Randolph L. Braham (1922–2018)

Randolph L. Braham was born Adolf Ábrahám to a Jewish family in Bucharest, Romania. His parents were Lajos Ábrahám, a laborer, and his wife Eszter. He was raised in poverty in Dej, a small town in Transylvania. After Hungary seized control of the region in 1940, Braham was barred from public high school because he was Jewish. His parents could not afford tuition at a religious school, so they enrolled him at an independent school where he could study without attending classes. In 1943–1945, he was forced to serve in the Hungarian army's slave-labor units in Ukraine. During the chaos caused by the advance of the Red Army at the end of World War II, Braham escaped Soviet capture and traveled westward secretly through Nazi-occupied Hungary.

In the village of Nyíri, he and four others were sheltered by a Christian farmer, István Novák, later honored by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. After the war ended, Braham returned to Dej to discover that his parents had been deported and killed at Auschwitz in 1944; his older sister, who had also been sent to Auschwitz, had survived. Making his way to Berlin, Braham served as a translator for the U.S. Army. In 1948, he emigrated to the USA and became a citizen, changing his name to Randolph Louis Braham. He earned a BSci degree in economics and government and an MSci in education from City College of New York. In 1952, he received a doctorate in political science from the New School for Social Research. In 1962, Prof. Braham began his teaching career at the City University of New York (CUNY), where he chaired the political science department and was named a distinguished professor in 1987. He became the foremost American scholar of the Holocaust in Hungary and Romania. Among the 60 books he wrote in his career were his monumental The Politics of Genocide (1981) and his three-volume The Geographical Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in Hungary (2013), both of which won the National Jewish Book Award.
He retired from active teaching in 1992 and began a residency as professor emeritus at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Prof. Braham was an original member of the Academic Committee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C.. He also was a special advisor to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City and for Yad Vashem. His works were used as major source books by courts of law in various countries, including Canada, Germany, Israel, and the USA in cases involving restitution and war crimes. Prof. Braham's memoirs were deposited at his archives at the USHMM.

In the 1998 Oscar-winning film The Last Day, he provided contextual overviews of the Hungarian Holocaust. He was also the subject of the documentary film Rémálmok nyomában, available in an English version entitled Retracing a Nightmare.

In 2014, Prof. Braham rejected the Order of Merit bestowed on him by the Hungarian government, explaining in a widely-published open letter that he saw it as an attempts by the government to falsify history and whitewash the country's collusion with the Nazis in the murder of thousands of Jews in WWII.