Samuel Pisar was 10 years old when Hitler and Stalin invaded his native Poland. Interned in Auschwitz and other infernos, he finally escaped from Dachau and was liberated by the American army. Aged 16, he was one of the youngest survivors of the Holocaust, and the only one from his family and school. Taken in by French and Australian relatives, he resumed his studies in Paris, later graduating from the University of Melbourne and earning doctorates from Harvard and the Sorbonne. In the 1950s, he served at the United Nations and UNESCO, before becoming an adviser to President John F. Kennedy, the State Department and Committees of the Senate and the House. In 1961, he was awarded U.S. citizenship by a special Act of Congress.

As an international lawyer in America, Britain and France, Samuel Pisar has counselled governments, corporations, foundations, the International Olympic Committee and personalities such as Arthur Rubinstein, Steve Jobs and Elizabeth Taylor. A defender of freedom and human rights, he took up the causes of Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other political dissidents, as well as many Jewish refuseniks. A widely-solicited lecturer, he has presided at conferences on law, trade and diplomacy and addressed global leaders at the Davos World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Fund, the New York Council on Foreign Relations and the European Parliament. In 1983, he chaired in Paris a world gathering of Nobel laureates, having himself been nominated for the Peace Prize. A board member of various public interest organizations, he is a trustee of Washington’s Brookings Institution, President of Yad Vashem France and a director of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah.

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Photo: Stuttgarter-Zeitung.de