Holocaust survivor Leon Schwarzbaum, a key witness in trials of alleged Nazi war criminals, died March 13 at the age of 101, according to the International Auschwitz Committee (IAC). “His death represents a great loss to the collective memory,” said Christoph Heubner, executive vice president of the committee.

Mr. Schwarzbaum testified in 2016 against former Auschwitz camp guard Reinhold Hanning, who was sentenced to five years in prison. In late 2021, he appeared as a witness in the trial of Josef Schuetz, a former guard at the Sachsenhausen camp, and had been scheduled to testify again.

Mr. Schwarzbaum was the only member of his family to survive the camps of Auschwitz, Buchenwald. After the war, he campaigned tirelessly to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive through lectures and talks around the world. He had often expressed anger and regret that so few Nazi war criminals had been brought to justice. “He did not want hatred, he wanted justice,” the IAC said.

Barrie R. Cassileth, whose efforts to bring treatments like acupuncture and massage into mainstream cancer care helped countless patients weather the pain of chemotherapy, radiation and terminal illness, died Feb. 26 at an assisted-living home in Beverly Hills, CA. She was 83.

Dr. Cassileth founded the integrative Medicine Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. What started with one woman in a small office grew to a staff of about 60 people, with its own four-story building. Today, thousands of cancer patients at Sloan Kettering, and in similar programs nationwide, benefit from what she called complementary care — the result, Dr. Cassileth always insisted, of advances in conventional medical care.

“Quality of life has only become an issue since enough patients have been around long enough to worry about quality of life,” she told The Washington Post in 2000.”

Madeleine K. Albright, a child of Czech refugees, who fled from Nazi invaders and Communist oppressors, and then flourished as a diplomat in the United States, died March 23 in Washington, CD. She was 84.

Enveloped by a veil of family secrets hidden from her for most of her life, Ms. Albright rose to power and fame as a brilliant analyst of world affairs and a White House counselor on national security. Under President Bill Clinton, she became the country’s representative to the United Nations (1993-97) and Secretary of State (1997-2001), making her the highest-ranking woman in the history of American government at the time.

It was not until she became Secretary of State that she accepted proof that, as she had long suspected, her ethnic/religious background was not what she had thought. She learned that her family was Jewish and that her parents had protectively converted to Roman Catholicism curing WWII, raising their children as Catholics without telling them of their Jewish heritage. She also discovered that 26 family members, including three grandparents, had been murdered in the Holocaust.

Esther Pollard, the wife of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard died Jan. 31 at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Israel. She was 68.

Born in Toronto as Elaine Zeitz, she devoted her life to bringing about the freedom of her husband. She met Jonathan Pollard on an Israel trip when they were teenagers. When she heard he had been arrested, she started writing him letters. They were married in 1993.

They moved to Israel a year ago, following the removal of his parole restrictions that prevented him from leaving New York. Jonathan Pollard, a former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst was sentenced to life imprisonment and served a 30-year term for passing classified information to Israel.

Harvey G. Stack, the patriarch of the family firm that calls itself the nation’s largest rare coin business, died

on Jan. 3 in New York. He was 93.

Mr. Stack joined Stack’s Rare Coins as a teenager in 1947, 14 years after his father and uncle had transformed what his great-grandfather had founded in 1858 as a foreign exchange house in Lower Manhattan into a dealership devoted exclusively to collectible currency.

Before retiring in 2009, he developed a standardized grading system for appraising coins, and he expanded demand among hobbyists by urging Congress to approve the U.S. Mint’s enormously popular 50 State Quarters Program which, beginning in 1999, honored each state with a commemorative coin in the order in which they had ratified the Constitution or were admitted to the union.

“History shows that rare coins of good quality have outperformed the Dow Jones industrials, real estate, and almost every other form of investment,” he said. But he counseled patience and pointed out that returns depended on two major factors: quality and rarity. What he looks for, he said, are coins that are “a little away from what a fellow can ordinarily find in his pocket or in mama’s shoe box.”