David P. Boder
| David P. Boder | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Aron Mendel Michelson 9 November 1886 Liepāja, Latvia |
| Died | 18 December 1961 (aged 75) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Psychology professor |
| Spouse(s) | Pauline Ivianski (m. 1907, divorced 1909) Nadejda Chernik (m. 1917, her death 1919) Dora Neveloff (m. 1925, his death 1961) |
| Children | Elena |
| Parent(s) | Berl Michelson and Betti Michelson |
David Pablo Boder (9 November 1886 – 18 December 1961) was a professor of psychology at Illinois Institute of Technology who traveled in 1946 to Europe to record interviews with Holocaust survivors. During that trip, he collected over a hundred interviews totaling 120 hours on a wire recorder developed by fellow professor Dr Marvin Camras. He was the first to record the experiences of the survivors and is a highly noted primary source reference.
Boder was born Aron Mendel Michelson to Berl and Betti Michelson, a Jewish family living in Liepāja, Latvia. The large Jewish community residing in Liepāja at that time likely allowed Boder to grow up speaking Yiddish and German, reserving Russian for speaking at school. At around age 19, Boder began studying psychology, first in Leipzig and then St. Petersburg. While living in St. Petersburg, Boder married Pauline Ivianski in 1907, who gave birth to their daughter Elena later that year. They divorced in 1909.
In 1919, Boder, his second wife Nadejda, and his daughter moved to Mexico, fleeing the Russian Civil War. Nadejda died in the 1918 flu pandemic soon after their arrival. In Mexico, Boder learned to speak Spanish, taught psychology at the National University, and married his third wife Dora in 1925 with whom he moved to the United States soon after. Upon moving to the U.S., Boder obtained degrees from the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, while also working at the Lewis Institute (which became Illinois Institute of Technology).
Upon the end of World War II, Boder conceived of a project for interviewing displaced persons of the war, to preserve their stories and investigate the psychological effects of war. In July 1946, Boder arrived in Paris and spent the next nine weeks conducting 130 interviews in 16 locations across France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy By this time, Boder spoke over seven languages, allowing him to conduct interviews in the subjects' native tongue. Most of the subjects were Eastern European Jews, primarily from Poland, but Boder also spoke with Western European Jews, non-observant German Jews, Greek Jews and non-Jewish persons.
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