Educating Max: A Lesson in German Courage

by Carole G. Vogel

In the picture above, my father, Max Garbuny, is standing in the middle row, first on the left. He was participating in an outing with fellow students and professors from the physics department of the Technical University of Berlin. What makes this photograph so remarkable is that it was taken in 1937. Max was a Jew, and German Jewish students had already been expelled from the university.

Max was born in Germany in 1912. His mother was a Berliner but his father had come from Russia. By law, Germany conferred citizenship through the father. So even though Max considered himself to be German to the core, he was registered as a resident alien. This bureaucratic fluke enabled Max to remain in the university despite the anti-Jewish laws enacted against German Jews.

Max could never have stayed at the school without the cooperation of the entire physics faculty and all his fellow students. Periodically, Nazi officials would question Max’s professors about his ethnic origins. Typically they would say, “Garbuny? He’s some kind of Hungarian.”

Any one of his fellow students could have alerted the authorities but oddly enough they too chose to protect Max and include him in student activities. What makes this so remarkable is that some of the students had already joined the Nazi party and professed the party line. Yet, each and every member of the physics department, student and faculty alike, made the choice to enable Max to finish his education, despite the risk to their own safety.

Snug in this safe cocoon, Max was blithely unaware of the true dangers that lay ahead. Like many other Jews in Germany, Max could not fathom the peril. One of Max’s Nazi classmates advised him to leave the country as soon as possible because he believed a horrible fate was in store for the Jews. This warning, along with prodding from his father and brother, prompted Max to take the precaution of applying for a visa to the United States.

In June 1938 Max finished his doctorate. Department tradition called for a “Doktor Schmaus,” a party to be held in his honor to celebrate this momentous occasion. However, Max’s professors knew that hosting a party to honor a Jew would place them all in jeopardy. By chance, however, one of the professors had just gotten his driver’s license and decided to celebrate this milestone. At his party, the professor asked Max to stand beside him as he talked about the great achievement of getting a driver’s license. The professor spoke about the long years of study, the late nights, and the experiments required to perfect his driving skill. He waxed eloquent about the many obstacles that lay along the road. This took great courage.

A month later Max and his brother fled Germany. However, Max did not take with him his hard-earned diploma. Senior officials at the university learned of his Jewish origins and withheld it. At their own peril, Max’s professors wrote glowing letters of recommendation for him and contacted physicists in America on his behalf. Princeton University, on the lookout for German-trained physicists, were alerted to Max’s predicament. Just as they hired Albert Einstein, they hired Max Garbuny, too.

After a stint as an instructor at the Institute of Physics at Princeton, Max joined Westinghouse Research Laboratories at its facility near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He remained there until 1992 when he was stricken with cancer. Max was the author of more than 80 scientific articles and more than 100 patents in such fields as optical radiation, solid states physics, cryo-physics, infrared devices, laser chemistry, remote gas detection, and laser engines. He was the author of Optical Physics, and a co-author of The Science of Science and Seven States of Matter.

Max died in 1999 at age 86. Despite losing most of his family in the Holocaust, he considered himself to be the lucky one among his classmates. He was not forced to become a soldier. He never killed anyone, he never participated in atrocities, and he did not sacrifice his life for the Nazi cause.

In a way, Max’s life has come full circle. As his daughter and a member of One by One, I speak to students in German gymnasiums about Max’s experiences. I tell them about the courage of my father’s professors and classmates, and how for one extended period during the Nazi Regime they all made the right choice.

Published in Journeys of Transformation: Confronting the Legacies of Conflict, War and Genocide by Wilma Busse et al. One by One, Inc., 2023.