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Ladislaus Löb in summer 2003 at the age of 70

Ladislaus Löb in December 1944 after arriving in Switzerland from Bergen-Belsen

Ladislaus (Laci) Löb, one of the last Professors of German at Sussex, died in Zürich, Switzerland, on 2 October 2021 from complications after a fall. He was 88. A distinguished scholar of the literature of the German Enlightenment, particularly its drama, and an accomplished translator from Hungarian and German, Laci will also be remembered for his first-hand accounts of the Nazi extermination of Romanian and Hungarian Jewry and of the 'luck' of his own survival.

Laci was born in 1933 into a Hungarian-speaking middle-class Jewish family in Cluj (Kolozsvár) in Transylvania in Romania. In 1944, at the age of eleven, he was deported with his father to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, then freed after five months with some 320 others following negotiations between Adolf Eichmann and Rezső Kasztner, leader of the Budapest-based ‘Relief and Rescue Committee’ formed to save Jews from the Nazis.

Laci’s book Dealing with Satan (2008), which he was unable to write until his seventies, offers a harrowing account of his experiences. It draws on the testimony of other survivors as well as his own and provides a well-researched and balanced defence of Kasztner, who was later assassinated and remains an incendiary figure in some quarters. The book won the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award in 2012. One of Laci’s adult fellow prisoners in Bergen-Belsen was Béla Zsolt, whose powerful memoir, Kilenc koffer [Nine Suitcases], he would later be the first to translate from Hungarian into English.

After his release Laci was granted asylum in Switzerland with his father and resumed his formal education, eventually obtaining a Doctorate of Philosophy at the University of Zürich. In 1963, after a brief career as a teacher and journalist in Switzerland, he came to England to teach German literature and language at the University of Sussex and he remained until his retirement. Talking with Laci, on and off campus, gave the liberating sense of moving between and across cultures and languages: “having been born a Romanian and Hungarian citizen, I am now Swiss and British by naturalisation.” He spoke Hungarian, German, English, French and Italian.

In 2017, Laci returned with his wife Sheila to the country that had given him refuge and finished the first English translation of Kurt Guggenheim’s Alles in Allem, a vast panoramic novel that evokes the transformation of Zürich between 1900 and 1950 from a rural community into a dynamic modern city. He will be remembered for his remarkable learning, courtesy, kindness and very dry wit by colleagues and students at Sussex - and by the many participants in the Sussex Summer School which he directed for several decades before and after his retirement. His was an extraordinary life and he was an extraordinary man.

Authors: Alistair Davies and Nicolas Tredell