From the sewers to the stars above
MY COUSIN Paul Felenbok, like myself a child survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Holocaust sadly passed away last month at the age of 84, in Paris where he had lived since the end of the war.
Paul was born in Warsaw shortly before World War Two and lived as a baby and young child in the ghetto with me and our extended family. He and his brother escaped through the sewers with their parents in 1943, just before the tragic Warsaw uprising. He was only seven at the time, and lost both his parents who were shot by the Germans when they were in hiding, shortly after their escape from the Ghetto.
He arrived in France in 1946, at the age of 10 with his brother and was raised in an orphanage. He had had no formal education until he arrived in France but managed to get his baccalaureate, then a scholarship to join the Sorbonne. After a degree in physics and a certificate in fluid mechanics, he joined the Paris Observatory, then spent a year at the University of Califronia, Berkeley.
He was then appointed as an astronomer at Paris Observatory, where he remained until his retirement in 2004. He headed the communication unit (Unicom) of the laboratory of extra-galactic astrophysics
Paul, an expert in spectroscopy, was above all a brilliant and inventive instrumentalist. Among his many achievements were several major advances in spectroscopy and astronomy. These included the visionary development of vacuum UV spectroscopy in the laboratory in the 1970s, providing data that would become indispensable for future space missions.
The development of astronomy in the French Alps village of St-Véran is yet another of his great achievements. In the late 1960s, he spotted the remarkable astronomical qualities of the Château-Renard site above St-Véran. He founded and led the development of “la Maison du Soleil (House of the Sun)”, in the village of St-Véran, a public centre which houses the very high-resolution spectrograph Sharmor on loan from Paris Observatory.
He was an extraordinary man, with a sparkling intelligence. He was also a great leader, pragmatic, humane and generous and dedicated to others. He was devoted to his wife Betty and daughters Veronique and Isabelle and his five grandchildren.
Paul managed to overcome his tragic childhood, which he almost never spoke of, to build himself as an extraordinarily human with a successful family life and career. Only a few years ago, convinced by his daughter Véronique, he finally agreed to entrust his memories to a writer and theatre director, David Lescot. This resulted in a deeply moving play, “Ceux qui restent (Those who remain)”, which has been published by Gallimard, has had two runs in Paris and has also been shown in America and in Warsaw translated into Polish..
I will really miss him and all my thoughts go out to his wife Betty and their two daughters.