Sussex professor awarded Austrian honour for book about Holocaust hero
Professor Ladislaus Löb (left) with His Excellency Dr Emil Brix, Austrian Ambassador
The cover of Dealing With Satan, by Ladislaus Löb
Sussex academic Professor Ladislaus Löb has been presented with the annual Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award.
The award was made at a special ceremony at the Austrian Embassy in London on Monday (10 December) for Professor Löb’s book recounting the life of the man who saved him from death at the hands of the Nazis.
Professor Löb, Professor Emeritus of German at Sussex, is the first UK recipient of the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award, which was first awarded in 2006.
The award is sponsored by Austrian Service Abroad, an organisation that has sent hundreds of young Austrians abroad for a year of social, peace or Holocaust remembrance work.
It was presented by the Austrian Ambassador to the UK, His Excellency Dr Emil Brix, who said: “Particularly in a situation where some voices wish to qualify and relegate these crimes to history, this prize is an important signal.”
Professor Löb said at the ceremony: “This award honours Rezső Kasztner, who saved thousands of his fellow-Jews from the Nazis.”
Professor Löb was 11 when the Nazis invaded his native Hungary in 1944 and began rounding up Jews and deporting them to the concentration camps. Seven months after his birthday he was rescued from the notorious Bergen-Belsen camp and was a passenger on the Kasztner train, which gave almost 1,700 Jews safe passage out of Hungary to Switzerland.
He eventually arrived in Britain and became an academic at Sussex in 1963, where he earned a reputation as a literary scholar, translating the acclaimed Holocaust memoir Nine Suitcases by Béla Zsolt.
His wartime experience is recounted in his book, Dealing with Satan: Rezso Kasztner's daring rescue mission (2008), which offers the first full account of Kasztner’s enterprise and the experiences of those he rescued from Bergen-Belsen.
Hungarian Jew and political activist Rezsö Kasztner had played a dangerous game, relying on the greed and rivalry of leading members of the SS and persuading them to trade Jewish lives for cash or the prospect of lenient treatment after the war.
The notoriety of this scheme - seen by some as collaboration of the worst kind - led to a spectacular trial and Kasztner's murder by Jewish extremists in Israel in 1957. His reputation as a Jewish hero of the Holocaust continues to court controversy.
Professor Löb says: “Kasztner was neither a knight in shining armour nor a traitor. Arrogant and devious, but uniquely resourceful and brave, he was precisely the kind of person needed to deal with some of the most evil men in the world.
“For a Jew to stand up to the SS and to save as many other Jews as Kasztner did (in fact many more than Schindler, whose task was made easier by his not being a Jew) was an astonishing achievement.”
Dr Helmut Grugger (University of Limerick and University of Innsbruck), who presented Professor Löb for the award, said in his laudation: “Ladislaus Löb’s book offers an outstanding contribution to the commemoration of the Holocaust in Hungary. It also successfully combines autobiography with precise historical documentation of facts.”