“Even in horrendous conditions, there were positive forces,” professor Nechama Tec said of the Holocaust in a public lecture this past Sunday.

“And without these positive forces, I do not think I would be here today.”

Tec, a Holocaust survivor, visited Oberlin this past week to teach the first mini-course of her long career. The course was called “Resilience and Courage: Women, Men and the Holocaust,” after her latest book, which received the National Jewish Book Award and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

The course, which met over a period of five days, followed the format of Resilience and Courage, which explores the experiences and coping strategies of Jewish men and women throughout the Holocaust. It examined archival testimonies, wartime documents and in-depth interviews with Jewish Holocaust survivors and rescuers.

Tec opened her mini-course with a public lecture titled “Parallel Lives: A Sociologist’s Turn to Holocaust Scholarship,” in which she discussed how her personal and professional experiences led her to study this period in history, particularly the significance of the relationships among compassion, resilience, mutual care and help.

“The more oppressive the political system is, the more need there is for compassion and cooperation,” said Tec.

These relationships are so important to Tec in part because of her own experiences as a young Jewish girl in Poland at the time of the German occupation. While her mother and father went into hiding for two and a half years, Tec and her older sister passed as Catholic with the help of a Polish family of laborers in exchange for money for food.

Tec was born in Poland to a well-off family. Her father was the owner of a factory and, Tec said, was “the most tolerant man I’ve ever come across. He would say, ‘Whatever you are, it is a historical accident of no importance. Don’t be ashamed or proud. Everyone is a human.’”

These words resonated with Tec at the time the Nazis marched into Poland and she was suddenly confronted with fear and confusion. She recalled, “I remember [the Nazis] looked through [the Jews], not at [them].”

Here she turned briefly from her personal account to explain the stages of the Holocaust. First was the identification of the Jews, second was the expropriation of the Jews, third was the removal of Jews from gainful employment, fourth was the isolation of Jews from the general public ultimately leading to the creation of the ghettoes and the fifth stage was distraction of Jews, namely the mass killings and executions and the deportations to concentration camps.

“Different ways of humiliating and degrading Jews accompanied each of these stages,” said Tec. “It was not enough for you to die; you had to die humiliated.”

Tec recalled how her parents, as these stages progressed and it became more and more clear that Jews were in danger, tried to instill her and her sister. “They told us that ignorance is very dangerous and that we must grow up fast, and that childhood is a luxury Jewish children cannot afford.”

Her father’s connections allowed him access to false papers giving each member of the family a different name and identity. One by one, each left the ghetto so that, if identified as a Jewish escapee, the entire family would not be killed. After a time of separation, the family reunited at the home of a Polish labor family, where Tec and her sister proceeded to pass as Catholic and where her parents hid.

One of the hardest parts of hiding her Jewish identity over that period, Tec related, was the bombardment of hate with which she was confronted.

“I was exposed to a great deal of anti-Semitism at that time,” she said. “If you want to know what people really think, don’t tell them what you are and you’ll find out what they really think.”

She continued, “I had to go along and agree with everything people said and I began to get used to it. I forgot who I was. I was ashamed.”

When Tec and her family returned to her city in Poland after the war, there were only 100 to 150 Jewish survivors of an original Jewish population of close to 40,000. Including her own, only three Jewish families remained intact.

“After the war, I wanted to forget,” said Tec. “I never spoke about the war.”

In the years that followed, she married a physician and moved to the United States where she studied sociology at Columbia University. Then, in the mid 1970s, she began to have memories of her experiences during the war.

“These memories became a compulsion,” Tec said. She became inspired to work on her autobiography, writing 10 to 12 hours a day until it was complete.

“As I was writing, I was learning more and more and more,” said Tec, “and I was also wanting to find out more about other people’s experiences.”

The completion of her autobiography marked the beginning of a new chapter in Tec’s academic career, in which she would write more books and hundreds of articles combining her knowledge of sociology with issues relating to the Holocaust. According to Tec, she is constantly working, never taking breaks in between projects.

“I am very fortunate that one project leads right into another,” she said.

Tec is currently working on two books, one on the Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and another on wartime correspondence with Christopher Browning (OC ’67), who is also a well-known Holocaust scholar.

At one point during her lecture, Tec was asked whether or not she found her constant study of the Holocaust depressing at all.

“Sometimes, when I do get upset, I say to myself, ‘You dope, how dare you be upset? You write books, you have friends, you have all these things,’” Tec said.

Ultimately, however, Tec believes that, “If you forget these people, it is like you are killing them again. By studying, remembering, writing and thinking, I’m keeping them alive.”