Wayne Rogers lauds the courage of Felix Zandman.

• Author: Zandman, Felix
• Position: MY CHAIRMAN - Reprint

One of the most amazing human beings I have ever met is also one of the most unusual businessmen I know. His name is Felix Zandman, and he is the chairman of Vishay Intertechnology. Felix founded Vishay in 1962 with the support of his friend Alfred P. Slaner. They named the company after the village in Lithuania where relatives of both men perished during the Holocaust. I serve on the company's board of directors as chairman of the strategic affairs committee and chairman of the compensation committee, not because it heightens my profile but because Felix asked me to serve, an invitation I consider a responsibility and an honor.

Felix, who's now in his eighties, is remarkable for many reasons, one of which is how he has found an intersection between his life and his work. He has made the personal professional, if you will. There is nothing I would not do for him. He also happens to be one of the most courageous people I have ever known.

Felix's story, which was chronicled in the book Never the Last Journey (written with David Chanoff), is one of the most harrowing I have ever heard. He was 15 years old when the Nazis destroyed the Jewish ghetto where he and his family lived and worked. Felix's family became separated, and he and his uncle, along with three others, sought refuge at the house of a Polish farmer who was Catholic and who had worked for Felix's family. Felix's family had once saved the life of the farmer's wife.

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The farmer dug a pit beneath the floorboards of his house and hid Felix and the four others there. For a year and a half, they lived in the cramped, insect-infested hole. On two occasions, the Nazis came with dogs, but the farmer's wife had sprinkled pepper all over the floor so that the dogs could not pick up the scent. In that dark, cramped space, Felix's uncle taught him advanced mathematics to keep them from going insane.

By the grace of God, Felix and his uncle survived. But they soon discovered that his parents and sister had been found in a different hiding place and taken to the death camps. After Felix escaped to France, he ended up attending the Sorbonne and earning a doctorate in physics. He then came to the United States, where he first worked on nuclear submarines and later invented an ultraprecise resistor that helped launch Vishay. To this day, everybody who is a descendant of his and of the family in Poland that hid him has a job with him for life.

I met Felix through my wife. Amy...