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Member honored as one of world’s top explorers


By SHERRY HALBROOK We’ve all heard, “Curiosity killed the


cat.” While it can be dangerous, curiosity also can take you, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, down the “rabbit hole” to a place that changes your life forever. PEF member Chris Nicola has been


going down rabbit holes for decades. One day in 1993, he went down into a mammoth cave in the Ukraine, and the more he found there, the more questions he asked until they became a powerful river that has swept him into a new and very different life.


On March 16, for instance, he was


honored by the Explorers Club at its 2013 dazzling annual awards dinner at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City along with famed astronauts John Glenn and Scott Carpenter, Mt. Everest climber Chhiring Dorje Sherpa, global circumnavigator Erden Eruc and Polish mountaineer Monika Rogozinska. In announcing its award winners, the


club described Nicola as a long-time cave explorer who “enriched the world” through his book, “The Secret of Priest’s Grotto: A Holocaust Survival Story” about Nicola’s discovery of how 38 members of an extended Jewish family, fleeing the Nazis, secretly lived for two years deep below the earth in a large cave, Popowa Yama, in Ukraine and survived there for 511 days until the Nazi’s were defeated. Not only was Nicola – a senior


CELEBRATING EXPLORATION—PEF member Chris Nicola is flanked by fellow honorees filmdirector James Cameron andTurkish adventurer Erden Eruc, as well as Explorers ClubVice President Constance Difede at the club’s annual dinner in NewYork. —Photo by Karen Zieff


professional conduct investigator for the state Education Department – one of the first to explore the secret hideaway in the cave’s 77 miles of passageways and chambers, he spent years investigating what he had found and tracking down the last remaining members of the Stermer family who had lived in the cave. He found them in Montreal and New York City. The book, which he co-wrote with


National Geographic photographer Peter


Lane Taylor in 2007, led to the award winning documentary film “No Place on Earth” in 2012 which features Nicola leading four of the surviving Stermers back to the cave and uses actors to portray the Stermer’s desperate efforts to hide there and survive. Nicola and some of the Stermers now travel the country speaking to groups and at public events where the film is shown. (For more information about the film


and where it is being shown, go online to www.noplaceonearthfilm.com.) In accepting the Explorers’ Club honor,


Nicola said: “What did I learn over the 20 years it


took me to unearth the Priest’s Grotto story and bring it into the light of day? “I learned the Holocaust was never one


individual story of how 6 million individuals perished, but rather 6 million individual stories of how sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, grandparents, lovers, classmates and friends perished – as are all such genocides! “I also learned the power, truth and


meaning of the words of the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, who in his poem “Ulysses” wrote, ‘I am a part of all that I have seen and met.’”


Nicola explores the cave


Priest’s Grotto in the Ukraine — Photo Credit: Christopher Beauchamp Wonderful Machine


Page 16—The Communicator May 2013


PEF Information Line: 1-800-553-2445


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