A Holocaust-refugee journey shaped the architect of modern financial derivatives

Evidence

Leo Melamed’s life is a quintessential twentieth-century story. He was born in Bialystok, Poland. In 1939, at the age of seven, he watched, peeking through a crack in the shutters of his parents’ home, as German troops entered the city. He witnessed the macabre ceremony in which Bialystok was handed over, under the temporary pact between Hitler and Stalin, to the Soviet Union. He and his family took the last train from Bialystok across the closing border into Lithuania. Almost certainly, they owed their lives to one of the good people of a bad time: Chiune Sugihara, who headed Imperial Japan’s consulate in Kovno, Lithuania. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 15