Kurt was born in 1929 in Vienna to a family originating in Romania and Poland. Although he had a doctorate in Chemistry, Kurt's father was unable to find work as a scientist due to anti-Semitism , so started a small company in the apartment building where the family lived, manufacturing ski-bindings. Kurt attended an integrated school on the grounds of the Schonbrunn Summer Palace in Vienna. After Hitler annexed Austria (the Anschluss, Kurt attended a segregated school in another neighborhood. He recalls the Kristallnacht as Nazi's rifled through and stole their precious belongings. Soon after, the family left Vienna by train to Cologne, Germany and paid a smuggler to get them across the Dutch-German border and then to Antwerp in Belgium. They were in Antwerp for about 8 months, while Kurt's father tried to make arrangements to leave Europe. In August,1939, they were able to leave for Montreal, Canada, where a colleague of Kurt's father, who was in the ski-binding business sponsored them. Kurt spent the rest of his teenage years in Montreal, and went on to become a world-renowned physicist and human rights activist.
