Dr. Albert Bourla, Chairman and CEO of Pfizer, grew up in a city of ghosts: Thessaloniki, Greece, where 48,000 of its 50,000 Jews had been annihilated by the Nazis.
The stories he heard at the family dinner table detailed his mother’s imprisonment and near-miraculous escape from a Nazi firing squad and his father’s years hiding out with Christian identity papers in Athens.
The university where he studied was built atop an old Jewish cemetery, the tombstones of more than 300,000 used for construction materials.
He never forgot . . . and is committed to ensuring that the world does not either, a chilling challenge at a moment when 20 percent of the global population is unaware that the Holocaust happened and fewer than 250,000 survivors remain alive to teach them that it did.
Dr. Bourla joins us to talk about the challenge we face today with a rise in antisemitism. He believes we all have an obligation to stand against hate, drawing on lessons from his family and Thessaloniki, his fears concerning the distortion of Holocaust history and his optimism that we can reverse the tide of indifference.
Dr. Bourla will be in conversation with Richard Salomon, a Harvard-trained lawyer who co-founded the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center. Mr. Salomon’s father escaped the Holocaust in Lithuania thanks to a Japanese diplomat who defied his government by giving visas to imperiled Jews.