The Mind Creative March 2014
Jakow Trachtenberg was born in Odessa on 17th June 1888 into a
Russian Jewish family. He graduated from the famous Berginstitut of
St. Petersburg and while in his twenties rose to the position of Chief
Engineer at the internationally known Obuschoff shipyards with
11,000 men reporting to the young genius.
After the murder of the royal family in 1918, Trachtenberg spoke out
against the revolutionaries and had to escape to Germany dressed
as a peasant in the middle of the night.
In Berlin he agin rose to be the leader of a group of intellectuals from
the post-war era and was also appointed as the editor of a magazine
that propagated peace and harmony in the country. He married
Countess Alice and immersed himself in writing about Russian
affairs. Soon he was hailed as one of the foremost experts on Russia.
Apart from this, he set up a methodology for learning foreign
languages; one that is used to this day.
As Hitler rose in Germany, so did Trachtenberg’s courage as he kept
on writing against fascism which soon made him a marked man for
the Nazis. In 1934, Trachtenberg fled to Vienna with his wife and
wrote Das Friedensministerium (The Ministry of Peace) and also
became an editor of an international journal. He was still on the
most-wanted list of Hitler and when the Germans marched into
Vienna, Trachtenberg escaped imprisonment and fled to Yugoslavia
where he lived a hunted life with his wife. His freedom was shortlived and he was soon arrested by the Gestapo.
He was transported to one of the most vicious concentration camps
where Jewish victims were ruthlessly killed on a daily basis. It was
there, in order to maintain sanity, that Trachtenberg turned his
brilliant mind to mathematics and logic.
Without books, paper and pens, Trachtenberg had only his brilliant
mind and precise thinking to depend on. Soon he started devising
methods of manipulating numbers in his memory. His body emaciated
by the day but his mind grew stronger amidst the mental calculations
and logic. He soon started adding huge numbers in his mind with a
method that used additions not higher than eleven! The sheer focus
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