The following obituary ran in the Boston Globe on Friday, March 26, 2010.
Helen Mahut; professor aided Polish resistance in WWII
In the guise of a young Catholic girl from the provinces during the Warsaw Uprising of World War II, Helen Mahut worked with the Polish resistance movement, her Aryan looks belying her Jewish heritage. She was then Helena Chechowicz, an identity given her by the real Helena to protect her from the Nazi German occupiers.
She had come close to death at least once when she lied about her lineage in a roomful of Nazis, who had someone measure her long, shapely legs; it was decided she looked more Nordic than Jewish.
On her way out of the inquisition room, another Nazi officer looked her in the eye and said, “But, you are Jewish?’’ She struggled for the right answer. “I am,’’ she said. The officer replied, “If you hadn’t admitted it, I would have shot you like a dog.’’
Dr. Mahut, a psychologist and researcher, told that story to Phyllis Benjamin and Michael Shia of Cambridge, a couple she considered family. For years, Sunday pancakes at their home was a tradition.
Dr. Mahut, who taught at Northeastern University for 23 years and was considered a pioneer in the field of behavioral and cognitive neurosciences, died March 7 at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center of complications of chronic heart disease. She was 90.
A Cambridge resident for 45 years, she had been in the rehabilitation center of Coolidge House in Brookline for several weeks.
Her advanced classes at Northeastern were among the most popular, as were her French Normandy dinners, Shia said. She continued writing papers on her research, funded by the National Institutes of Health, until 2005, he said.
“Helen was a remarkable woman,’’ said Mark B. Moss, professor and chairman of the department of anatomy and neurobiology at Boston University School of Medicine. He said she changed the lives of the students she mentored throughout her career, some of whom went on to be quite successful.
“She not only taught her students the nature and practice of science,’’ he said, “but also, and perhaps more importantly, the nature of human behavior.
“She was a survivor at all levels and allowed us to observe her engage these skills every day. She made us aware and sensitive to our own selves, who we were as individuals, and how to make the best of ourselves. She was demanding and was relentless in teaching us science and human nature. Without question, she was the most influential person in my life.’’
Her major research interests, according to Joanne L. Miller, chairwoman of the department of psychology at Northeastern University, were brain function, learning, memory, and motivation.
In 1992, the Globe reported that Dr. Mahut was researching short-term memory loss, looking into the impact of brain damage caused by Alzheimer’s disease. “As a result of painstaking studies with rhesus monkeys, first at McGill University in Montreal and later at MIT and Northeastern, Dr. Mahut demonstrated that a healthy hippocampus is crucial to preservation of short-term memory.’’
Though she was 72, the Globe said, Dr. Mahut “keeps on with both research and teaching, refusing to be called ‘professor emerita’ at a time of life when most of her academic colleagues talk about how to occupy their retirement years.’’
“Every time I start an experiment,’’ she told the Globe, “I still feel like a graduate student, scared as to whether or not we will get meaningful results. It’s exciting.’’
She was born Walentyna Dudekzak in Kiev, Russia, the daughter of a Polish Jewish engineer and a Russian aristocrat mother. She was later known as Valentina, but most consistently as Helen, from her borrowed identity.
While attending Oxford University in England in 1939, according to her memoirs, she was called home to Poland by her father.
With the threat that Germany would invade Poland, she felt she had to go, though, she wrote, her father did not believe Germany would invade. She became bored at her family’s home, she wrote, so she packed her backpack with “bread, salted lard and some sugar and made my way to Lvov or Lemberg, the only university town free of Germans.’’
There, she was admitted to the university in the department of philology and Oriental studies. She was assigned to live in a dormitory full of male medical students, but soon mixed-gender dorms were banned. Medical student Arthur Harlig agreed to “a marriage of convenience,’’ she wrote, so she could live in quarters for married students. Harlig became a doctor and was forced by the Nazis to serve in a concentration camp, where he was eventually killed.
Her memoirs also tell how her Jewish father, her mother, and her brother were rounded up by Nazis and burned alive in a village schoolhouse.
She joined the Polish resistance in Warsaw, posing as a Catholic girl from the provinces while doing all the work an underground requires. Among other activities she taught English to resistance workers, one of whom was Stefan Mahut.
After the war, she administered refugee camps for the governor general of Austria. Stefan Mahut left to study in Canada and Helen agreed to marry him. Their marriage ended in divorce.
She enrolled at McGill University, where she received her doctorate in physiological and comparative psychology in 1955. Her mentor was D.O. Hebb, a distinguished researcher on brain function.
Seth Sharpless, retired professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, was a graduate student at McGill with Dr. Mahut.
“Helen loved animals, and in Hebb’s laboratory of comparative psychology, there were many dogs and rats and monkeys to love. It was not unusual to see Helen issuing from her laboratory with a black-and-white-spotted lab rat crawling out of her lab coat pocket or clinging to her shoulder.
“Helen could dominate any social gathering with ease; one could not be in the same room with Helen without being conscious of her presence. She tended to dramatize everything . . . Everyone she knew she was convinced was important in the general scheme of things, either as villains or heroes, and she always had a story to tell about them."
From 1955 to 1966, Dr. Mahut held research associate positions at Montreal Neurological Institute and the psychology department at MIT. In 1966, she joined the psychology department of Northeastern, where she played “a key role in the department’s growth and development over many years," Miller said. She retired in 1989.
She never forgot Europe’s indebtedness to the wartime Allied Forces, Shia said. On her frequent walks around Boston, he said, “whenever she saw a group in uniform, Helen would always invite them for coffee."
She loved jazz, he said, and at the old Tower record store was pleased to be known as “Foxy Lady."
She had requested cremation and that her ashes be returned to France, but did not specify what to do with them. Shia and Benjamin plan to scatter them along the beaches of Normandy in April. A service will be held in Boston.
There are no immediate survivors.