My cousin Paul Felenbok, who has died aged 84, was, like myself, a child survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and the Holocaust. Since the end of the second world war he had lived in France, and for many years he was an astronomer at the Paris Observatory.
The son of Jacob Felenbok, a jeweller, and Sabina (nee Herzlich), Paul was born in Warsaw, and grew up there in the early years of the war. The Germans established the Warsaw ghetto in 1940, sending many among its Jewish population to Nazi concentration camps. Paul’s family – his parents, and their two sons, seven-year-old Paul, and his teenaged brother, Georges – escaped through the sewers in 1943, just before the Warsaw uprising that May. As they fled across Poland, assisted by smugglers, German soldiers discovered and shot his parents.
Paul and his brother remained hidden, witnessing the German retreat and the arrival of Soviet troops in 1944, and eventually were able to travel in 1946 to Paris, where Paul was raised in an orphanage. He had had no formal education until he arrived in France but gained his baccalaureate, then a scholarship to study at the Sorbonne. After gaining a degree in physics and a certificate in fluid mechanics, he joined the Paris Observatory, spent a year in the US, at the University of California, Berkeley, and was then appointed as an astronomer at the Paris Observatory, where he remained until his retirement in 2004.
An expert in spectroscopy, he was, above all, a brilliant and inventive instrumentalist. He made several major advances in spectroscopy and astronomy, including the development of vacuum UV spectroscopy in the laboratory in the 1970s, providing data that would become indispensable for future space missions.
The development of astronomy in the French Alps village of Saint-Véran is another of his great achievements. In the 1960s, he identified the remarkable astronomical qualities of the Château-Renard site above Saint-Véran. He founded and led the development of the Maison du Soleil, which houses the high-resolution spectrograph Sharmor on loan from the Paris Observatory.
Paul was an extraordinary man, with a sparkling intelligence, a great leader, pragmatic, humane, generous and dedicated to others. He often visited the UK in connection with his work, and to see family here. He was devoted to his wife Betty (nee Szobad), whom he married in 1959, and daughters, Véronique and Isabelle, and five grandchildren, all of whom survive him.
Paul almost never spoke of his childhood. A few years ago, convinced by his daughter Véronique, he finally agreed to entrust his memories to a writer and theatre director, David Lescot. This resulted in a deeply moving play, Ceux Qui Restent (Those Who Remain), published in 2015 and shown at theatres in Paris, America and Warsaw.
