As part of the Visas for Life lecture series, Dr. Nehama Tec, a University of Connecticut professor, discussed her experiences as a Holocaust survivor and her research about the time period in front of a crowd of 50 people.

As a young Jewish girl living in Poland during the Holocaust, Tec said she pretended to be a Catholic orphan and was able to co-exist with non-Jews because of her fair hair and flawless Polish accent. Since her parents spoke Yiddish and their Polish was less than perfect, they could not venture outside for three years, Tec said.

“My mother was a beautiful woman. But, she looked Jewish. She was a beautiful, Jewish woman. She and my father had to be in hiding because their Polish accents weren’t good,” Tec said.

Tec and her entire immediate family survived the Holocaust in large part due to Christian rescuers who were willing to take them in and offer protection. Tec said her family was a fortunate one.

“In this small group of survivors, only three intact families remained,” Tec said.

She said that out of approximately 40,000 Jewish people who lived in her city before the war, only 150 were alive as the war came to an end in 1945. She said her family did whatever it needed to do to survive during the time.

“Sometimes protection was exchanged for money,” Tec said. “Sometimes it was given out of the goodness of their heart. But we always had protection.”

Tec eventually immigrated to the United States, where she attended Columbia University and ultimately earned her doctorate.

For many years, Tec said she could not bear to think of her experience during the Holocaust, but it was inevitable that she did.

“In the mid-70s, I don’t know why, my memories began to stir,” she said. “They threatened to make me revisit my past.”

At that time, she began to write her autobiography, “Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood,” and after she finished she said she was “hungry for more knowledge.” She is now the award-winning author of several books, all on the Holocaust.

Tec was brought to Boston University to speak about one of them, “When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Poland.” After much investigation and study, Tec said she has uncovered six characteristics she believes are typical of “altruistic” Christian rescuers of Jews in wartime Poland.

Tec said 86 percent of the rescuers she studied “risked their lives for the Jews without anticipating any rewards.”

She found altruistic rescuers were very individualistic and often did not fit in well within their community.

“They were not feeling constrained by the wishes of other people, so they did what they felt was right, not what other people did,” Tec said.

Tec said the same people who were known in their communities for performing good deeds also helped Jews during the Holocaust. She said they were humble, modest people. “They did what they thought was right, what had to be done.”

Christian rescuers saw people in need, and they offered their help, often without thinking about the consequences, Tec said. In Poland, during the war, aiding or protecting a Jew was a crime punishable by death, according to Tec.

“My father would always say, ‘Thank goodness they were non-rational people and did not sit down and think about it for then what would have happened to us?'” Tec said.

According to Tec, 51 percent of survivors received help from total strangers, while only 19 percent were offered protection by their friends.

While Tec acknowledged there were “many more murderers of the Jews than rescuers,” the rescuers are very important to the history of the Holocaust.

“If we don’t talk about them, it is psychologically unhealthy and plays into the track of the anti-Semite,” Tec said. “Anti-Semitism is ripe and growing to proportions that are really very dangerous.”

Tec said she did not think Jews maintained relationships with their rescuers after the war had ended.

“I feel that they did not make an effort to find them because by reviewing your contact with the rescuers you remember your total dependence on them,” she said. “You were not a human being.”

“She was a very engaging speaker on a fascinating topic,” said Andrea Zarkauskas, a CAS sophomore. “It’s unfortunate that there weren’t more students here.”