Holy crap. You’re not kidding. So, get this: he’s like, “Man, it’s a pain trying to get out the word about what’s happening here. I know! We’ll broadcast it by radio!”
And he did.
He set up a motherfucking radio station in Auschwitz, and used it to broadcast for the better part of a year:
How on earth the Germans didn’t discover that is beyond me. Maybe it just never occurred to them to monitor for a radio broadcast coming from inside the goddamn camp, because no fucking way, right?
Not sure if he meets any objective criteria for “smart,” but General Stanislaw Sosabowski came off as the smartest person in the Hollywood treatment of Operation Market-Garden, the movie A Bridge Too Far.
But he was played by Gene Hackman, which might make anyone look smart.
Here’s a guy running a long-term cancer care operation in Texas with drug regimens that never have been validated clinically. He’s made many millions of dollars while keeping FDA regulators from shutting him down (despite numerous violations at his clinic).
Jerzy Kosinski, author of Being There. True story: He was supposed to be at Sharon Tate’s house the night of the Manson murders, but he had just flown into LA and was dealing with his lost luggage, which ended up saving his life.
He also thought his wife was trying to murder him when he caught her with a bottle labeled “Polish Remover.”
I don’t if you count Jews, but Sammy Eilenberg, Samuel Eilenberg - Wikipedia, was one of the top mathematicians of the 20th century. He, but none of his family, got out of Poland in 1939 and ended up eventually at Columbia where he gave me my first job.
Although I do not dispute that she belongs on this list, and deserves admiration, I would question whether there is any real justification for calling Marie Curie a genius. I am not aware of any significant conceptual innovations she made. She (along with her husband, Pierre) was set the task, by her teacher Henri Becquerel, the discoverer of radioactivity, of finding out what it is in uranium ore (pitchblende) that (as Becquerel had also discovered) causes it to be even more radioactive than the uranium extracted from it. She and Pierre (who, however, died in a street accident part way through the project) set about doing this using conventional, well established chemical purification techniques that eventually allowed them to discover the elements polonium and the very radioactive radium, which are also present in pitchblende in small quantities, along with the uranium. This required a lot of hard work and determination, over many years (and perhaps courage, although the dangers of radioactivity were not really appreciated at the time), but very little in the way of innovative thinking or “genius”. Curie deserves admiration for her hard work and her doggedness (perhaps not only in her research, but also in getting herself accepted as a female scientist at a time when they were vanishingly rare), and perhaps her courage, and no doubt she was a very intelligent woman, but there was little about her to justify the term “genius”.
Her fame rests far more on the fact that she was one of the first women to make any sort of significant and high-profile contribution to science, than on the nature of that contribution itself.