A Stanford physics professor, who was able to escape Nazi Europe due to the efforts of American journalist Varian Fry, has died. Walter Meyerhof of Menlo Park was 84.
Meyerhof was born April 29, 1922 in Kiel, Germany, the same year that his father, Otto Meyerhof, won the Nobel Prize for discovering how the human body converts sugar to energy.
Even though his father was a distinguished professor, his parents thought their son would have an easier life if they baptized him and raised him as a Lutheran.
But the family was still distinguishable as Jews because of their name. When the Nazis came to power, they stripped Meyerhof’s father from his position as the highest-ranking professor at the university.
Meyerhof was able to flee Germany for France, but while his parents were able to obtain papers to go to the United States, Meyerhof had just turned 18, and therefore needed papers of his own.
He landed in an internment camp, but it was one that was not as bad as some others, said his wife, Miriam. “For instance,” she noted, “they took them out for lunch to restaurants.”
As Meyerhof later wrote in his memoir, “In the Shadow of Love: Stories from My Life,” he wrote a note on a piece of toilet paper asking for help, and dropped it on the ground in front of a customs officer whom he recognized.
“When you’re 18 you’re perhaps more resilient than when you’re 80,” Meyerhof told the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California in 2002. Nevertheless, he said, despite his being lucky, “it is quite clear my father’s Nobel Prize opened doors for me not opened to other people. I felt, on the whole, more secure than perhaps other people would feel.”
Meyerhof was eventually able to get out of France, going through Spain and Portugal on the way, until finally he boarded a warship headed to the United States in 1940.
His escape was engineered by Varian Fry, an American journalist credited posthumously with saving thousands of Jews by forging documents, exchanging money on the black market and arranging safe routes to Spain.
“He was very kind to me,” Meyerhof told the Jewish Bulletin in 1998. “He was sort of a father figure for me.”
Meyerhof landed first in Philadelphia, where he obtained his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1947 he married Miriam Ruben, whom he had known from childhood.
He joined the Stanford faculty in 1949, retiring in 1992. He was a popular physics professor and authored two physics textbooks. In 1977 he won the Dinkelspiel Award, which is given to a favorite professor teaching undergraduates.
After retiring, he took up watercolor painting and registered for a writing class for seniors at Foothill Community College, which got him thinking about his past. It was through the class that he decided to write his book.
He also spent a lot of time thinking about the man who saved him, eventually becoming the director of the Varian Fry Foundation, dedicated to educating the public about Fry’s heroism. In 2002, Meyerhof estimated he helped distribute teaching materials about Fry to 35,000 schools across the country.
“I owe him a debt of gratitude,” he said then. “I feel he is a role model for American schoolchildren.”
In addition to his wife, Miriam, of Menlo Park, Meyerhof is survived by sons Michael of Menlo Park and David of Burbank, sister Bettina Emerson of Seattle and one grandson.