Life offers many opportunities, but rarely in one’s lifetime does it offer the privilege of knowing a man like Walter Kohn. A Nobel Laureate and UC Santa Barbara professor of physics, Walter was a senior statesman, scientist, and scholar who left behind rich consequences for our world. He passed away just before midnight on April 19, 2016, with his wife, Mara Schiff Kohn, and other loved ones at his side. He was 93.
Born in Vienna in 1923, Walter was a teenager when World War II began. He and his sister, Minna, were rescued from the Nazi regime in one of the Kindertransport missions that brought some 10,000 children out of Nazi Germany, Austria, and other German-occupied territories, and placed them with surrogate families in England. His parents, Gittel and Salomon Kohn, were killed at Auschwitz in 1944.
Before leaving Austria, Walter was a student first at the Akademisches Gymnasium, the oldest secondary school in Vienna, and then at the Chajes Gymnasium, the Jewish high school. At the Akademisches, Walter followed a course of study in Latin and Greek under the guidance of his mother. That changed, however, when Walter attended the Chajes, whose principal, Emil Nohel, was a well-known physicist and a former teaching assistant of Albert Einstein. It was Dr. Nohel who first sparked Walter’s interest in physics — an interest that would last a lifetime.