Margot Heuman was 14 when she and her family were deported to Theresienstadt in 1943, a Jewish transit ghetto for those who would be sent to the death camps. Her father died there. Her mother and younger sister would perish later in the camp at Stutthof. But Margot survived, she said, because she had fallen in love with a Viennese girl named Dita Neumann, and their relationship and caring for each other had kept them alive.

After Bergen-Belsen, the site of Dita and Margot’s final internment, was liberated in April 1945, Dita was sent to England and the Swedish Red Cross brought Margot to Stockholm, where she was cared for by a schoolteacher who had volunteered to take her in. In 1947, she moved to New York to reunite with her mother’s brother. She attended City College, and later married Charles Mendelson, an accountant. She died on May 11 at a hospital in Green Valley, Ariz. She was 94. She is survived by a son and a daughter, five grandchildren and one great-grandson.

She and Dita remained friends throughout their lives. Dita became a nurse and married a doctor in Canada. When she died of cancer in 2011, Ms. Heuman was at her side.

Robert Wallach, whose career as a trial lawyer in California was overshadowed by his connection to one of the biggest corruption scandals to hit Washington during the Reagan Administration, died on

May 15 at his home in Alameda, CA. He was 88.

From the moment he graduated at the top of his law school class from the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Wallach was widely considered one of the best personal injury lawyers in California. Yet, in the early 1980s, he shuttered his practice and moved to Washington to become an unofficial adviser to Edwin Meese III, a friend since law school who had become a counselor to President Ronald Reagan.           Most of his work in Washington was pro bono, including advising a small defense contractor in the South Bronx called Wedtech. Mr. Wallach wasn’t the only Washington figure working with Wedtech. It later emerged that the company had poured huge sums into the coffers of politicians, lobbyists and former administration officials to win big Pentagon deals, often doctoring invoices to hide bribes. Wedtech soon had $250 million in contracts.

Mr. Wallach was convicted of fraud in 1989 and sentenced to six years in prison. The case was thrown out on appeal. He returned to the Bay area and began to rebuild his reputation. Over the course of his 58-year career, he took 283 cases to verdict and lost just 14 of them.

Walter Abish, a widely admired if not widely read American author whose early life consisted of hasty escapes from hostile forces in Nazi-era Austria and revolutionary China, died on May 28 in Manhattan. He was 90.

“Though he has published relatively late and little,” John Updike wrote in a review of Mr. Abish’s

memoir, Double Vision: A Self-Portrait, in The New Yorker in 2004, he “projects a distinctive presence in  contemporary letters.” Overall, Mr. Abish published three novels, three collections of short stories, a volume of poems, and the memoir.

His most acclaimed novel was How German Is it, which explored the complex interplay between modern Germany, with its strong postwar economy and ordered society, and its roots in the Nazi era. The book won a PEN/Faulkner prize for fiction in 1981 — one of a string of accolades that punctuated Mr. Abish’s life as a writer and scholar at several American universities and colleges. He became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998.

Boris Pahor, a novelist in the Slovene language, who was best known for his descriptions of life as a member of the Slovenian minority in pre-WWII Fascist Italy, and as a Nazi concentration camp survivor, died May 30 in Trieste, Italy. He was 108.

In his novel Necropolis, he visits the Natzweiler-Struthof camp 20 years after his relocation to Dachau. Following Dachau, he was relcated three more times: to Mittelbau-Dora, Haerzungen, and finally to Bergen-Belsen, which was liberated on April 15, 1945.

Pahor, a prominent figure in the Slovene minority in Italy, was awarded the Legion of Honour by the French government, and the Cross of Honour for Science and Art by the Austrian government, and was nominated for the Nobel prize for literature by the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

George Shapiro, a Hollywood talent manager who oversaw the careers of comic personalities like Jerry Seinfeld, Andy Kaufman and Carl Reiner, died on May 26 at his home in Beverly Hills, CA. He was 91.

Mr. Shapiro was most closely associated with Jerry Seinfeld, The New York Times said. He signed Seinfeld as a client soon after watching him perform at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles in 1980, and  lobbied NBC to build a series around him. He was an executive produced of the hugely popular sitcom.

Mr. Shapiro first watched Andy Kaufman perform at the Improv comedy club in Los Angeles in 1975 and was impressed by his bizarre, idiosyncratic act. He soon signed him and persuaded him to join the cast of the sitcom “Taxi” in the role of Latke.

Other clients included Robert Wuhl and the producer and writer Bill Lawrence, who is known for the TV series “Spin City” and “Scrubs.”

Andrée Geulen was not Jewish, but because of her, 300-400 Jewish children were saved during the Nazi occupation of Belgium. For that she was honored in 1989 by Yad Vashem as a Righteous Among the Nations, as recognition given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazi genocide.

She was a young Belgian teacher at an all-girls boarding school in Brussels in the 1940s when her Jewish students were no longer showing up for school. She soon learned why: They and their families had been rounded up by the Gestapo and sent to a camp in Mechelen, northeast of Brussels — a way station on the road to Auschwitz.

She volunteered to help a clandestine group, the Committee for the Defense of Jews, that spirited Jewish children out of harm’s way, to convents, monasteries, boarding schools, farms and families around the country that were willing to hide them. She said in testimony after the war, “I had some addresses, and I saw it as a race between myself and the Gestapo, who would get to the family first.”

She died at 100, on May 31, in a Brussels nursing home, the last survivor of a cadre of women who, working for the committee, together rescued some 3,000 Jewish children. They could not tell the parents where their children were heading for fear of exposing the families or the institutions hiding them.

After the war, Ms. Geulen fetched many hidden children and reunited them with parents who had emerged from their own hiding or who had survived the camps. She found apartments for the families, solicited charities to pay for adequate furnishings and negotiated with manufacturers for mattresses, blankets and sheets to give to the families.

One of the children was Helene Weiss, then an 8-year-old whom Ms. Geulen took to a farm owned by a Catholic family. When Mrs. Weiss, now 89, a retired bookkeeper living in Baltimore, learned of Ms. Geulen’s address at an event for hidden children, she wrote her a letter of gratitude for risking her life. “I sent her pictures of my children and grandchildren,” Ms. Weiss recalled in a phone interview, “and said, ‘If it weren’t for you, they wouldn’t be here.’”

Charlotte Frank, who blazed a career path beginning as a fourth-grade teacher in New York City to become a policymaker codifying ambitious curricula for millions of students, died on May 26 at her home in Manhattan. She was 93.

The daughter of unschooled Eastern European immigrants, Dr. Frank was recruited in 1980 to oversee curriculum and instruction for the New York City school system by Chancellor Frank J. Macchiarola. She is credited with bringing new thinking to the teaching of reading and math, helping to modernize sex education and supporting the instruction of evolution by barring science textbooks that taught creationism. During her tenure, Ms. Frank argued for universal full-day kindergarten and initiated summer programs to instruct teachers at all levels in how to counter racial prejudice in classrooms.