TEC, NECHAMA

TEC, NECHAMA (1931– ), U.S. sociologist and authority on rescue and resistance during the Holocaust. Tec devoted her scholarly career to understanding altruistic and cooperative behavior under extreme conditions. Her path-breaking research, which emphasizes the matrix of personal, social, and cultural contexts that motivated instances of altruism, questions earlier attributions of such behavior to class, politics, or religion. Drawing from sources including memoirs, interviews, and archival documents in German, Polish, and Yiddish, Tec suggests that factors such as social marginality, independent-mindedness, and empathy for the vulnerable were critical to Jewish and Christian rescuers and resisters. Tec's research originated in her family's World War II experiences. Born in Lublin, Poland, to Roman Bawnik, a businessman, and Esther (Hachamoff) Bawnik, Tec lived for three years during the war under an assumed Christian identity. With the aid of Catholic Poles, her sister and parents also survived by passing as Christians. She married Leon Tec, a child psychiatrist, in 1950 and immigrated to the United States in 1952, where she had two children. Educated at Columbia University, she received her B.A. (1954), M.A. (1955), and Ph.D. (1963) in sociology. A thematic continuity weaves through Tec's numerous articles and books; each research project grows out of the previous one. Tec's first books on gambling and drug use reflected her early interest in fringe behavior. With the 1984 publication of her memoir, Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood, Tec began to integrate this interest with the nascent field of Holocaust studies. In Dry Tears and her subsequent books (When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland (1986); In the Lion's Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisen (1990); Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (1993); and Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust (2003), Tec explored marginal behavior in the context of World War II. Her studies illuminate the rare but vitally important phenomenon of Jews and Christians risking their lives, and often those of their families, to help others escape Nazi persecution. In the critically acclaimed Resilience and Courage, Tec considers these and other aspects of the Holocaust from the perspective of gender, noting that, "even though the Germans were committed to sending all Jews to their deaths, for a variety of reasons women and men traveled toward that destination on distinct roads" (12) and often employed different coping strategies. Tec received numerous awards, honors, and prizes, including appointment to the Council of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; two Pulitzer Prize nominations; a National Jewish Book Award; a First Prize for Holocaust Literature by the World Federation of Fighters, Partisans and Concentration Camp Inmates; and an International Anne Frank Special Recognition Prize. She served on the sociology faculty at the University of Connecticut for over three decades, and held several senior research fellowships, scholar-in-residencies, and international lectureships. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: J.T. Baumel, Review of Resilience and Courage, in: Yad Vashem Studies, 32 (2004), 479–86; D.H. Hirsch, Review of Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, in: Shofar, 13 (Summer 1995), 91–94. (Rona Sheramy (2nd ed.)