A WELCOME ADDITION TO MY QUINE STORIES

Dr. Douglas Quine, son of W. V. O. Quine, sent me a very gracious email about my personal reminiscences of his father. He has agreed to allow me to post the following paragraph, which considerably deepens and enriches one of those memories. I am very grateful to him for this.

I do have one minor addition to your account with regard to my father’s reaction to the horrors of the holocaust. Dad had a strong sense of right and wrong and a visceral reaction to the horrors of the Nazi atrocities. He enrolled as quickly as he could in the WWII effort (even though with his age, his family, and his children he was exempt from the draft) and spent the war in Washington DC decoding the German submarine codes. Throughout the remainder of his life he was passionate about the importance of ending the Holocaust, about the terrible wrongs suffered by the Jewish people, and his admiration for the survivors – many of whom became his colleagues. Many of these feelings are documented in his 1985 autobiography “The Time of My Life”.