Viktor Pollak

Viktor Adolf Pollak (born March 17, 1917 in Vienna ; † April 29, 1999 on the Atlantic) was a Czech-Austrian-Canadian medical technician.

Life

Pollak, who comes from a Jewish family, grew up with his uncle in Postoloprty in Czechoslovakia after the death of his parents . He attended a high school in Prague, where he began studying electrical engineering and medicine, which he had to break off after the German occupation.

In 1941 the family was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto . After the liberation in 1945, which his uncle's family did not live to see, he resumed his studies and graduated in 1946, initially with a diploma in electrical engineering and later also in medicine.

Pollak did research in the field of medical technology and was active in Europe, South America and Asia until 1968, in addition he developed designs for the Czechoslovak telephone company Telsa. From 1968 he worked at the Canadian University of Saskatchewan , where he was appointed to the chair of biomedical engineering in 1970. Even after his retirement in 1984, Pollak continued his research and publications. Pollak died in 1999 while on a boat trip to Europe.

In 2004, his widow Mirka Pollak donated the Viktor and Mirka Pollak Fund for Medical Technology, based on her husband's legacy, from which an amount of $ 100,000 was donated to RWTH Aachen University and from which Viktor, currently endowed with € 2,000, was donated annually -and-Mirka Pollak Prize for Medical Technology to promote medical technology research to graduates of the university.

literature

• Viktor Pollak, S DAVIDOVOU HVĚZDOU PEKLEM TEREZÍNA: Paměti profesora Viktora A. Pollaka 1938–1945, Brno: Littera 2010.