Nechama Tec

Nechama Tec (née Bawnik) is a Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. She received her Ph.D. in sociology at Columbia University, where she studied and worked with the highly-regarded sociologist Daniel Bell, and is a noted Holocaust scholar. Her 1986 book, When Light Pierced the Darkness and her 1984 memoir Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood both received the Merit of Distinction Award from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rit. She is also author of the book Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (Oxford University Press, 1993, ISBN 0-19-507595-1) on which the 2008 film Defiance is based, as well as a study of women in the holocaust. She was awarded the 1994 International Anne Frank Special Recognition prize for that book.

She was born in Lublin, Poland to a family of Polish Jews in 1931, and was 8 years old in 1939 when Poland was invaded by Germany. She survived the Holocaust thanks to her life being saved by Polish Catholics. After the war she immigrated 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, Dr. Leon Tec, is 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.

Dr. Tec was appointed to 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.