In the camps, "I was savage in an inferno where Eichmann's reality eclipsed Dante's vision of hell. I reacted with the nervous system in a frenzy to hang on. Harvard marked a redemption. Here the mind began to soar and the struggle for moral and intellectual survival began. It was a struggle that begin in Australia at the age of 18, after I hadn't been in a classroom for six years."

There he quickly learned English, finished high school in a year and a half, and relearned the ways of civilization. Ruefully, he recalls his reaction when a boy teasingly slipped a banana peel in his pocket: "I swung a Landsberg jailhouse punch at him," acting "as if he wanted to kill [me]." But Pisar had for gotten how to apologize. "I had been in hell too deeply and too long. The next day presented him with two pounds of bananas."

In 1994, shortly after he had entered the University of Melbourne. Pisar discovered that he had tuberculosis. Ironically, this and another remnant of his war years catalyzed his metamorphosis and shifted the direction of his future life: "During the war and after I had acquired my languages trying to survive--English. German, Russian, French, Yiddish and a few other languages Immobilized and put on my back. I began to read and systematically swallowed literature after literature. "Then I recovered, and by then of course. I had become a very thoughtful man."

Finishing his studies at the University of Melbourne. Pisar was awarded a fellowship to Harvard Law School, and recalls with joy the years he spent completing first an M.A. and then a Ph.D. on the legal aspects of East-west trade. "At Harvard, my mind was set on fire," he writes. "I spent my night in the second basement in the dust that Dr. Newton had ordered me to avoid. I undertook detailed and captivating research, deciphering unpublished manuscripts in several languages."

For years, he says, he had thought the slogan on the main gate of Auschwitz the most cynical and indecent in the world. It was it the dusty stacks of Widenel Library and Langdell Hall that I realized it was indeed work that brings freedom."

* * *

The Years at Harvard were only the beginning of Pisar's "reincarnated" existence. Graduating from the law school, he went to work first as a counsel to UNESCO, later as a member of President Kennedy's task force on foreign economic policy. His first book. Coexistence and Commerce, published in 1970, caught the winds of detente and helped influence government policies and public attitudes on both sides of the Atlantic. He has since been called upon as an adviser to both the State Department and the Senate Committee on Foreign Commerce.

For the last 20 years, Pisar says, he has lived by the ancient proverb that. "The ink of the scholar teaches more than the blood of a martyr." Today, however, Pisar is no longer so sure. Pointing to the nuclear arms race and the Middle East conflict, the plight of the Third World's hungry millions, and rising inflation and unemployment world wide, Pisar sees shadows of the past, warnings of future terrors that could come.

"I know Hitler was not just an aberration, but an almost logical outcome of a society that had fallen apart." Pisar observes. "My purpose was not so much to write an autobiography, but to establish a link between what I have lived and the new dangers--not only to tell myself what has happened but to transmit it to others who learn from history very, very badly."

Although the new threats, Pisar stresses. Will not be of the same form as the Holocaust, they could be equally extreme. "I have lived through a pilot project for the destruction of humanity." Pisar says, "a death rattle of the species on the eve if the nuclear age. To me the nuclear arms race is a kind of specter of a planetary gas chamber."

But Pisar sees the greatest danger in the world in the economic dislocation that is sweeping the world. "Hitler was a progeny of unemployment and inflation, social unrest, and helpless politicians who could not cope." "Pisar observes, adding. "This is the stuff of which untold Holocausts are made."

Despite the severity of his warning. Pisar maintains that his ultimate message is deeply optimistic: "If there is one salient insight I have brought out of my experience, it is that the human sprit has an amazing and infinite ability to endure and survive. Man can rise from the ashes and your like the Phoenix--and I say this with the authority of the number engraved on my firm."