A child survivor of the Holocaust was reluctant to share his family’s full story, until he saw a picture of himself as a 4-year-old boy at Auschwitz on a website denying the Holocaust

For years, Michael Bornstein, PHA ’62, wished he could wash away the serial number—B-1148—that was seared into his left forearm when he was just 4 years old. He’d mention Auschwitz, if asked about the tattoo, but he wouldn’t dwell on the Nazi death camp where his father, brother, and nearly 1 million other Jews were murdered during World War II. He’d seldom speak of being separated from his mother, who withstood beatings from female guards as she smuggled bread and thin gray soup to him in the children’s barracks, and who later smuggled him into the women’s barracks before she was sent to a labor camp in Austria. He wouldn’t say much about how his grandmother somehow, improbably, kept him alive long enough for them to be among the 2,819 prisoners liberated by Soviet soldiers.

His recollection of those dark days is dim—“a blessing and a curse,” he says. He seems to recall the stench of bodies burning, the smoke rising from crematoria chimneys, the quickening clack of guards’ boots. But he’s also aware of the malleable nature of memory, how the things we recall, especially from early childhood, are shaped by some inscrutable mix of perception, imagination, and the stories we’re told. And so for years he stayed mostly silent about his past, not only because it was traumatic but also because so much of it—the texture of his brother’s hair, the sound of his father’s voice—was inaccessible to him.

He preferred to look forward, with an optimism he says he inherited from his mother. Gam zeh ya’avor, she’d tell him, quoting the motto she and her husband shared during the war. This too shall pass. He can still hear the sound of his mother’s voice because she found him in Żarki, Poland, after the war. In February 1951, when he was 10, they immigrated to the United States, where he’d go on to build a career in pharmaceutical research and—with his wife, Judy—raise four children in what he calls “a life filled with soccer games, birthday parties, and bliss.”

As his kids grew up, they began pressing him for details about his past, but he’d always resist a full recounting. Now Bornstein is 77, and his children have children of their own. Several years ago, when Jake Wolf, the eldest of his 11 grandkids, started asking questions, wanting to use the information for his bar mitzvah project, Bornstein couldn’t say no. He began to open up.

Then he saw something that left him stunned and more determined than ever to tell his story: a picture of himself as a boy at Auschwitz on a website claiming that the Holocaust is a lie, that it never happened. “I slammed my computer shut in disgust. I was horrified. My hands shook with anger,” he writes in Survivors Club: The True Story of a Very Young Prisoner of Auschwitz, published last March by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “But now I’m almost grateful for the sighting. It made me realize that if we survivors remain silent—if we don’t gather the resolve to share our stories—then the only voices left to hear will be those of the liars and bigots.”

Bornstein wrote the book with his daughter Debbie Bornstein Holinstat, a TV news producer who for years had urged her father to work on such a project. She helped him plumb his earliest, darkest memories, and together they searched historical records and interviewed relatives and others who knew his family in Poland. In the process, they discovered a detail that helped solve one of the biggest mysteries of his survival, and he learned much about the resolute, resourceful father he never got to know. Together, they reclaimed a family heritage, illuminating stories of loss and resilience that had been left largely untold for 70 years.

Żarki, Open Ghetto

Michael Bornstein was born on May 2, 1940, in the Nazi-occupied town of Żarki, Poland, the second son of Sophie Jonisch Bornstein and Israel Bornstein, baby brother to 4-year-old Samuel. They lived in a redbrick house on Sosnawa Street.

In some parts of Poland during the late 1930s, Jews couldn’t own land, and their business dealings were restricted. But Jewish-owned businesses thrived in Żarki, where more than half of the town’s population, approximately 3,400 residents, was Jewish. Bornstein’s father was an accountant, and his mother’s brother Sam Jonisch (one of her six siblings) ran his family’s leather tannery in town.

That changed on Friday, September 1, 1939, when German forces invaded Poland, reaching Żarki the following day with an aerial attack that torched some homes and businesses. Sophie, newly pregnant with Michael, wanted to check on her parents, who lived nearby. But Nazi storm troopers had already moved onto the streets. On Monday, when all Jewish men in Żarki were ordered to report for labor shifts, Sophie left Samuel with her mother-in-law, Dora, and set out to find her parents. As she neared the Jewish cemetery, she saw German soldiers command a family she recognized from synagogue to strip naked. As mother, father, and young daughter huddled together, the soldier fired three shots, and the family fell dead in the ditch the father had just dug. It was a scene that haunted Sophie Bornstein her entire life.

The Nazis murdered more than 1,000 Jews in Poland that day, including 100 in Żarki. Such atrocities brought out the worst in some gentile residents, Bornstein and Holinstat write. “Many Catholics had not liked living among Jews before the war. Now they blamed the town’s Jewish people for making them the target of German bombings.”

In October, as Nazi soldiers went door-to-door confiscating Jews’ money and jewelry, Israel Bornstein sought to safeguard his family’s valuables. He gathered what he could in a burlap sack—a string of pearls, a stash of banknotes, the family’s small silver kiddush cup—and buried it in the backyard.

Żarki was still an open ghetto at the time, which meant that it wasn’t surrounded by fences, but Jews couldn’t come and go as they pleased. The Nazis shut down or took over Jewish businesses, enforced a strict curfew, and made Jews wear white armbands with a blue Star of David on them. They also forced them to create a Judenrat, a council of Jewish leaders. The town elders elected Israel Bornstein to serve as president. It was not a coveted role. Many Jews in Eastern Europe came to see Judenrat members as traitors, simply doing the bidding of the Nazis, and in Żarki people viewed Israel with suspicion.

But in their research, Bornstein and Holinstat found a collection of essays and a detailed diary written in Hebrew that told of Israel Bornstein’s heroic, often successful efforts to make conditions more bearable. In Survivors Club, they describe how he collected money from fellow Judenrat members and used the funds to bribe Gestapo officers, helping to obtain 200 legal travel visas for families trying to leave Żarki, for example, and saving the life of a teenager who faced execution because he was too sick to work one day.

“Though it’s sometimes seen as a very negative position, my father used it to save people. He set up soup kitchens. He was a very good man. And it made a lot of difference to me knowing that he was a good man,” Bornstein says. “That’s one reason we called the book ‘Survivors Club,’ because my mother’s six siblings all survived, and part of it has to do with my father, who encouraged them to go into attics, basements, wherever they could go to survive.”

By October 1942, however, the call had come for Żarki to be made Judenrein, “clean of Jews.” Most of those remaining were sent by train either to labor camps or to extermination camps. The Bornsteins and approximately 120 others were allowed to stay behind as part of a cleanup crew, but eventually they too were sent away, to a labor camp in Pionki. And in July 1944, when that camp closed, they were packed onto trains bound for Auschwitz.

“Sickness Saved My Life”

Upon arrival at Auschwitz, like all families, they were split up: Israel and Samuel were assigned to the men’s side. Michael initially stayed with his mother and grandmother until guards shaved his head and tattooed his arm. He was sent to the children’s barracks, where some older kids looked out for him, warning him to hold his nose as he drank down the smelly gray soup. Other kids stole his bread. Sophie was sent to the women’s barracks with Michael’s grandma Dora. She risked her own well-being to find her son and eventually bring him into the women’s barracks, where he hid under straw, in corners, scattering at the sound of guards approaching to take roll call.

While Sophie was able to protect Michael, she was helpless to save her husband and young Samuel, who died in September from the effects of Zyklon B gas—the Nazis’ preferred method of execution at Auschwitz, where as many as 6,000 people per day were killed in gas chambers. “[My mother] later told me that her heart literally felt like it had been gouged from her chest with an ax” when she learned of their fate, Bornstein writes. Soon, however, she was sent to a labor camp in Austria, and Michael was left alone with his grandma Dora.

By January 1945, with Soviet forces closing in on Auschwitz, the Nazis started to evacuate the camp, forcing an estimated 60,000 prisoners on what came to be known as a death march to concentration camps in Germany. Many prisoners, already frail from malnutrition, died from exposure in the harsh winter. But Michael and Dora evaded the march, and Bornstein always wondered how.

Not long ago, while visiting Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Israel, he discovered a document that solved the mystery. Nazi records indicate that he was in the infirmary at the time, diagnosed with either diphtheria or dystrophy (the writing is unclear). And his grandmother was with him. “The name doesn’t really matter,” he writes in Survivors Club. “That piece of paper recovered by a museum years after the war made one miracle clear. Sickness saved my life.”

On January 27, nine days after he found refuge in the infirmary, Soviet troops arrived. A couple of days after liberation, Dora carried Michael out to freedom, a scene captured on film by Soviet cameras. “Of the hundreds of thousands of children who had been delivered by train to Auschwitz, only 52 under the age of eight survived. They were the world’s best hiders,” Bornstein writes. “I was one of them.”

Postwar Dangers and the Cup of Life

Bornstein’s freedom brought with it a new set of dangers. “I would like to tell you … that all of us went home and lived happily ever after,” he writes. “But it wasn’t like that at all.” Four out of 10 Jews who survived the concentration camps died within a few weeks of the arrival of the Allied armies. Those who did survive found much of Eastern Europe unsafe for them, particularly in Poland, where anti-Jewish sentiments led to a series of murderous pogroms.

Soon after liberation, Michael and Dora returned to Żarki, where they found the family home on Sosnawa Street had been seized by a Polish family who now saw it as their home. Dora took Michael to a farm on the edge of town, where they found shelter in a chicken coop. They would periodically head into what had been the Jewish quarter, where they met relatives who were, miraculously, among the few dozen Jews (out of 3,400 six years earlier) to return to Żarki after the war. One day, as Michael and Dora walked in town, he spotted his mother, who had made her way back from Austria. “If we had both seen more horror than the world knew it could hold—then this moment was the opposite of that,” he writes. “This was the opposite of despair.”

Sophie realized that there was little opportunity left for them in Żarki. But first she tried to recover the valuables her husband had buried. “At night, even though the house was occupied, she went digging with her bare hands to try to find these things, jewels and money, and the only thing that she found was the kiddush cup, which is a cup that you make blessings with,” Bornstein says.

“And so this cup has been in our family ever since. It’s been at my wedding, at our kids’ weddings, at their bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, and so on. It’s not worth much if you buy it for the silver, but we cherish it quite a bit.”

In Munich, Waiting on Passage to America

After the war, Dora decided to remain in Poland, but Sophie determined that she and Michael would apply for visas to the United States. “She said the word ‘America’ the way a child says the word ‘candy,’” Bornstein writes. “She told me America was the most wonderful and welcoming place you can imagine.” That was not the case for them in Żarki or in Munich, where the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society assigned them to a displaced persons camp and, later, to a one-room apartment in the city.

“The German kids were bullies,” Bornstein recalls. “I had no hair on my head, I was skinny, and I didn’t speak the language, so I was bullied quite a bit.” Sophie bought flour and nylons from American soldiers and sailors in Munich, and sold the goods on the black market. It was a risky way to make a living, and Bornstein feared that she’d be arrested and he’d lose his mother again. But after nearly six years, they received their visas and set off on the USS General M. B. Stewart, arriving in New York City in February 1951.

With help from aid organizations, they eventually settled in a small apartment on 98th Street and Madison Avenue. Sophie worked as a seamstress, making $30 a week, and Michael attended P.S. 6. “I was this little kid who didn’t speak much English and had a tattoo on his arm. The teachers didn’t say anything, so I was pretty much alone and didn’t have friends,” recalls Bornstein, who soon found a job that would prove to be consequential. “I worked at Feldman’s Pharmacy, at 96th and Madison, getting 50 cents an hour,” he says. “The head pharmacist, Victor Oliver, was very good to me. He kind of took me on as a father figure and sparked my interest in science.”

Oliver even attended Bornstein’s bar mitzvah, held at Park Avenue Synagogue, after which his mother gave him a gift that she’d been saving for years to buy him: a gold watch. “You have to wind it a few times a day to make it work, but it’s great,” he says. “And on the back, it has a gimel and a zayin, which are the Hebrew letters for gam zeh ya’avor, ‘This too shall pass.’”

“A Can-Do, Get-It-Done Type of Guy”

Bornstein’s mother also instilled in him a deep appreciation for the value of education. Like faith, she’d tell him, education can’t be taken away. In 1958, he enrolled at Fordham’s College of Pharmacy, just as she embarked on a new chapter in her life. “My mother remarried and moved to Cuba because her sister was there,” he says. She would later return to the States and settle in South Florida, but at the time, Bornstein says, “I was pretty much homeless, and Fordham didn’t have any room in the dormitories, so they put me up in the infirmary.” It was the second time in his life that an infirmary saved him, he says. “I would probably have skipped college if it weren’t for that.”

In addition to providing Bornstein with room and board, Fordham gave him a partial scholarship. He spent summers working in the Catskills to help pay any remaining tuition costs. “I was a chamber maid, then a busboy, then a waiter, and finally a head waiter,” he recalls. “The salary was only about twelve dollars a month, but the tips made it.” On campus, he found a niche on the fencing team.

One of his former Fordham classmates, William Stavropoulos, PHA ’61, recalls Bornstein as a “nice, friendly guy.” He says he and his friends in G House at Martyrs’ Court never would have suspected the horrors Bornstein had been through. “I remember distinctly sitting around one day and a guy asked Mike about his tattoo. He mentioned the camp and said his mother used to hide him here and there, keep him out of sight of the guards, but he didn’t say much else. He was always upbeat.”

After graduation, Bornstein enrolled at the University of Iowa, where he earned a Ph.D. in pharmaceutics and analytical chemistry. But he says his greatest achievement there was meeting an undergraduate named Judy Cohan. “We obviously hit it off. He had the same interests I did, and he was persistent,” recalls Judy, who was studying special education. They attended movies and plays, and he accompanied her on visits to the children’s ward at local hospitals. “He was very caring of the children, and that was important to me.”

They were married nearly 50 years ago, on July 9, 1967, after Bornstein began his career at Dow Chemical in Zionsville, Indiana. While there, he reconnected with Stavropoulos, who had earned a Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry at the University of Washington and would go on to become chairman and CEO of Dow. The two, both newlyweds at the time, would see each other socially, and Stavropoulos even helped the Bornsteins move into their new apartment. But they lost touch over the years. “He went to work for Eli Lilly, and I stayed at Dow,” Stavropoulos recalls. In the late 1980s, Bornstein and his family moved to New Jersey, where he worked as a research manager for Johnson & Johnson, eventually rising to director of technical operations, a position that took him to Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, France, and elsewhere.

“He was a streetwise guy, and I always knew he was going to be a success,” Stavropoulos says. “When I think of Mike, I think of a positive, can-do, get-it-done type of guy. At Dow he was that way, and at Fordham too. It’s an incredible story. He’s obviously a courageous man.”

Fighting Intolerance with Compassion

Holinstat says her dad’s courage was especially evident during the process of writing the book. “My father is such a positive man, and he’s gone out of his way his entire life to show his kids and his grandkids nothing but positivity, so for him to dig deep and be willing to open up and talk to me about the deepest, darkest places in his memory was difficult for him, and it was hard for me because I knew how hard it was for him.” But the process has been well worth it, she says, explaining that they wrote Survivors Club with readers as young as 10 years old in mind.

“For my dad, a big piece of this was making sure that his grandkids understood the atrocities of the Holocaust. So it was really important to us to write something that the kids could grasp at this stage in their lives, and that they could share with their peers, because this next generation, most of them will grow up not having met a Holocaust survivor.”

In March, shortly after the book was published, it became a New York Times best-seller. The paper’s reviewer noted that the book combines the “emotional resolve of a memoir with the rhythm of a novel,” and that, although the book is marketed for young readers, “the equal measures of hope and hardship in its pages lend appeal to an audience of all ages.”

Holinstat waited decades for the opportunity to help her father tell his story, but she feels the timing of the book’s publication could not be more poignant or pointed, coming amid a recent surge in anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiments in the U.S. “I truly believe that this story is being released now for a reason, to remind people what happens when bigotry goes unanswered,” she says.

The core moral lesson of the Holocaust, she and her father believe, is the ease with which any group of people can be dehumanized. “The world can never forget what happens when discrimination is ignored,” Bornstein said last April at Congregation Beth-El Zedeck in Indianapolis. “And it’s not just discrimination against Jewish people but against all minorities, and that includes Muslims, Mexicans, and African Americans. It’s time for compassion; it’s time for empathy.”

Bornstein plans to return to Poland this year with Judy, their children, and other family members. Holinstat has been communicating with people in Poland about establishing a Holocaust memorial in Żarki, and the family will be going to Auschwitz, which Bornstein visited in 2001 with Judy and in 2010 with his son, Scott.

In the meantime, Jake Wolf, the grandson who persuaded Bornstein to share his story, is preparing for his freshman year at Syracuse University, where he intends to major in both communications and business. “In our family,” he says, “it’s so important to know how difficult it was for my grandpa. He never had any hate toward the world for what he was put through. And that inspires all of us. If he could get through that with a smile on his face, we can do anything.”

A “Survivors Club” Reunion in the Suburbs

Since the publication of the book, Bornstein has heard from many people who have thanked him for telling his story, including some who understand all too well what he and his family endured. Sarah Ludwig was the 4-year-old girl standing next to Bornstein in the iconic photo from Auschwitz. Tova Friedman, then 6, stood just behind Ludwig as the children showed their tattoos to Soviet soldiers. The three survivors recently learned that they live just miles from each other in suburban New Jersey.

On Sunday, June 4, they gathered with kids, grandkids, and other relatives for a reunion brunch at Holinstat’s home that included prayers of remembrance and celebration, and the use of one precious silver cup. For Holinstat, it was a remarkable coda to the experience of helping her father tell his story after all these years.

“The last time they saw each other, they were kids wearing prisoners’ stripes,” she says. “Now they’re surrounded by family.”

—Ryan Stellabotte is the editor of this magazine.

Watch NBC Nightly News‘ coverage of the reunion.

Where do they come from, and how do they get around? Fordham biologists produce the world’s first in-depth genetic study of brown rats, and investigate the mysterious, wily ways of New York’s biggest scourge.

New Yorkers love to hate their rats, shuddering whenever a pointy nose or a scaly tail peeks from behind a trash can or subway rail. So visitors to the First Street Green Art Park on New York’s Lower East Side were surprised one Saturday this past May when they came upon five street artists painting larger-than-life murals celebrating the city’s most reviled rodent—a rat giving the peace sign, a rat snuggled contently amid a vegetable ratatouille, a rat with an NYC baseball cap and a spray can, rats looking, well, cute.

The unusual project, “Street Art for Street Rats,” was intended to bring attention to the research of Fordham biology professor Jason Munshi-South, Ph.D., and his graduate students, who have spent the past four years trying to understand the species that, perhaps more than any other, has adapted itself to live side-by-side with humans in the urban environment.

“You’d think rats are so common, we’d know all about them, but in fact we don’t know very much about their ecology or evolutionary biology,” Munshi-South says.

Biologists don’t even know how many rats live in New York City. Estimates range from 250,000 to 2 million. Yet, argues Munshi-South, rats are as important to study as any other species, if not for their extreme resilience and adaptability, then for the insights into how we can fight back against the damage they cause and diseases they spread.

With the help of $670,000 in funding from the National Science Foundation, Munshi-South and his students have helped lift the veil of mystery to reveal the inner workings of New York’s rat population.

“The initial idea was to understand what a New York City rat is, from all ecological and evolutionary angles,” says Munshi-South. But the project soon expanded globally to examine where rats were coming from and how they got to New York. The lab put out a call to labs across the globe, and dozens of researchers from as far away as Japan and the Galápagos Islands sent in the genetic signatures of the rats in their neighborhoods—more than 300 samples in all. “It grew into an effort to understand the evolutionary history of rats all over the world,” he says.

A Long Global Journey

Other animals have adapted to live in cities—birds, mice, wild turkeys, and coyotes, for example, have moved into urban green spaces across the country. But rats may be the most successful at exploiting the human environment, says Matthew Combs, a Ph.D. student in Munshi-South’s lab. They’re also highly social animals that, once they establish a colony, reproduce and expand rapidly, learning from one another where to find the best sources of food—and which danger spots to avoid. “They are able to take advantage of all the resources we provide, even in the face of all our attempts to eradicate them,” Combs says.

In order to trace the journeys of rats around the world, the biologists in Munshi-South’s lab have availed themselves of recent advances in genetic research and data analysis.

“Anytime a population undergoes major changes, when it shrinks or expands or mixes with other lineages, it leaves a residue in the genome,” explains Munshi-South, who has been teaching at Fordham since 2013. To detect those residues, the lab uses a “big data” approach. Rats have some 2.7 billion base pairs in their genome. Using techniques developed for the Human Genome Project, the researchers are able to show through successive subtle gene variations which rats are related to which others, tracing their progression across both time and space.

The New York rat is known by many names, including the common rat and the brown rat. But its official name, the Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus), is a misnomer. Emily Puckett, a postdoc in Munshi-South’s lab who analyzed more than 300 rat DNA samples from 30 countries, discovered that the species actually originated in Mongolia, transitioning from forests to farms to villages as they adapted to human food sources—probably thousands of years ago, with the advent of agriculture. From there, they expanded both east to Japan and western North America, and west to Europe, where in the 1700s they stowed away on British ships bound for the bustling port of New York.

A Feisty, Unwelcoming Breed

To examine the history of rats closer to home, Munshi-South and Puckett got permission from the American Museum of Natural History to extract DNA from 100-year-old rat skulls and skins as a supplement to the samples they gathered from all over the city. They published their findings, the first in-depth study of its kind, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the flagship biological journal of the U.K.’s Royal Society.

While Munshi-South expected to see evidence of many waves of rat immigrants mixing in New York over time, mirroring the story of its human immigrants, that turned out not to be the case. In fact, all of the rats of New York can be traced to that initial wave in the 18th century, with little mixing with new arrivals since.

“We think that once rats get established and build big, healthy colonies, it’s hard for new rats to integrate and breed into the population,” he says. In other words, New York’s rats are so aggressive they fight off any newcomers. “That’s good news” for humans, he continues. “We are not at risk of novel diseases from a lot of new rats mixing with the local population.”

Combs has picked up the trail from there, looking at how rats are moving within New York. On any given day, he can be found setting and checking traps in every ZIP code of Manhattan, a difficult task given how adept rats are at avoiding danger. So far, he and his colleagues have caught more than 550 rats and produced genetic data for 250 of them since the start of the study.

“Most of the rats I trap are juveniles, only a couple weeks or a couple months old,” he says. “Those are the only ones foolish enough to walk into my traps.”

To find his quarry, Combs targets out-of-the-way spots behind trash cans and in the corners of parks, looking for telltale signs of burrows, pellets, or the greasy smudge marks from sebum, oil of their fur that marks well-traveled pathways. He often receives help from residents hanging out on sidewalks or stoops who are only too happy to tell him where the rats live in their neighborhoods—sometimes even letting him into their backyards to trap them.

Once he traps the rats, he brings them back to the lab where he extracts DNA samples and analyzes them for differences. So far, his research has revealed rats to be creatures of habit, rarely venturing more than 30 to 150 meters from their colonies. When they do stray, they tend to head north and south, possibly following the long, unobstructed paths of sewers and subway lines. As a result, a subtle north-south genetic gradient exists along the island, with a break in midtown.

“There seems to be an uptown group of rats and a downtown group of rats, with less movement around the midtown region,” says Combs. That break may be due to the neighborhood’s lack of residential buildings and green space, impeding their progress.

The next step in the research is to use computer models to ask what environmental attributes—such as water sources, open soil, sewers, and subway lines—determine how rats are distributed within the space. In addition, Combs will look at demographic patterns of rats’ human neighbors to see if, for example, rats are more prominent in socioeconomically depressed areas, as some research suggests.

Controlling Threats, Debunking Myths

In addition to its intrinsic value in understanding a species that lives so closely with humans, the project has public health implications. Rats can be a menace, damaging infrastructure and spreading diseases such as salmonella and leptospirosis to dogs and humans. If city officials are better able to understand where rats are coming from and how they get around, they can better control how they spread. Munshi-South has been collaborating with the New York City health department to help officials refine their strategy for exterminating rats. While much of that work remains confidential, Munshi-South says that part of the project is locating major reservoirs of rat colonies from which the rats might be spreading.

At the same time, Munshi-South’s lab has continued collaborating with researchers in other cities. Just as humans have built different urban environments, so too might rats adapt to them differently, following different patterns of movement in the open spaces of New Orleans, the parks of Vancouver, or the favelas of Salvador, Brazil. Researchers from all three cities have recently visited Fordham to compare notes and research techniques that will help tease out the ecological differences of rats, which may be just as pronounced as the cultural differences of the humans they live with.

The recent “Street Art for Street Rats” event was conceived by Combs as a way to help educate the public about the ecology of rats in all its complexity. The spark came when he ran into Jonathan Neville, a friend from his undergrad days at Hamilton College, who is a co-founder of the Centre-fuge Public Art Project, which works to “transform neighborhood eyesores” with vibrant murals.

While the artists were painting, Munshi-South, Combs, and others from the lab were on hand to teach passersby about how they use genetics to trace the journeys of rats around the city. And they debunked some common myths, such as the misconception that there are more rats than people in New York (actually, they say, there are 250,000 to 2 million rats, compared to 8.4 million humans) or that rats are able to squeeze their skeletons flat (though they can fit in tight spaces). Even so, they realize there are limitations to the average New Yorker’s tolerance.

“A lot of people do respect them and think they are fascinating,” says Combs, who likes their feistiness and adaptability. “But if someone thinks they are a scourge and is just interested in getting rid of them, I won’t try and change their mind.”

—Michael Blanding is a journalist and the author of two books, including The Map Thief (Avery, 2014).

The Signal Flame: A Novel

In his first novel, The Sojourn (a finalist for the National Book Award in 2011), Andrew Krivák told the story of Jozef Vinich, a sharpshooter in the Austro-Hungarian Army who survives World War I and immigrates to America with $50 in his pocket. He settles in northeastern Pennsylvania, rises from yard worker to co-owner of a roughing mill, and acquires 2,000 acres of land on which he builds a large home for his wife and children. But he and his descendants are a “war-haunted family in a war-torn century.” The Signal Flame, set in 1972, begins with Vinich’s death. As his daughter Hannah and grandson Bo mourn, they grapple with the news that Bo’s younger brother, Sam, who joined the Marines, has been reported as missing in action in Vietnam. They also grapple with the legacy of Sam and Bo’s father, who came home from World War II a silent, damaged man and was later killed in a hunting accident. “What they shared were the wars,” Krivák writes in a lyrical prologue to a lyrical, moving novel on the meaning of love, loss, and loyalty.

The Streets of Paris: A Guide to the City of Light Following in the Footsteps of Famous Parisians Throughout History by Susan Cahill, GSAS ’95 (St. Martin’s Press)

Susan Cahill first visited the City of Light during the 1960s, on her honeymoon with her husband, the writer Thomas Cahill, FCRH ’64. It’s a place, she writes, where “the streets are stories.” She takes readers through them in this travel guide, following the lives of 22 famous Parisians from the 12th century to the present. She writes about “The Scandalous Love of Héloise and Abelard,” “The Lonely Passion of Marie Curie,” and “Raising Hell in Pigalle,” where the “scruffy streets of the ninth were François Truffaut’s muse and mother.” Each chapter includes a lively cultural history, plus information about nearby attractions. The result is an engaging guide for travelers drawn to stories that, Cahill writes, “do not show up on historical plaques or in the voice-overs of flag-waving tour guides.”

Pause: Harnessing the Life-Changing Power of Giving Yourself a Break by Rachael O’Meara, GABELLI ’04, (Tarcher Perigee)

Six years ago, Rachael O’Meara was a customer support manager at Google. The job made her “the envy of all my friends,” she writes, but she was burning out fast, feeling overwhelmed, unfulfilled, and unable to find the off switch. Her work and well-being suffered. Eventually, with support from her boss, she took a 90-day unpaid leave and returned to the company in a new role, with a healthier outlook. In this book, she shares her story and stories of others who have discovered that a pause, even a “forced pause” like getting laid off, can lead to a more fulfilling life. She offers tips for creating a daily “pause plan.” It can be as simple as a five-minute walk or a day unplugged from digital devices, she writes, but the benefits are priceless: greater “mental clarity” and “a chance to remember what ‘lights you up.’”

A Foreign Service officer prepares for her first diplomatic post

Sama Habib got her first lesson in diplomacy as a preschooler, not long after she and her family immigrated to the U.S. from Egypt.

“I was calling everyone to come and play, and all the kids looked at me like I was an alien,” recalls Habib, who was 4 when her family settled in Monroe, New York. “‘It’s not that they don’t like you,’ the teacher told me. ‘It’s just that they don’t speak Arabic.’ That’s when I learned that if I want people to play on the jungle gym with me, I have to learn to speak their language.”

This spring, Habib has been studying Spanish and U.S. immigration law at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia, as she prepares to set off in August on her first diplomatic post—as a consular officer in Monterrey, Mexico.

It’s a career path she first glimpsed in 2010, right after high school, when she was selected for a State Department program that fosters transatlantic understanding. At Fordham, she majored in business and earned spots at a U.N. conference in Scotland and a seminar in Moldova on peace building in Eastern Europe.

She drew on her background to add depth to class discussions about the Egyptian uprising of January 2011, taking “an even-handed and fair approach to the region,” says Marcus Holmes, Ph.D., who taught international relations at Fordham.

After graduating in 2014, she earned fellowships that allowed her to work at the U.S. Embassy in London, earn a master’s degree in international affairs at Columbia University, and intern at the State Department and at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok.

Now she’s “primed and prepped,” she says, to pursue a diplomatic career made possible by her family’s emigration.

“For me to be doing what I’m doing now, not only as a woman but as a Coptic Christian woman, that just wouldn’t exist in Egypt,” she says. “The American Dream is why I’m here, and it’s why the Foreign Service speaks to me.”

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An editor teams up with her heroes in the marvelous world of comic books

Kateri Woody had dreamed of getting her name in a comic book since she was 13. Now an associate managing editor for special projects at Marvel Entertainment, she has her name in so many she can’t count.

“As soon as I realized I would be going to school in New York and that Marvel was here, I applied to their internship program,” Woody says. She was particularly drawn to Marvel comics because “the stories are based in our world,” she says, “so everything happens in places we recognize.”

She finally landed the much-coveted internship during her second year in Fordham’s master’s degree program in English, and it launched her publishing career. After graduating, Woody went on to join Oxford University Press.

“I always told my boss at Oxford that the only reason I would leave is if Marvel wanted me back full time,” she says. After almost four years, that’s exactly what happened.

Now she is completely immersed in the world of Marvel. Her favorite character, Marvel’s Captain America, is tattooed on her right forearm. “He’s always resonated with me, especially because of the World War II connection,” Woody says. “My grandfather was a paratrooper, and I would hear his war stories and then see the echoes in the Captain America stories.”

A close second is the lesser-known Squirrel Girl, who had made appearances in previous series but got her own in 2015. “She’s vibrant, she’s funny, and she’s different,” Woody says. “A lot of heroes have identity crises because they’re putting on a mask and being someone else. But Squirrel Girl, or Doreen, knows who she is. She’s not burdened by that.” Plus, Woody says, “She’s the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.”

Woody’s time at Fordham also gave her a new hero outside the Marvel canon: Benjamin Franklin. “I think about my Benjamin Franklin class a lot,” she says, somewhat surprised at herself. “I’m not really sure why. I guess because he was this industrious, self-made man who revolutionized the world in many ways. But he was funny too.

“And he believed that if you want to have leisure time, you have to put in the work. That’s really stuck with me.”

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A physicist treks to the South Pole to map light left over from the Big Bang

Joshua Sobrin is well acquainted with frontiers, and not just because of the time he’s spent at the South Pole. As a cosmologist, or someone who studies the origins of the universe, he’s part of a scientific field that has undergone its own “Big Bang” of sudden expansion since 1964.

That’s when scientists discovered the Big Bang’s leftover radiation, providing evidence for what was once considered a “crazy theory” and kicking off a new era of research projects in cosmology, Sobrin says.

As a doctoral student in experimental cosmology at the University of Chicago, he’s working on one of those projects, helping to upgrade a radio telescope at the South Pole so it can study the heavens with greater acuity.

The South Pole’s dry, untroubled atmosphere is one of the best on Earth for studying the cosmic microwave background, the term for omnipresent radiation left over from the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, Sobrin says. This background once seemed uniform, but better technology has teased out disturbances that indicate what was happening when the universe was just 380,000 years old.

This “baby picture of the universe” could tell us more about the sorts of matter and energy that make up the universe, or answer puzzles about its expansion after the Big Bang, he says.

Sobrin spent 10 weeks at the South Pole in 2016 and plans to return in December. He helped design and integrate the telescope’s new receiver, which contains optics and detectors cooled near absolute zero for maximum sensitivity.

Sobrin double-majored in physics and religious studies at Fordham and earned a master’s degree in the philosophical foundations of physics from Columbia University. He would eventually like to become a physics professor who can also engage with students’ theological and philosophical questions.

While theology and science take entirely different approaches, he says, “you’re sort of as close as you can get to brushing up to theological questions when you start talking about the universe’s beginnings.”

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A medical doctor considers how socioeconomic factors affect our health

Dr. Hussein Safa’s ambitions were shaped by a war. It broke out in 2006 in Lebanon, where he grew up, and he was impressed by the doctors who showed up in his country and risked their lives to provide much-needed medical help.

He later learned the name of their organization: Doctors Without Borders. “When I learned about that, I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do. That’s how I want to give back at some point.’”

Today he’s closing in on that ambition, having just finished medical school at Creighton University and preparing to begin his residency at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.

The idea of giving back was reinforced by his education at Fordham. Grants and scholarships made it possible for him to attend, and the University’s Urban Plunge program fueled his own extraordinary community service efforts, which were recognized by Fordham’s Dorothy Day Center for Service and Justice.

At Creighton, he founded an organization to advocate for the needs of LGBTQ patients and providers. And he sought out his residency program because, in addition to its medical training, it teaches community involvement and advocacy so that doctors can better meet the health care needs of urban, diverse populations.

It was Urban Plunge that opened Safa’s eyes to the particular problems facing some urban residents, like a lack of affordable nutritious food.

“Human health doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” Safa says, expressing a holistic view reinforced at Fordham and at Creighton, both Jesuit universities that nurture the whole person. “The whole person includes their social environment.”

He feels privileged to have the opportunity to be a doctor and wants to use it for others’ benefit. After completing his three-year residency, which will also include an HIV and global health track, Safa plans to join Doctors Without Borders so he can help people in distressed areas, regardless of whether they can pay for health care. He himself didn’t have health insurance until he came to the United States with his parents and settled in Staten Island just before his 17th birthday.

“I know what it’s like to be constantly afraid that you’re going to get sick and you don’t have money for it,” he says. “That’s part of the reason that I want to give back.”

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A medical writer breaks down complex research to help advance cures

While earning his doctorate in chemistry, studying the finer points of cell division, Evan Smoak made a discovery that had nothing to do with centromeres or proteins or germ lines.

What he discovered was that he loved communicating science. His favorite task was translating jargon into simple narratives that engage an audience and move scientific discussions forward. And it was this realization that brought him to his current job at the crux of research into cancers and rare blood diseases.

Working as a medical writer for a medical consultancy group in Philadelphia, he develops scripts, presentations, and other materials that provide a common vocabulary for everyone involved in creating treatments—from the research lab to the doctor’s office and beyond. His work might help medical thought leaders understand the results of clinical trials, for instance, or help scientists and doctors discuss the feasibility of turning a particular lab result into a treatment, he says.

It’s the kind of work that will grow more important in light of new anti-cancer initiatives like the Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot announced in 2016 by the Obama administration. “As the science becomes more complex and more far-reaching, I think that it’s more and more important to be able to facilitate this kind of dialogue” so that the most promising research avenues get attention, he says.

Before earning his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania, he co-authored seven articles in scientific journals as a Fordham undergraduate, helped by Fordham grants that allowed him to pursue summer research. He was mentored by chemistry professor Ipsita Banerjee, Ph.D., whose guidance, he says, “was about so much more than just the science; it was about how can you effectively communicate what you’re doing.”

He would eventually like to find creative ways to communicate science clearly to the public.

“We do have a responsibility,” he says, “to be more cogent in the way we put together our science for a nonscientific audience.”

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A psychiatric resident aims to help underserved populations

When Carlisdania Mendoza began medical school at Duke University, she brought many of Fordham’s Jesuit values with her.

Her undergraduate experience in STEP and CSTEP at Fordham—two New York state programs designed to support minority students and prepare them for careers in science, health, and technology—taught her that “you don’t do things reflexively,” she says. “You’re rigorous and methodical and reflect on what you’re bringing to the table. Being partners with the community is more enriching for everyone involved.”

She received a half-tuition scholarship to Duke’s new primary care track, where she began working with a support group for transgender Latina women, including some who were undocumented. But she wanted to do more. “I knew I could go deeper,” she says, “and help these women live longer and trust the medical system. What’s more humanizing than acknowledging that someone has a need and then helping them get that?”

Mendoza was frustrated when she couldn’t get the support she needed to create a medical clinic for the women, but the experience made her rethink her trajectory. Midway through medical school, she gave back her scholarship and switched to Duke’s psychiatry track, a bold move that did not surprise Renaldo Alba, FCRH ’02, GSE ’10, associate director of Fordham’s STEP and CSTEP programs.

“Carli is strong-willed and stubborn in her principles. She doesn’t do things because they are financially convenient,” Alba says. “Other folks are looking to win, win, win. Carli is looking to do good, good, good.”

Mendoza, who was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to the Bronx with her family when she was 10, had not considered the mental health field until she entered medical school. But during her psychiatry clinic, she realized how rewarding she found working with mentally ill patients. “It felt very easy and natural for me,” she says.

Now, having graduated from Duke in 2016 and completed the first year of her psychiatric residency at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Mendoza knows she’s found her path. “I just feel so energized working with people and achieving goals with them,” she says.

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Meet these and 17 other young alumni—all in their 20s—who are amplifying the spirit of passionate engagement that’s been at the heart of the Fordham mission since 1841.

A former Jesuit Volunteer aims to reduce health disparities

Soon after Brittney Cavaliere began volunteering at Joseph’s House in Washington, D.C., James Hardy arrived.

“He was a pain, he really was,” Cavaliere says with a laugh, recalling how the 60-something-year-old acted when he first got to Joseph’s House, an organization that offers shelter and end-of-life care for homeless men and women with HIV and cancer.

As Cavaliere describes it in The Messengers, a documentary film by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Lucian Perkins, Hardy “wanted help, but he was too proud to ask.”

That changed when his cancer almost killed him.

By the time Hardy had bounced back, he and Cavaliere had developed a deep friendship that was defining for both of them, she says. “I think we were learning to be vulnerable together.”

Joseph’s House was Cavaliere’s second assignment as a member of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, which places volunteers in communities tackling challenges like homelessness, hunger, mental illness, and poverty. Though she had worked with similar populations before, it was a particularly emotional time for Cavaliere. Even after leaving, she spoke with Hardy every day until he passed away. A picture he gave her of himself—“I want for you always to remember me like that,” he told her—still hangs on her bedroom wall.

“My time at Joseph’s House helped me better understand how to be a party in a relationship,” Cavaliere says, “how to be my best self, how to be vulnerable, how to love.”

It also helped Cavaliere confirm that social work was not the best route for her. She went on to explore a research career in D.C. before returning to New York to pursue a master’s degree in public health at Columbia University. Since college, Cavaliere had focused on supporting those affected by HIV/AIDS, but in graduate school she expanded her focus to health policy and practice.

“If I learned anything from my time at Joseph’s House, it’s that people shouldn’t be dying just because they’re black or poor,” Cavaliere says. “HIV shouldn’t be affecting different populations disproportionately because they’re marginalized, because their voices aren’t heard by the government or by policymakers.”

Having graduated this spring, she hopes to fight for health equity for all through community organizing and advocacy work.

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