Obituaries of note

ARNOLD N. NAWROCKI, 78, widely credited with bringing individually wrapped slices of cheese into the homes of millions of families in the 1950s, died June 30 in Sun City, Ariz. He found a profitable way to wrap individual slices of cheese with cellophane while working at the Clearfield Cheese Co. in Curwensville, Pa. Wrapping the cheese - which required a seal that would not allow oxygen in - stretched its shelf life from about a week to more than six months, allowing families and shops to store it and the military to ship it to soldiers around the world.

JOAN LOWERY NIXON, 76, a prolific, award-winning author of mysteries for children and young adults, died Saturday in Houston. She wrote more than 140 books, some published in more than a score of languages. She won four Edgar Allan Poe Awards, known as Edgars, from the Mystery Writers of America.

CHAIM ENGEL, 87, who helped carry out a noted group escape from a Nazi death camp, died July 4 in New Haven, Conn. He had a stroke after a car accident and then developed pneumonia, said his daughter, Alida Engel. During World War II, he was a prisoner at Sobibor, a secret death camp in eastern Poland, where 250,000 people, chiefly Jews, were murdered. On Oct. 14, 1943, he was among 300 prisoners who escaped in an uprising that involved killing guards and camp officers. The breakout was detailed in Richard Raske's 1982 book Escape From Sobibor, which was made into a television movie in 1987. Mr. Engel played a minor role.

LORD SHAWCROSS, 101, who was Britain's chief prosecutor at the Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremberg and a representative at the United Nations through the late 1940s, died Thursday at his home south of London, said his secretary, Greta Kinder. He once admitted to having some respect for Adolf Hitler's aide, Hermann Goering, who killed himself the night before he was to be executed. "A criminal no doubt, but a courageous one, and a man of great ability and outstanding personality," Lord Shawcross said. "He defeated the gallows by taking poison in his cell, and for that I take my hat off to him."

PATRIARCH RAPHAEL I BIDAWID, 81, spiritual leader of Iraq's Chaldean Catholics, died Monday in Beirut, Lebanon, the Vatican's missionary news service said in Rome. He was an outspoken opponent of the economic embargo on Iraq, imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Some accused him of being an apologist for Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. He said he was defending his country. Chaldean Catholics are the largest Christian community in Iraq.

ZHANG AIPING, 93, a Chinese field commander in the Korean War who later served as defense minister and managed China's nuclear bomb program, died in Beijing, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

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