Host: Meg Bowles
[Uncanny Valley theme music by The Drift]
Meg: [00:00:12] Welcome to The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Meg Bowles.
For quite a few years now, The Moth has produced an annual science-themed Mainstage. And it's often one of my favorite shows of the season. It's an interesting thing to work with scientists, because on the whole, they're trained to keep themselves out of the equation. It's about the facts, the data. But when you start asking questions and get them talking about their experiences, you hear remarkable stories behind the science, or the personal inspiration that drove a scientist to spend, in some cases, a lifetime searching for answers.
We like to ask Ben Lillie over at The Story Collider for recommendations of storytellers we might consider. If you aren't familiar with The Story Collider, they're a podcast that features true personal stories about science. You should totally check them out.
Here's our first storyteller, Sarah Schlesinger, at one of The Story Collider's monthly live events in New York City.
[applause]
Sarah: [00:01:07] Hi. So, 37 years ago, when I was 16, I came through the gates of The Rockefeller University for the very first time. I had never heard of the place, even though it had been on 66th Street, New York Avenue, and I'd probably walked by it more times than I could have counted, but I never knew what was behind those gates.
My high school biology teacher had given me tickets to what were called at that time the Christmas lectures. They're now called the holiday lectures, which are these amazing lectures by world-class scientists, many of whom were Nobel laureates for high school students. And I had the great privilege of hearing Dr. Christian de Duve, who had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering the microanatomy of the cell. This was the hottest science going. He took a room full of high school students on what he called a tour of the inside of the cell for two days. I was completely amazed. I had thought before that I wanted to be a scientist, but this completely nailed it for me.
But I was 16 and I was expected to get a summer job, and I thought, well, this would be a really cool place to get a summer job. So, I came home, I told my parents. My parents nicely nodded at me and they said, "Fine, knock yourself out, get a summer job there." So, this would have been the day after Christmas was the lecture, and my mother went to a New Year's party. And just by a series of coincidences, she was talking to a friend of hers who said, “This friend had a friend whose husband--” He was a scientist. And just by coincidence, he worked at The Rockefeller University. So, my mother came home and told me this odd coincidence here. We'd never heard of this place. In a week's time, we'd heard of it twice.
So, I said, "Can you get me his phone number, so I can call him and see if he'll hire me for the summer?" I don't think ever again in my life would I have had the nerve to just pick up the phone and call some stranger and ask them to hire me. But I was committed to getting a summer job there, and this seemed like my best opportunity. So, I called Ralph Steinman, who I'd never met before, nor had I ever heard of, and he was extremely nice to me. He said to me, "Well, you know, we can't pay you, but we can give you meal tickets for the cafeteria, and we'll pay for your train ticket to come to work." What he didn't know was I would have paid him for the opportunity.
So, I started to work beside him at the bench. And this was 1977. He had just discovered the dendritic cell. So, this is a cell in the immune system that orchestrates all the other cells. It's called an antigen-presenting cell. Ralph liked to refer to it as the conductor of the immune orchestra. It teaches all of the other cells in the body how to respond to viruses, bacteria, pollen, or even your own cells.
So, I kept working for him in the lab every summer and every January through high school and college and then medical school. In the mid-1990s, I had the opportunity to have my own lab working on these cells with regard to HIV vaccines. And I took the opportunity, and thus began my grown-up collaboration with Ralph. I was in Washington at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. And there, even though all I did was work in the lab, because I am an MD, I was required to learn all about clinical development and how to do clinical trials and how to deal with the FDA.
Ralph's discoveries had reached the point, where it was beginning to be thought that they could be moved from the laboratory into the clinic, and they could be used for several things, including vaccines and cancer immune therapy. Because remember, these are the cells that make the immune system either get activated or get quiet down. And so, Ralph wanted to start to do this kind of work and I had learned the skills necessary to do it. So, I came back to help him do this. We got a big grant from the Gates Foundation and started working on the first vaccine to prevent HIV that directly targets dendritic cells. And so, this was my project, and it was an amazing time. Everything was going along swimmingly. We had money, things were going well in the lab.
Ralph went to a meeting in Colorado, and he came back, and he was yellow. Well, being yellow, bright yellow, is a very bad sign. It's what's called jaundice. And it's a sign that the liver is failing, and that that means that all of the bile salts are backing up into the skin and the eyes. I knew immediately when I saw him that something dreadful was going on. It turned out that I was right. And Ralph, in fact, had pancreatic cancer. He had a grapefruit-sized mass at the head of his pancreas. And as many of you know and probably most of you know, pancreatic cancer is a dismal diagnosis. 97% of people who have what he had would expect to be dead within a year.
So, all of a sudden, everything changed. And in addition to having such a grim prognosis, there's very little good standard therapy, hence the grim prognosis. So, after Ralph was diagnosed, he assembled the group of us that were closest to him in his office, and he basically explained that he understood better than probably anybody, he is also a physician, that this was a grim diagnosis. And though he was willing to engage in all of the standard therapy, it was very unlikely to really make a big difference. And so, he saw this as an opportunity to be his grand experiment. He wanted immunotherapy of his own design based on his dendritic cells.
So, we all got to work. And the way it works to do a clinical trial or clinical experiment takes a very long time. So, we had to piggyback on things that were already started by our colleagues. And because Ralph, though, I don't think I mentioned it, was a wonderful and warm and caring human being. People came forth literally from the four corners of the earth, offering whatever clinical resources they had, protocols that were open, ideas, vaccines to help him.
And so, we started to have these meetings in his office. I'm trained as a pathologist, which is a kind of doctor who deals with making diagnoses in tissue. So, my responsibility was to understand what we needed to do with the tissue when it was removed at the time of surgery, how it needed to be divided up to maximize the various opportunities that existed. And so, when it got close to the operation, everybody else had left and I assembled my pile of papers. I'm clumsy and I was nervous as it was, and I said to Ralph, I said, "I know we're going to do this, we're going to do this, and we're going to do this." I said, "Who's actually going to treat you? Who's going to administer the vaccines to you?" And he looked at me and he said, "I'd like you to do it."
I was overwhelmed, because first, I was honored that he wanted me to do it, and then I was a little sick at the thought [chuckles] of doing it. But he said to me, "Look, you don't have to do it if you don't want to. Think about it overnight." And I said, "No, no, I want to do it." At this point, I didn't really think it was going to make any difference, but I knew that he thought it was going to make a difference. And so, I wanted to give my teacher the comfort of knowing that he had done everything that he could, and I wanted to give myself that same comfort. So, I did think about it overnight, and I came back and I said, "Of course, I'll do it."
I reminded him that I wasn't an oncologist. And he said, of course, he knew that. He was always irritated at me when I pointed out the obvious. He reminded me that he trusted me. And frankly, he knew that I would do what he said, that I would follow his scientific direction and not try to substitute my own. And that, frankly, led to our first argument. [audience chuckles] Because he was the consummate scientist and an absolute purist. And he had trusted in his cells when nobody else had. He wanted to do an experiment that was going to be reportable. So, he wanted to do a treatment and then wait four weeks and do the next one.
I and my colleagues realized that if you waited four weeks and something didn't work and the tumor came back, that would be it. We were going to be lucky if we were going to be able to keep the tumor from growing back, let alone, you know, address it if it came back. So, despite all of my arguments about his health and his life, a smarter colleague said to him, "Look Ralph, you're an N-of-1. It's only a case report, no matter how good the data is, [chuckles] so it's not going to have statistical significance." So, only with that argument was he willing to concede that we could do each treatment one right after another. And we did. But before we could start, we had to have all of the appropriate regulatory permissions.
And so, I went to see Emil Gotschlich, who is the head of our IRB, our institutional review board, who was responsible for all of this. And he said to me, "Well, that's all fine, but I have to be sure that you want to be doing this and you're not being pushed into it. Do you want to be doing this?" And I said, "Well, I don't want to be doing this, but if anybody has to be doing it, I want it to be me." And then, he said to me the hardest words that I heard during this period. He said, "You know, no matter how good a job you do, no matter how hard you work, this is likely not going to end well." I assured him I understood, though at that time, I really didn't.
So, we then proceeded on our journey of eight clinical trials, three different vaccines, two that were made of Ralph's own dendritic cells that he had discovered, and one that targeted his dendritic cells. Ralph lived four and a half years. He saw a daughter married, he saw two grandchildren born, and he was awarded the Lasker Award, which is sometimes known as the American Nobel. But anybody who has a Nobel Prize will tell you there is no equivalent to the Nobel. [audience chuckles]
And so, four and a half years after his diagnosis, he started to get sicker and sicker. All of us who had thought that maybe Ralph was right and maybe this was really going to work were profoundly disappointed. And over the summer of 2011, he got weaker and weaker, and he started to make arrangements for what would happen to the lab and what would happen to the rest of us when he was no longer with us. In the end of September, it was just too much for him. He had fought valiantly, and he decided that there was no winning. And in his own inimitable way, he became impatient for the whole thing to be over.
And so, he retired with his family and was surrounded by his loving family. He passed away very peacefully at the end of September. Now, he died on a Friday night to Saturday morning. I got a call from his daughter on Saturday morning saying her father had passed away peacefully with his family and asking me not to tell anybody. They told me and one or two other people, but they wanted to be private just for that weekend. The community in which we work, because we work so hard in so many hours, where all of our colleagues, or many of our colleagues are our close friends, not all of our colleagues, [audience laughter] but they're close friends amongst our colleagues. And so, to tell one person would alert the community.
They just wanted to be by themselves. They had been through hell and not back. So, I said, "Well, can I come and see you?" And they said, "Please, just let us be." I said, "Can I send food?" And they said, "Yeah, that you can do." So, I sent food. I spent the good part of the weekend planning with my closest colleagues how we were going to tell the lab, and how we were going to break the news to the various people we had to tell, and then what we would do. And I was dreading going to work Monday and telling everybody.
So, I didn't sleep well Sunday night. And about 05:45 on that Monday morning, my cell phone rang. I had gotten in the habit of leaving it on and by my bed in case they needed me for something, I never knew what. My phone rang. It was Ralph's daughter. I picked up the phone. I was in that like half sleep, are you asleep, are you awake, are you dreaming, is this real? I still hadn't processed that he had passed away.
So, I pick up the phone, I hear her voice, and she said, "Dad won." I'm like, "Honey, didn't your dad die?" And she said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, he died, but he won. The Nobel committee is calling us and emailing us, and we don't know what to do." Now, you have to remember, in addition to being the ultimate prize, there's a strict rule that the Nobel Prize cannot be awarded posthumously. It can only be awarded to a living scientist. So, the Nobel committee, like everybody else in the world except the three of us, assumed he was still alive. So, I said, "Alexis, I don't know what to do. I'll call the university and we'll find out."
So, I called the people at the university. They got in touch with the president, and then it got taken out of my hands blessedly. There was a bit of a controversy for that morning as to whether he would be able to keep the prize. And the Nobel committee convened, and I've subsequently learned from the people on the committee, they consulted with their lawyers and they decided that it had been given in good faith, assuming he was alive. The rules allow it to be awarded to a live person, even if they don't live to see the ceremonies, which are in December. So, they used that construct to allow him to keep the prize.
So, we'll never know the dendritic cells that Ralph received prolonged his life. Clearly, he lived way beyond what one would have expected, even under the best of circumstances. He believed fervently that they did. I'm not sure whether they did or not, and I'll probably never be sure. But his technology, dendritic cells have been approved for treatment for prostate cancer, which you can see advertised on television if you watch golf or the 6 o' clock news. [audience laughter] Really you can. And I sometimes see it and I get so excited.
So, they have moved forward from the lab to a clinical treatment for prostate cancer. Our vaccine trial that we started back thinking of in 2001 is now fully enrolled, and we have the results. 45 people received the vaccine. That was an idea in Ralph's head. They've made good responses to HIV. Good, strong protective responses. It's just the first phase of a trial, so we won't know if they're protected, but that would have been what he would have wanted more than anything. So, though Ralph never saw that and he didn't even ever know he won the Nobel Prize, I had the great pleasure of watching his beautiful wife, Claudia, accept the prize on his behalf in Stockholm in December of 2011. And more than anything, Ralph was right. Thank you.
[applause]
Meg: [00:17:04] Sarah Schlesinger currently leads the Zanvil Cohn Clinical Vaccine Center at Rockefeller University to develop vaccines for the prevention and treatment of HIV. They conduct the studies in a tiny 20-bed research hospital, which has been doing these kinds of clinical investigations since 1910.
Sarah and I exchanged a few emails and I asked her if she had any thoughts after listening to the audio of her story, and this is what she wrote. "I fear I did not fully convey what a wonderful human being Ralph was. He was warm and kind and charismatic. He was, from our first meeting, the finest teacher I have been privileged to encounter. Though nobody was more rigorous than Ralph, he took a pleasure in science in a way that few others do. He was extremely generous with his ideas, time, and authorship. I wish I could have better conveyed his wonderful nature. I miss him. And the joy he brought to our work very much."
[Jazz på svenska by Jan Johansson]
Meg: [00:18:06] People say the Nobel festivities are truly the most amazing celebration of science discovery and intellect. We'll hear a firsthand account of that coveted trip to Stockholm, when The Moth Radio Hour continues.
[Jazz på svenska by Jan Johansson]
Jay: [00:18:35] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by PRX.
Meg: [00:19:34] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Meg Bowles.
A few years ago, my family and I relocated from New York City to a small town in southern Sweden. The cultural differences are definitely there. But the one I remember being really struck by was when it came time for the King of Sweden to present the Nobel Prizes.
The Nobel Prize ceremonies are as much a part of the popular culture in Sweden as the Academy Awards are in the US. I kid you not, it's equally glamorous and glitzy, if not more so. There are paparazzi autographs and after the ceremony, there's an elaborate banquet that is televised live across Sweden, complete with presenters commenting on fashion, behind the scenes features on dishes served and the chefs who prepared them. It's basically your smart Oscars.
Our next storyteller, Robin Frankel, got to experience the Nobel festivities firsthand when her husband's stepfather-- Let me say that again, so you don't trip over it when you hear her say it in the story. Robin's husband's stepfather won the Nobel Prize in the category of physiology or medicine.
[cheers and applause]
She told the story of her Scandinavian adventures at a StorySLAM we produced at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. The theme of the evening was Glory.
Robin: [00:20:48] It was 1998, Columbus Day. I was sleeping late. It was a holiday. And my mother-in-law's husband called the house phone. For those of you who don't know what that is, that's a phone [audience chuckles] that rings in the house but you can't take it outside. [audience laughter] And my stepfather basically said, he said, his name is Bob, "Robin, I'm so sorry I woke you up, but they seem to tell me that I just won the Nobel Prize in Medicine." Bob was a pharmacologist at Downstate, and he had been given a lot of awards. So, this was not a tremendous surprise. Although, okay, come on, it's a huge surprise when somebody, you know, wins the Nobel Prize. So, I was like, "What? Oh my God."
Okay. So, fast forward to, “Can I go to Sweden to meet the King and the Queen? I'm Princess of Westchester. [audience laughter] Can I go?” So, in the end, each Nobel laureate is allowed to bring 40 people, [audience reaction] believe it or not. Fast forward to the plane, where I'm on the plane with my husband, his mother and Bob. We're on the Scandinavian Airlines, and the pilot makes this incredible announcement that is like unbelievable. Everybody on the airplane knows that we have a Nobel laureate. And the plane lands in Stockholm, where Bob will get the Nobel Prize and the million dollars that he had to share with two other laureates, because they were all three named.
But nevertheless, we're heading to our destination. We get out of the airplane. And because I'm with Bob and my mother-in-law, all of a sudden, we're escorted into this area. It's like an unmarked door. Have you ever been in another country where you get out of the plane and you go through customs and you go through mayhem? I've never felt this. We walk in this unmarked door, and it opens up into the most beautiful receiving room. It's the Queen's receiving room with couches and tea and chocolate. And we meet, what is called, our attaché. Does everybody know what that is? I thought it was a briefcase, [audience chuckles] but it's actually a person who is assigned to every Nobel laureate. And our attaché is assigned to us so we can ask every stupid question, because we're going to be there for seven nights until the big night, which is the Nobel.
So, during that time, I'm wondering, where is my suitcase? Because I have my ball gown that I had to buy with a train. You know what a train is? It's not what runs at 161st. It's a thing that you schlep behind you [audience laughter] when you walk in a beautiful gown and it's this material. I had to buy a gown with a train. My husband and all of the other men who were going to the big night of the Nobel were not allowed to bring any clothes, because the rule is you have to go to the King's tailor to get white tails for the big night. And then, door is opened and it's a glass door, and there is our Volvo Limo. We each get a Volvo limo with my suitcases are right in the back, and somebody hands us our passports. And we go. And the week continues. Then, it is the Nobel night. The streets in Stockholm are closed.
By the way, the hotel we were in was called the Grand Hotel. We were not allowed on the first floor. Arafat-- Some of you are younger. Do you know Yasser Arafat? [audience chuckles] First floor. And the third floor was Bruce Springsteen. We were only allowed on the second floor. But it was a beautiful hotel and I couldn't give a shit what floor they wouldn't let me on. [audience laughter] So, we get into our buses. We have beautiful coach buses. Each laureate has 40 people, an entourage. And the buses go through the street of Stockholm. No one is allowed to drive that night. So, everyone's waving at you. I am a princess, and I wave back to everybody [audience chuckles] as I ride in the bus to the Nobel.
We get there. And as you can imagine, the plates are gold, a real gold or gold plated or something fancy where they counted them, and the utensils and it is absolutely magnificent. The tables are rectangular shaped, and it must have been about a thousand people. But each table was identical. So, it's rows and rows of identical tables. There is an orchestra in the middle, and the orchestra is playing along with the wait service. It's unbelievable. So, you have the guy who's standing there with the-- What's that called? Yeah, the baton. And the waiters come in.
I have to go to the bathroom really quickly, so I run out and I come back in, and I am the only one left who's coming to my table. I realize the orchestra has started. That means the waitstaff has started. That means my waiter is coming and all the waiters. I look to my left and my right, there's 30 waiters waiting for me to sit down. So, I sit down and they serve that dish. It is time to meet the Queen.
The whole week everybody has said, "Don't touch the Queen. You don't touch the Queen. The Queen is on a red carpet with red velvet ropes. You don't touch the Queen.” That's a rule that everybody knows. But we get to meet the Queen, because my husband and my mother-in-law and my stepfather win the Nobel Prize. So, I get to meet the Queen. There's two guards on each side of her. You're supposed to go up there and you're supposed to curtsy or bow or what have you.
I just look at her, and she's magnificent. She's beautiful, but she's warm. She's just emoting this unbelievable feeling. I just do what comes natural to me. I go, "Come here." [audience laughter] I grab her and I see her hand go up, because the guards-- She says, "This is okay. This is okay." And I recognize finally she knows that maybe it's her way of saying, "I know you're a princess in your own way."
[cheers and applause]
Meg: [00:27:52] That was Robin Frankel. When I asked Robin what her father-in-law, Dr. Robert Furchgott, won the Nobel for, she said, he won for Viagra. She was joking, but not completely, because he did win for his work with nitric oxide, which helped lead to the development of Viagra, the anti-impotency drug.
For some scientists, the road to the Nobel starts with that all-important and sometimes brutally competitive middle school science fair. Deirdre Bowen told this next story about her fond science fair memories at a StorySLAM evening we produced in Seattle, Washington, where we partner with public radio station KUOW. The theme of the night was Rewards.
[cheers and applause]
Deirdre: [00:28:34] My K-8 Catholic school science fair was the most vicious competition you could ever imagine. Everybody loved to participate in it. And the reason it was probably super competitive was because the school was located just down the street from the National Institute of Health. And employees from NIH came to judge the competition. [audience laughter] As it happened, my dad worked at NIH. Yeah, I know. He's a, to put it mildly, an incredibly competitive overachiever, internationally famous scientist. [audience chuckles] and he was deeply invested in my science fair projects. [audience laughter]
Fifth grade was the first year that I was eligible to participate in this project. And he decided what my project fair would be. It involved a monkey skull. [audience chuckles] That's all I remember, because I was the pariah for the rest of the year. My fifth-grade class thought I had killed a monkey. [audience chuckles] I didn't, but maybe my dad did, I'm not sure.
So, skip to seventh grade where I've entered my teen years, and felt like I could be myself a little bit more, and I put my foot down and I said, "Dad, I'm going to choose my own science fair project. I'm doing something on dreams." And my dad said, "No, that is soft science. You have to do-- [audience laughter] You have to do a hard science." And I said, "No, I'm doing soft science." [audience chuckles]
So, I did my project on dreams and I didn't do well. Meaning, I got an honorable mention and I didn't win. So, my dad was okay with that, because he was going to use that for leverage in eighth grade when it really mattered. [audience laughter] Eighth grade mattered, because that's when the judges didn't just come by and observe your project, they interviewed you. They grilled you about your methods, your analysis, your results, and conclusion. Yeah, welcome to suburban D.C. [audience chuckles]
So, my dad waited for eighth grade and said, "Okay, what project are you going to do?" And in a political statement, I said, "I'm doing a project on the effects of television on test taking." He said, "Again, that's soft science. You can't do that." And the reason why I chose the television is because he wouldn't let us watch television [audience laughter] ever.
So, I went ahead with my project, because it turned out that there were about five or six second graders that lived on my street, and so I drafted these various quizzes and I had them watch a different TV show each day. I got my data, and then I proceeded to do my analysis. But unfortunately, there was a huge outlier. Some of you might be familiar with Jordan Ellenberg, the Wisconsin professor who just wrote New York Times best seller called How to be right about Everything, he was one of my subjects. [audience laughter]
So, the study didn't go quite as planned. But nonetheless, I was still going to present my data in the science fair. So, my dad really, really wanted to be involved and make this connection with me. And the reason was, is that everything my dad touched became a championship affair. I have three brothers. They all played soccer. My dad coached them. They had championship seasons. My sister loves horses. She did competitive horseback riding. He was her coach. She was the champion.
I am neither athletic nor a horse lover, [audience chuckles] so my dad didn't know how to make me a champion. But he did sit me down and attempt to practice with me for this judging interview process. So, Saturday of the science fair came, and the first judge came up to do the interview. I was a nervous wreck. All I wanted to do was get through it. And I did. I breathed a sigh of relief like this. [sighs] At that moment, my dad jumped out from around the corner and said, "Here's everything you did wrong." [audience reaction]
So, I listened. I tried really hard to remember everything he said, so that when Judge 2 and Judge 3 came along, I would do better. I did get through Judge 2 and I did get through Judge 3, and I was just so happy to be done. And as the science fair ended, we got in the car and I was just relieved, because my dad wasn't telling me that I did anything wrong anymore. He was just sitting there silently. [audience chuckles] So, I was happy. I was very, very happy.
So, you can imagine my surprise on Monday morning, they made the announcement about the saint of the day and her biography. [audience chuckles] They also then announced who had died from the parish over the weekend. [audience chuckles] And then, they announced the science fair winner. It was me. [audience cheers and applause]
And that made me eligible for the county science fair. [audience laughter] I only have five minutes, so I won that one, too. [audience laughter] I also got an award from the National Science Fair Foundation. That was actually a punishment, because I had to go and observe for a full Saturday what they do at the National Science Foundation. [audience chuckles] They only do hard science. [audience laughter] But the best reward was what my father said to me. He said to me, "Out of my five children, you were the only one to defy me, and it was the correct thing to do." [audience laughter]
[cheers and applause]
Thank you.
Meg: [00:34:18] Deirdre Bowen said the science fair actually had a significant impact on her. She went on to pursue a law degree, but said her love of research never faded. In fact, all through law school, when reading judicial opinions where judges proclaim how the world works and how the law should be applied, she always left thinking, how do they know that? Shouldn't they rely on empirical data? So, after law school and practicing law for four years, she went back to graduate school and earned her PhD in Sociology, a soft science. These days, she's a law professor, and all of her publications involve sociological studies of legal issues.
Coming up, we'll hear a story from Nobel laureate Roald Hoffman, when The Moth Radio Hour continues.
Jay: [00:35:02] The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And presented by the Public Radio Exchange, prx.org.
Meg: [00:35:52] This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Meg Bowles.
In 1981, Roald Hoffman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. I had the honor of meeting and working with Roald, when he agreed to share a story at an evening we're producing in partnership with the World Science Festival in New York City. A word of caution, this story deals with the inhumanity of war, and may not be appropriate for some listeners. Here's Roald Hoffman, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Roald: [00:36:27] When the war began, I was four years old. What war? We all have our wars. Mine was World War II. You can tell from my age. I was born to a happy Jewish family in a very bad place to be born at that time and at the wrong time. And that was southeast Poland. And in July 1941, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, ran over the town where we were. In that first week, there were many losses. My grandfather was killed. The Ukrainians in town rounded up the people, drove them up to the castle, where SS Einsatzgruppen killed 2,000 people.
Things did not get better. We stayed in that town a little while, and then later went to a labor camp called [unintelligible 00:37:38]. This was essentially slave labor to fix blown up bridges and roads. My father was a civil engineer, was valuable to the Germans, because he had built those roads. And so, he had some privileges in the labor camp, where we all were. He could pass in and out. And the only documents we have from the war, in fact, are some passes which say the Jew Hillel Safran can pass out of this camp.
One day, two German officers came into the camp. And perhaps looking for some to scare us, and they said to my mother, "Tell the boy to sit on a doghouse." There was a dog house. And one of them said, "I'm going to shoot the dog." And the other one said, "What if Klaus' misses?" And they all laughed. I went and sat on the doghouse. One of them pulls out his gun, takes one shot in the air. The dog runs out, shoots the dog with a second shot just centimeters away from where I was.
The situation got very bad in time. There were people who were being sent to the extermination camps. No one wanted to believe it, but my father and mother believed it. They found a friendly Ukrainian schoolteacher in a nearby village who offered to hide us. And one dark night, we walked out of the camp. You could bribe the guards. This was not an extermination camp. We walked to that schoolhouse and went into the attic. We did not leave that schoolhouse for 15 months. That was January 1943. This was a one-room schoolhouse. The village had maybe 200 souls. Maybe 30 kids were there. The front room was a one-room schoolhouse. In the back, the teacher lived. Above was the attic. That’s where we were.
Food was brought up once a day in a pail. Slops were taken away. There was one window. There were slats in the window, and we put a cloth over it at night. We rarely lit a light. I sat by that window. In the attic, I slept in on a straw mattress. There was a bag of peas as a pillow. I looked out that window, and I could see children playing outside. It was a schoolhouse, after all. I could hear them during recess, running. But I knew I couldn't be with them.
Among those children were actually a few Jewish boys who were kept at the orphanage at the monastery at the end of the road in this little village of Univ. They were kept there under false identities. The monks saved them, the Ukrainian-Greek Catholic monks. I played games. My mother taught me how to read. She invented all these games. There were geography books there. This was a schoolhouse. They were stored up there. She taught me latitude and longitude. We played these games where she would give me a latitude and longitude and I would have to say whether it was wet or dry. The skill thing was she would try to find a lake in the middle, like the great lakes of the Aral Sea. So, I would fall down.
She asked me, "How do you go from here to there? Like, how do you go from Univ, the village where we were, to Montevideo or to California?" I would have to name every sea along the way. Some of those passes around Denmark have pretty hairy names for a little boy. [audience laughter] And in there were actually four people initially, an uncle and aunt, my mother and I. My father would join us later. Uncle and aunt had a two-year-old. I was five years old, almost five years, four and a half, when went into the attic. The uncle and the aunt had a two-year-old at that time. It was judged that I would keep quiet. But the two-year-old would not be able to keep quiet in the attic. She was given to a Polish family to keep. And neither the Polish family nor the little girl survived the war.
Once in a while, in the beginning of our stay, my father would come to visit. One time he brought some candy. I can't imagine now what it must have cost to find some candy in that time of war, but he found it. One day, he did not come. And the letter was slipped under our door saying that his attempt to break out of the camp-- We had another uncle in a partisan group in the forest. They were smuggling weapons into the camp. My father remained in the camp as the head of an attempt to break out, and his attempt was betrayed. And the letter said that he was tortured and then shot in town. My mother cried. She tried not to cry when I was there, of course, and to hold some of her feelings in.
Eventually, it got too cold up in the attic. The attic was open to the outside. There were holes in it, and we couldn't survive another Ukrainian winter. We moved down to a storeroom on the first floor, a room about maybe 8 x 10ft. By now, we were five. My uncle had come in from the forest. And in that room, we lifted up some of the floorboards. We dug out some of the earth to build a bunker, a hiding place, because occasionally police came to the schoolhouse. We dug out this place, so we could go in there and hide in the worst times. And then, the floorboards would be moved over and a cupboard moved over that I still remember the smell of the wet earth, it's something you don't forget.
We stayed in there. And all this time, I felt enveloped by a, what I would call, a cocoon of love. There was this tremendous love around me, even as there was this terrible danger out there. Eventually, the Russians came back driving Studebaker trucks. We could hear the artillery in the distance. The offensive had stalled not too far from the town and from where we were. And one day, it was also a night in June 1944. This is a long time before the war ended in Europe, but this is when were freed by the Red Army. We walked out from that schoolhouse and walked across muddy clay fields after rain. My mother carried me.
I was seven at this point. The two women supported the men. The men's legs were swollen from lack of motion. We walked across to the German lines, where a soldier gave us a ride on his truck into town. I could see some of the German bodies lying in the road. We were refugees in Europe then for a while. We left Poland. My mother remarried after the war, and I then had a sister born already in this country. We came to this country. We lived happily ever after.
In 2006, five years ago, my sister and I and my son Hillel, who is named as my father was Hillel, went back to that village and to the town. The schoolhouse was still there, and the attic was still there. The schoolhouse was expanded and rebuilt, but the attic was still there. We climbed into the attic. It was very important that my son be there, because at the point that we climbed into that attic, he had a five-year-old, my grandson Sam. And so, as I watched my son, as we touched hands, I could feel that he knew what it meant to be a five-year-old shut in that attic.
We climbed down and wanted to see the place where the storeroom was. But the school had been rebuilt. The storeroom had been rebuilt into a classroom. Then, I look at this classroom, and on the wall is Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements. Now, I'm a chemist. I became a chemist almost by accident. I'm a good chemist. [audience laughter] It took my mother 25 years old to get over the fact that I didn't become a real doctor. [audience laughter] I look around this room, and there's some chemical equipment, and there is some more stuff on the walls about acids and bases. And this same room in which we had been hidden 62 years before that was now a chemistry classroom.
Now, there were in this town altogether 4,000 Jews, 4,000 Poles, 4,000 Ukrainians. Of the 4,000 Jews, maybe 200 survived the war, four children among them. Those children are all in the United States. We had done well. But what about those hundreds and hundreds of children who had not survived, who did not or even have that cocoon of love to hold them together, whose deaths were solitary? Who will tell their stories? Who will speak for the dead?
[applause]
Meg: [00:49:58] That was Nobel laureate Roald Hoffman. Roald is the Frank H. T. Rhodes professor of Humane Letters Emeritus at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He continues to be active in research, and says the most recent years have been some of his most productive. He has ventured into several new fields in theoretical chemistry.
Roald and his wife, Eva, traveled to Stockholm along with Roald's mother, an aunt and two uncles to accept the Nobel Prize. Roald says, “The Nobel foundation is like a dream machine, an inspiration for young people, especially in a world that values pop stars and athletes.” I asked Roald if he had any other achievements I might mention, and he told me one of his highest was having his name appear not once, but twice as a clue in the New York Times crossword puzzle.
You can find all the stories you heard in this hour at the iTunes store or on our website, themoth.org, where you can see pictures and find out more about our storytellers.
That's it for this episode. We hope you'll join us again next time for The Moth Radio Hour.
[Uncanny Valley theme music by The Drift]
Jay: [00:51:15] Your host this hour was Meg Bowles. The rest of The Moth's directorial staff includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin Jenness, and Jenifer Hixson. Production support from Mooj Zadie. Special thanks to Tracy Day and Brian Greene from the World Science Festival, and Ben Lillie and Erin Barker from Story Collider.
Moth stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Most Moth events are recorded by Argot Studios, supervised by Paul Ruest. Our theme music is by the Drift. Other music in this hour from the album Jazz på svenska by Jan Johansson. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by me, Jay Allison, with Viki Merrick, at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
This hour was produced with funds from the Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by PRX. For more information about our podcast or for pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.