Felix Zandman — businessman with roots in the Russian Empire
He was born in Grodno in 1927 - some sources give 1928 - into a well-off Jewish family. The town had been part of the Russian Empire until the First World War, was Polish when he was born, was taken by the Soviet Union in 1939, by Germany in 1941, and is now in Belarus. He lived through four of those sovereignties before he was twenty.
In October 1941, when he was fourteen, he and his parents Aaron and Genia, his seven-year-old sister Mira, and both sets of grandparents were sent to the Grodno ghetto. Most of them did not survive the war.
He did, because a Catholic Polish family - Jan and Anna Puchalski, later recognised at Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations - hid him under the floor of their house. The space was a dugout about 170 centimetres long, 150 wide and 120 high. He shared it with his uncle Sender and three other people for seventeen months. To keep him occupied and sane, his uncle taught him trigonometry and higher mathematics in the dark, from memory, with nothing to write on. It was the only formal instruction in the subject he received before university.
In 1946 he left for France. He took a mechanical engineering degree and a master's in physics at Nancy, and a doctorate in physics at the Sorbonne in 1953 on the strain behaviour of materials - the field his uncle's lessons had pointed him toward. He ran the stress analysis laboratory at the French jet engine manufacturer SNECMA, and was given the French Order of Merit for Research and Invention in 1960.
He moved to the United States in 1956 and worked at Tatnall Measuring Systems in Philadelphia, where he developed a temperature-stable foil resistor. No one would invest in it. In 1962, with a four-thousand-dollar loan and start-up money from his cousin Alfred Slaner, he set up his own firm to make it.
He called it Vishay, the Yiddish name of the village where his grandmother had been born. No Jews were left there after the war. The company is now one of the largest manufacturers of discrete semiconductors and passive electronic components in the world, with some 22,000 employees and revenue near three billion dollars, and its Bulk Metal foil resistors and foil strain gauges became industry standards. The Society for Experimental Mechanics named an award after him in 1990.
He took Israeli citizenship in 1994 alongside his American one and was a major donor to Yad Vashem, where a sculpture he commissioned commemorates his grandfather, who stayed with the small children in the main part of a house while the adults hid in the attic. He wrote a memoir, Never the Last Journey, and in 2008 went back to Poland with the March of the Living to tell the story of the family who had hidden him. He died in Philadelphia in June 2011.
"Grodno ghetto and hiding, 1941-44; France 1946; United States 1956"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Grodno (Belarus)
He survived seventeen months hidden in a dugout beneath the floor of a house belonging to Jan and Anna Puchalski, recognised at Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, where his uncle taught him mathematics from memory. He named his company Vishay after the village where his grandmother was born.
Born in Grodno - Russian Empire until 1915, Poland at his birth, Soviet from 1939, German from 1941, now Belarus - to a Jewish family. Sent with his family to the Grodno ghetto in October 1941 at the age of fourteen; most of the family did not survive.
.svg?width=900)
Grodno (Belarus). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"I survived to build, not just to remember."