Background
She was born in Lublin, Poland to a family of Polish Jews in 1931 and was 8 years old when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939.
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Nechama Tec
Edit Profilehistorian sociologist university professor
Education
She received her Doctor of Philosophy in sociology at Columbia University, where she studied and worked with the sociologist Daniel Bell, and is a Holocaust scholar.
Career
She is also author of the book Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (Oxford University Press (1993, ) on which the film Defiance (2008) is based, as well as a study of women in the Holocaust. She survived the Holocaust thanks to her life being saved by Polish Catholics. After the war she emigrated to Israel and later moved to the United States, where she earned a doctorate at Columbia University.
She is the mother of film director Roland Tec.
Her daughter, Leora Tec, is an attorney who did work in the Nazi Hunter Division of the Justice Department (also known as the OSI, or Office of Special Investigations). Her husband, Doctor Leon Tec, was a noted child psychiatrist and author of Fear of Success and the autobiography, Adventure and Destiny.
Nechama Tec was initially shocked by the changes made in adapting her book to make the film Defiance. The Bielski partisans, for example, never actually went into battle against German tanks.
However, after seeing the film a number of times, she confessed to liking it "more and more." In a joint appearance with Roland Tec at a screening of the film in January 2011, she denied ever being unhappy with the film, and they both agreed that alterations of the story made for dramatic effect in the film did not alter the essential message of the story.
Doctor Tec was appointed to the Council of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and served in 1995 as a Scholar in Residence at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, in Israel. Jewish Children: Between Protectors and Murderers. Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: 2005.
“Jewish Resistance: Fact, Omissions, and Distortions,”.
Miles Lerman Center for the Study of Jewish Resistance. 1997.
Tec, Nechama; Weiss, Daniel (1997).
"A Historical Injustice: The Case of Masha Bruskina". Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Oxford Journals) 11 (3): 366–377.
Retrieved April 2015.
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