The innovators the Nazis erased

Yesterday, I sat at a conference in Tel Aviv of Israeli tech leaders. A top VC from Sequoia Capital spoke about last month’s mega-exit, which saw Google buy cyber unicorn Wiz for $32 billion. Smart and charismatic founders talked about what their companies are doing to solve real-world problems, as organizers from Globes, the Israeli financial publication, raced to share their speeches online for a public hungry to hear some good news for a change.

In my mind’s eye, I also saw the founders who weren’t there. I imagined their presentations. I imagined them saying how they had solved problems that remain unsolved as yet. I imagined them showing slides with inventions which, in real life, were never invented.

Some of these, I fantasized, ease climate change. Some improve road safety. I even daydreamed that one is a reliable algorithm which tells me which dad jokes will get a laugh from my kids.

Jewish populations wiped out in the Holocaust contained so much promise to contribute to the advancement of science, technology and the overall good of humanity. Trailblazing pre-war research involved disproportionate numbers of Jewish people. And as the 20th century unfolded, we also saw how a propensity for traditional learning gave rise to great achievements in other areas. Around Yom HaShoah, our Holocaust Remembrance Day, my mind is on the lost knowledge as well as the lost people.

A country of 9 million people today has achieved such strides in research and technology. A Jewish diaspora of a similar number has also played a remarkable role across a huge range of fields. The mind boggles at what life would be like had the 6 million who were murdered lived, pursued their own paths, and raised children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Albert Einstein was visiting the US when Hitler came to power and chose not to return to Germany. What about the scientists who were not so fortunate, whose research never came to light?

I reported on health and science throughout the pandemic for this site. On the suffering, the deaths, on the wait for medications and vaccines, as well as the blow-by-blow advances to ease the pain of patients and ultimately make us safe again. What different medical innovations may have come our way had the Nazis not murdered real scientists, as the evil Mengele conducted his pseudoscience on his real-life victims?

At the conference yesterday, I watched a brilliant innovator speak on stage. Upon finishing, he went straight to his father, also a professor, and embraced him. A chain of scholarship, running down generations, each encouraging the next. How many such chains were broken between 1939 and 1945? How many other innovators would have climbed down from the stage and embraced their fathers or mothers?

Over the last 18 months, I have been deeply moved to see the empty chairs across Israel for the missing hostages. In this vein, today I will be clearing part of a shelf in my study, where some of the books that never got written would have stood. Perhaps every school library in Israel—and across the Jewish world—should keep an empty shelf too: not as a void, but as a quiet monument to the brilliance that might have been.