Thomas Mermall

In 1947 Thomas Mermall and his father managed to leave Europe and settle in Chile for three years before moving to the United States where his father’s brother lived. Mermall completed his studies in the US and became a naturalized citizen. He went on to become a full professor of Spanish Literature at Brooklyn College and formed part of the doctoral program of the City University of New York.

When the Nazis reached Uzhhorod in the spring of 1944, Mermall’s father, Gabriel, hoping to save his wife and child, returned from the Russian front where he had been part of a Hungarian motorized army unit. Mermall’s mother was too sick to travel, but he and his father fled into the forest where they were helped by a series of local residents until settling into a hayloft which housed a detachment of cavalry from the collaborationist Hungarian government, something which created a constant danger for them. Mermall’s mother was deported to Auschwitz where she died a few days after her family’s flight from the city. However, by what Mermall referred to as “the flip side of destiny” given the odds against his survival, he and his father were freed in November 1944 by the arrival of the Red Army. Thomas Mermall, it turned out, had been the only Jewish child in the entire region to have survived.

Thomas Mermall, Uzhhorod (in the Ruthenia region of Czechoslovakia, now the Ukraine) July 25, 1937 – New York City, September 22, 2011, Hispanist and professor of Spanish literature. Mermall's studies focused primarily on modern Spanish literature and thought, primarily the developments after the Spanish Civil War, including analyses and commentaries on the works of José Ortega y Gasset, Unamuno, Pedro Laín Entralgo, Juan Rof Carballo and Francisco Ayala, as well as comments on the importance of the essay in Spanish literature.