Contemporary Views on the Holocaust

Randolph Louis Braham was born Adolf Abraham in Bucharest, Romania on December 20, 1922. After Hungary seized control of the region in 1940, Braham was barred from public high school because he was Jewish. His parents registered him at an independent school, where he could complete assignments without attending classes. From 1943 to 1945, he was forced to serve in a Hungarian army slave labor battalion in Ukraine. Captured by the Soviets, he escaped and was sheltered by a Hungarian Christian farmer. After the war, he served as a translator for the United States Army. He emigrated to the United States in 1948 and became a citizen in 1953. He received a bachelor's degree in economics and government, a master of science degree in education from City College, and a doctorate in political science from the New School for Social Research. He taught comparative politics and Soviet studies at City College from 1962 until 1992. He founded the Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies there in 1979. He wrote or edited more than 60 books during his lifetime including The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary and the three-volume The Geographical Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in Hungary. He died from heart failure on November 25, 2018 at the age of 95.