The golden medallion awarded to Nobel laureate Walter Kohn for his breakthroughs in chemistry will be auctioned on January 27, along with three books on heat, matter, and pure math he had purchased while in a refugee camp in Canada.
Kohn was a much-loved and respected professor at UC Santa Barbara , who died in 2016, having come there in 1979 as the the founding director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics, now known as the Kavli Institute. Significantly, Kohn and his sister, Minna, had been rescued before the Holocaust in Austria by the Kindertransport, the relocation of Jewish children overseas that began after Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Broken Glass,” during which the Nazi party destroyed and defaced Jewish synagogues, schools, businesses, and homes in November 1938. He and Minna lost their parents in the Auschwitz death camp.
Kohn recalled his school years in his biographical Nobel statement . He had preferred Latin over mathematics in high school, but the pogroms of the ’30s closed schools in Vienna to him, but he was able to enter a Jewish school, the Chajes Gymnasium. There he met two extraordinary teachers: “In physics, Dr. Emil Nohel, and in mathematics Dr. Victor Sabbath. While outside the school walls arbitrary acts of persecution and brutality took place, on the inside these two inspired teachers conveyed to us their own deep understanding and love of their subjects. I take this occasion to record my profound gratitude for their inspiration to which I owe my initial interest in science. (Alas, they both became victims of Nazi barbarism).”