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Nechama Tec is a Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. She received her Ph.D. in sociology at Columbia University, where she studied and worked with the sociologist Daniel Bell, and is a Holocaust scholar. Her 1986 book, When Light Pierced the Darkness and her 1984 memoir Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood both received the Merit of Distinction Award from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rit. She is also author of the book Defiance: The Bielski Partisans on which the 2008 film Defiance is based, as well as a study of women in the holocaust. She was awarded the 1994 International Anne Frank Special Recognition prize for that book.
She was born in Lublin, Poland to a family of Polish Jews in 1931, and was 8 years old in 1939 when Poland was invaded by Germany. She survived the Holocaust thanks to her life being saved by Polish Catholics. After the war she immigrated to Israel and later moved to the United States, where she earned a doctorate at Columbia University.
She is the mother of film director Roland Tec. Her daughter, Leora Tec, is an attorney who did work in the Nazi Hunter Division of the Justice Department. Her husband, Dr. Leon Tec, was a noted child psychiatrist and author of Fear of Success and the autobiography, Adventure and Destiny.
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