If luck is a relative concept I can call myself lucky,” Ladislaus Löb told the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. “I lost the majority of my family in the Holocaust. I was persecuted in antisemitic Hungary. I spent five months in Bergen-Belsen as a child of 11, but I was spared Auschwitz and granted asylum in Switzerland while Nazi Germany was still trying to win the war it had started”.
A Hungarian-born writer, Holocaust survivor and scholar of German Enlightenment literature, Löb became part of the so-called Kasztner group of some 1,700 Jews given safe passage out of Hungary thanks to a deal struck between the Hungarian lawyer and Zionist leader Rudolf Kasztner and Adolf Eichmann. That deal gave Löb and his father the opportunity to pass through the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany to St Gallen in Switzerland in December, 1944.
In 2019 Löb, who has died aged 88, told the Zurich newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung of the man who would become one of Israel’s most controversial figures. “I had an unbelievable amount of luck in my life, but that I managed to live longer than the age of 12, I can only thank one man, Rezso Kasztner”.
In the midst of a sensational political trial, Kasztner, who rose to high office in Israel after emigrating there in 1947, was murdered by Jewish extremists in 1950 who denounced him as a collaborator.
Löb was born in Kolozsvar in northern Transylvania, then under Hungarian control, the only child of Izso, a businessman and Jolan née Rosenberg, who died of tuberculosis in 1942. Raised in Marghita, a shtetl north west of the city, he described his family as middle-class Neologues or Hungarian non-Orthodox Jews.
Löb grew up in a Hungary rife with antisemitism where harassment was normal. Between 1938-1941 three sets of anti-Jewish laws were enacted, removing Jews from public life and restricting their social and cultural activities. Hitler’s troops invaded the country on 19th March, 1944, and at the age of 11 he was sent with his relatives to the Kolozsvar Ghetto, a disused brick factory with inhumane conditions. They were among 1,800 Jews but he and his father managed to escape and joined the Kasztner group in Budapest. However, the group was detained in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Hanover in Germany, before Eichmann gave permission for them to leave for Switzerland, in two batches, in August and December, 1944.
Adolf Eichmann and his Sonderkommando sought to obliterate the last Jewish community in central Europe, eagerly assisted by Hungarians from all walks of life. Löb recalled. “There was a final outburst of lethal legislation. Between 16th April and 8th July 440,000 Jews from the provinces were confined in ghettos and deported to Auschwitz, where 330,000 were gassed on arrival — among them my grandparents, uncles and aunts, with only some cousins surviving”.
Löb ’s father was determined to survive. “He forged a certificate of exemption, bribed a policeman and led me out of the ghetto. On a train crawling with agents in search of Jewish fugitives, we reached Budapest undetected. A brave Christian doctor hid us in his clinic for a while. As a more permanent solution, we were invited to share a hideout constructed in one of the universities by a group of students. My father declined, and later a bomb hit the building, killing everybody in it. The alternative was the ‘Kasztner train’”.
Kasztner, a fellow Hungarian, was a Zionist activist who led an illegal relief and rescue committee, specifically formed to save Jews from the Nazis. He negotiated a large ransom in return for Eichmann’s agreement to give safe passage to nearly 1,700 Hungarian Jews to emigrate to Palestine. “Thanks to my father’s persistence, the two of us were allowed to join them,” said Löb. But a long, cramped and traumatic journey awaited them. When the name “Auschwitz” was heard, everyone panicked.
They arrived in Bergen Belsen, where, Löb believed “Eichmann was probably trying to extort a higher ransom from Kasztner. Some 50,000 died during the last three months of the war of starvation or disease but he and his father were released “before these horrors began”.
Considered “valuable merchandise,” they enjoyed some privileges, such as avoiding slave labour and wearing their own clothes minus the yellow star. They even organised their own entertainment, worship and education for the children. However, the psychological and physical effects of hunger and deprivation took their toll. Eventually they boarded the train which took three days to reach Lake Constance on December 7, 1944.
On May 8, 1945, some 700 committed Zionists emigrated to Palestine but rather than return to Hungary or elsewhere, Löb and his father remained in Switzerland. He spent a few weeks in a Youth Aliyah home in Bex, preparing for life on kibbutz, followed by two years at the École d’Humanité, a boarding school in the Alps. He attended secondary school and university in Zurich where he obtained a degree in English and German and became a teacher and journalist.
In 1963 Löb moved to Brighton, where he became a professor at Sussex University and visiting professor at the University of Constance and Middlebury College. He published several academic books and articles, including translations of well-known authors, including Friedrich Nietzche, but is probably best known for the story of his own survival, which he told in Dealing with Satan: Reszo Kasztner’s Daring Rescue Mission, (2009), published in five languages. Drawing on the testimony of other survivors, apart from himself, it is described as a well-researched and balanced defence of Kasztner. It won the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award in 2012. As a Swiss and British national, Löb described his own life as “inextricably linked with the life and death of Reszo Kasztner”.
He told the JC in 2017: “Some people say it’s strange I became a professor of German. There is a German culture that is not the Nazi culture. I have no anti-German feelings. I find it less easy to be open minded to Hungarians”.
In the same year he returned with his wife Sheila Deasey to live in Zurich and complete the first English translation of Kurt Guggenheim’s Alles in Allem (All in All), a panoramic novel set in mid 20th century Zurich. He became involved with the Gamaraal Foundation, which works with Shoah survivors and set up a web page dealing with the Kasztner story, which describes his life as a refugee following his arrival in Switzerland. He is survived by his two daughters from his first marriage, Dinah Loeb and Susannah Khan and five grandchildren.
Ladislaus Löb: born March 8, 1933. Died October 2, 2021
