Ladislaus Löb


Ladislaus Löb is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Sussex in England. He is the author of From Lessing to Hauptmann: Studies in German Drama and Christian Dietrich Grabbe.
Löb is also known for having been a passenger, when he was 11 years old, on the Kastner train, which saw around 1,600 Jews given safe passage out of Hungary to Switzerland during the Holocaust. He has written about his experience in Dealing with Satan: Rezso Kasztner's Daring Rescue Mission. For this book he received the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award 2012.

Early life

Löb was born in Cluj-Napoca, northern Transylvania, the only child of Izsó, a businessman, and Jolán, who died of tuberculosis in 1942. He was raised in Marghita, a small town of 8,600 residents, 150 km northwest of the city.

Kastner train

In 1944 Löb was taken with his relatives to the Kolozsvár Ghetto, but he escaped with his father and joined the “Kasztner group” in Budapest.
The group consisted of around 1,600 Jews who were given safe passage out of Hungary to Switzerland, as a result of a deal struck between Adolf Eichmann and the Hungarian lawyer and Zionist leader Rudolf Kastner. The group was detained in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Hannover, Germany, before Eichmann allowed them to leave for Switzerland in two batches, in August and December 1944. In the 1950s in Israel, Kastner was accused of collaboration and murdered by Jewish extremists.

Education and career

In Switzerland Löb spent two years at the Ecole d’Humanité, before attending the Realgymnasium of Zürich from 1948 and studying English and German at the University of Zürich from 1953 to 1961.
In 1963 he took up a post at the University of Sussex in Brighton. He taught German language, German literature and Comparative literature, and held visiting professorships in the University of Constance and Middlebury College. Before retiring as an Emeritus Professor in 1998 he published mainly studies in literature; since his retirement he has concentrated on translating from German or Hungarian. His combined account of his own experience of the Holocaust and the fate of Kasztner has been published in six languages.

Works

Books