Residence Brighton, England Books Dealing with Satan | Role Author Name Ladislaus Lob | |
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Occupation Professor Emeritus of German, University of Sussex | ||
Ladislaus Löb (born 8 May 1933) 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 (1974) and Christian Dietrich Grabbe (1996).
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Löb is also known for having been a passenger, when he was 11 years old, on the Kastner train, which saw almost 1,700 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 (2008). For this book he received the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award 2012.
Early life
Löb was born in Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvár), northern Transylvania, the only child of Izsó, a businessman, and Jolán (née Rosenberg), 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 (known by its Hungarian name because Northern Transylvania was then under that country's control), but escaped with his father and joined the “Kasztner group” in Budapest. The group consisted of almost 1700 Hungarian Jews who were given safe passage 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, for five months before Eichmann allowed them to leave for Switzerland in 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.