning for the first time in 62 years, to remember. Remember whom? The people who lived there and are forever gone from us – the Jews of Zolochiv. They were there for centuries, as their gravestones once testified. There are no gravestones left. …
“We survived. How? By chance. Through the unimaginably courageous acts of good people. Millions around us were passive; hundreds of thousands collaborated, participating actively in atrocities. But thousands of Ukrainians helped Jews survive.”
Among those whose actions redeem one’s faith in humanity were Metropolitan Andrei Sheptyts’kyi, of the Greek [-Catholic] church in the region, and his brother Klement. And the good teacher who hid us in the unlit attic and then a storeroom of his village schoolhouse for 15 months, Mikola Dyuk.”
After that memorable trip to Zolochiv in 2006, Prof. Hoffmann’s mission became the restoration of the Jewish cemetery and those gravestones in honor of his father and all the Jews of Zolochiv who perished in the Holocaust. He enlisted the help of Bishop Borys Gudziak and the late Cardinal Husar. They turned to Myroslav Marynovych, who is the vice-rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. Today, an imposing memorial to the Jews of Zolochiv stands in an empty fenced-in field that was once the Jewish cemetery.
In 2015, Prof. Hoffmann wrote an autobiographical play, “Something That Belongs to You,” about his time in the attic and the events that surrounded that moment in history. It is a story of survival and memory, of complex Ukrainian-Jewish relations, of struggles to remember and forgive.
The underlying themes are of coming to terms with great loss; of the importance of both remembering and forgetting on the way to forgiving; and of the choices, always there, that human beings must make between good and evil in terrible times.
Though the Nobelist is a world-renowned chemist and philosopher, Prof. Hoffmann considers himself, above all, a teacher. He prides himself in the fact that he always taught introductory chemistry for freshmen, and classes for non-chemists. He has written many essays on the ethics of science and chemistry, believing that scientists must understand and be responsible for the consequences of their inventions – for good and bad.
Most importantly, he believes that scientific discoveries, especially those funded through government grants, should be available free to the scientific community and the citizenry. That is why he owns no patents. His research results are available to all.
“It was an accident that I became a Nobel Laureate,” said Prof Hoffmann when I met him a week ago in Washington. He was attending the annual American Chemical Society Conference, and more than 100 of his former graduate students had organized a symposium honoring Prof. Hoffmann and his path-breaking research.
“There are many scientists, in any given year who deserve the award. But it is not an accident that I became a good scientist, simply because I was able to pursue my interests in America. Otherwise, if my family had been able to remain in Ukraine, most likely, I would have followed in my father’s footsteps to become an engineer – that’s the way it was in those times.”
“I don’t own a single patent, not that I’m especially proud of that. But that work that we did on ‘orbital symmetry control’, in the hands of others, led to many useful and lucrative patents,” he said.
Like his work in theoretical chemistry, which joins organic and inorganic atoms and molecules into new combinations, Prof. Hoffmann has created unique bonds between chemistry, poetry and philosophy. He is more proud of his title, “Professor of Humane Letters,” than perhaps of his Nobel Prize. Prof. Hoffman is an extraordinary Renaissance man in an age of specialization.
At a recent lecture at Penn University in March 2017, Prof. Hoffmann noted that “almost everyone who survived [the Holocaust] has a good story to tell, and in it feature good human beings… Saviors,” and “because it is impossible to survive without help from somebody, and there are good people in any times, it is those good people who save the world.”
Through these words and his many actions, Prof. Hoffmann has displayed a humanity and nobility that is rare in our times. Not only has he foregone the monetary rewards that were potentially due him on account of his discoveries in the form of patents, but he considers his lasting achievements – his true legacy – the many students whom he mentored over the decades of teaching.
The Ukrainian embassy in Washington is preparing a special ceremony in October to honor Prof. Hoffmann.