UNTOLD STORY: THE AMAZING LIFE OF EUGENE SOCHOR
OBITUARY: EUGENE SOCHOR, 87
Many saw the aging retiree on his daily walks along the Dallas Road waterfront. Few knew that Eugene Sochor, who died here last week, went from being a 14-year-old hunted by the Nazis to senior posts in UNESCO and the global aviation authority.
Fourteen-your-old Eugene Sochor wasn’t home when the Nazis came to take him to Auschwitz.
So the Belgian Jewish boy lived, while his father and stepmother died.
He survived in hiding for the rest of the Second World War — educating himself while doing so — before building a good career, a good life, in New York, Paris, Montreal and, for the past dozen years, Victoria.
Maybe you saw him heading to the Hotel Grand Pacific for his daily swim. Maybe you saw him in his white sun hat, just another oldster walking the Dallas Road waterfront. Often it’s not until people die, as the 87-year-old did Sept. 2, that we learn the stories of the people living in our midst.
His parents were Russian refugees who alit in Antwerp, Belgium, where Sochor was born in 1928. His mother died when he was six. His father, having lost his job as a telephone engineer, owned a little news agent’s shop.
No one could have foreseen the horrors of the Holocaust, but the Sochors knew life for Jews would be rough after the Germans invaded in 1940. The family tried to get out when the remnants of the British army were evacuated from Dunkirk.
“He was on the beach with his parents, pleading with the boat owners to let them on, but they didn’t have enough boats for the soldiers, let alone the refugees,” says Sochor’s daughter, Nicole.
The family rode back to Antwerp in a German truck. Then came the order for Jews to wear a yellow Star of David in public. Then came the Holocaust. Almost 25,000 of Belgium’s 70,000 Jews were deported to the camps, and almost all of those who were deported died.
When the Nazis came for the Sochors in 1942, neighbours warned young Eugene before he got home. They also passed him a hastily scrawled note from his stepmother: the name of a relative in the resistance. With her help, Sochor and his three-yearold brother were spirited to an attic where they spent the next 18 months. “It was like Anne Frank, I suppose,” Nicole says.
Sochor’s relative, a member of the Red Orchestra communist spy ring, eventually came up with doctored X-rays that allowed Eugene to be taken into a home for tubercular children. While there, living under an alias, he wrote plays and performed them for the kids.
He also studied: Latin, the classics. “Education was a civilizing and strengthening thing that kept him going throughout the war.”
After being freed, he sold Allied soldiers pre-war postcards that he had stashed from his father’s shop (he broke in after the Germans sealed it), earning enough money to bring himself and his little brother to New York. He had $4.25 in his pocket when he landed. Sounds like a movie.
Despite a lack of formal educa- tion, by age 20 Sochor had done a four-year university degree in two years while simultaneously selling ice cream, working at a factory and teaching languages at Berlitz. He also earned three master’s degrees. Drafted into the U.S. Army, he almost got shipped to Korea, but a last-minute plea to legendary spymaster Wild Bill Donovan, for whom he had done some postwar work, landed him in Paris, where he took over the press office of the Allied headquarters in Europe.
A condensed version of his life includes stops as an award-win-
ning newspaper reporter in Buffalo, at the U.S. State Department and at a job running the UNESCO press office in Paris. There, Nicole says, he fought to maintain the unit’s integrity and independence during a time when the U.S. and Soviet Union were in a tug-ofwar, and in an office where antiAmerican and anti-Semitic sentiments were rampant. (“He mistrusted ideological extremism to the end,” she says.) Then came a similar post at the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal, where he wrote the book The Politics of International Aviation.
Along the way, he wed Nicole’s mother, a cousin of his friend Patrick Moynihan, the future U.S. senator.
The marriage eventually ended. Maybe that had something to do with the memories Sochor could never quite shake.
“I think it was painful to him that he had to assume the burdens of adulthood at a very young age, and suffered the loss of his loved ones at a very young age,” Nicole says.
And don’t forget the effects of three teenage years on the run from people who wanted him dead. He was actively sought by the Nazis while in hiding; they even faked a letter from his father, hoping to smoke him out.
“My father was being hunted like an animal, and I think that feeling of wariness never leaves you,” Nicole says.
Sochor did remarry; he is survived by his widow, Noreen Adrie, Nicole and her brother Daniel.
For most of the rest of us, he was just one of those people who pass unnoticed on the street, their stories untold.