My story

My first decade

I was born on 8 May 1933 in Cluj, the capital of the Romanian province of Transylvania. Apart from Romanians the largest ethnic group in the province consisted of Hungarians, who tried to achieve equality or even dominance by all means at their disposal, including the use of Hungarian place names instead of Romanian ones, such as Kolozsvár for Cluj or Margitta for Marghita. From 1940 to 1945 the region was actually under Hungarian rule.

I was the only child of Izsó Löb and Jolán Löb, née Rosenberg. My father had been badly wounded as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army in the first world war, but had managed to build a career as a businessman afterwards. My mother died of TB in 1942. To prevent infection I was forbidden to enter her room for four years and could only speak to her from the threshold.

I attended a class for Hungarian speakers in the Romanian primary school of Marghita and received top marks in every subject, until the Jewish pupils were transferred to a different teacher who punished us for this disgrace by unfair marking and harsh disciplinary measures. At home I was taught to read, but not understand, texts in Hebrew by students from the yeshiva, or invented elaborate games to play with my Jewish friends, when I was not reading Grimm’s fairy tales. Out in the streets I kept myself on the alert and ready to escape on foot or by bike from louts who shouted “stinking Jew” and threw stones at me.

I still remember some specific anti-Semitic incidents from my first decade. Once a scruffy youth stopped in front of our house bawling, to the tune of the anthem “Hatikva”, a scurrilous song telling the “bloody yids” to “bugger off to Palestine”. I thought somebody would come and arrest the lunatic, but nobody came.

On certain festive days all the houses in the village had to be flagged. I don’t know if I managed to jump high enough to reach any of the flags, but I do remember my father having to pay a heavy fine because his “son, a Jew” had “insulted the Hungarian nation”.

My mother was not only known for her beauty but also for her cleanliness and tidiness. During her long illness she did all she could to keep her surroundings clear of bacteria. Nevertheless, my father was sentenced to an even heavier fine because his wife, with her “diabolical Jewish intellect”, had tried to “poison the Hungarian nation”.

I, “insulting the Hungarian nation” — **I. “Insulting the Hungarian nation”**

**My mother, “trying to poison the Hungarian nation”**

Spring 1944

In the early years of the war the Third Reich granted a certain amount of freedom to Hungary as its ally. For the Hungarian Jews this meant a temporary reprieve from the Holocaust. But it did not last.

As the Soviet armies closed in on the country the Hungarians and their “Regent” Miklós Horthy, the unemployed Admiral of a non-existent fleet, tried to defect from the “Axis”. Hitler, however, was quicker. During the night of 18/19 March 1944 his troops invaded Hungary and sealed the fate of the Jews.

Between 15 May and 17 July, some 150 “special commandos” of Adolf Eichmann, the SS lieutenant-colonel known as the “Architect of the Holocaust”, enthusiastically assisted by hordes of Hungarian soldiers, officials and private individuals, rounded up 440,000 Jews from the Hungarian countryside. These were first imprisoned in ghettos and then deported to Poland, where 330,000 of them were immediately murdered.

By that time I was living in Cluj with my grandparents who had taken charge of my welfare after the death of my mother. I attended the Cluj Jewish Gymnasium for a few months before it was closed as a result of the German invasion. Of all the brutal anti-Jewish measures that led up to the Holocaust I was upset most by having to wear the yellow star. The more I wished to show it off with pride the more ashamed of it I became.

Cluj counted about 18,000 Jewish inhabitants. Early in May we were ordered to line up in front of our houses to be taken to the ghetto. Law-abiding as we had been for generations, we obeyed the authorities, but some of us found it hard to climb into the open-back trucks. This fact supplied the armed gendarmes with excellent opportunities to swear and hit out at us. One gendarme noticed the watch I had been given a few days earlier as a present for my eleventh birthday. He wrenched it from my wrist and slipped it into his pocket. Sári’s toy dog that I loved so much suffered the same fate.

The ghetto had once been a brick factory on the “Iris” industrial estate. We had to sleep on the bare ground under a roof held up by posts and without any walls, where bricks were normally stacked to dry. The food we were given was repulsive and insufficient. There were no latrines till we excavated them by hand. Any communication between guards and Jews was impossible and among the Jews themselves hampered by distrust and hostility. The adults were traumatised by their fall from their earlier circumstances. Only we children could sometimes feel that we were taking part in some exciting adventure.

After a few days in the ghetto the captives were moved on by cattle trucks. Most climbed readily onto the awkward vehicles without protest, either because they could not imagine the approaching tragedy or because they had persuaded themselves that neither the Germans nor the Hungarians would hurt anybody who had done no harm to them. They were sadly misguided, as an eye-witness report concerning my own family shows.

Deportees arriving in Auschwitz had to file past an SS doctor, who directed them right or left with a careless gesture. Right meant forced labour, often ending in death, while left meant marching immediately into the gas chamber. When my aunt Sári came up to the German he waved her to the right, but when she asked him to let her go with her parents he did so, and Sári went together with her father and mother to her death.

Bergen-Belsen

My father expected the worst but was determined to stay alive. He bribed some policemen and civil servants and escaped with me from the ghetto in Cluj to Budapest, where Jews on the run had the best chance of not getting caught.

A brave Christian physician allowed us to hide in his clinic for a while, but that approach was too dangerous in the long run and we had to leave. We were offered a hideout in a university building, but my father rejected it and after the war we heard that the building had been hit by an allied bomb and all those hiding there had been killed.

Our third and last chance was the “Vaada”, an illegal Jewish committee that had initially looked after refugees from neighbouring countries but after the German invasion tried to save Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust. The leader of the group was Rezsö Kasztner, a Zionisl activist from Cluj. In lengthy and heated negotiations with Kasztner Eichmann had agreed to allow nearly 1700 Jews to emigrate to British-occupied Palestine for a ransom of 1000 US dollars per head. My father was not one of the prominent Jews who were selected by various committees on merit, nor did he have any money to contribute to the ransom, but he had the knack of being in the right place at the right time, and he managed, probably through sheer persistence, to get the two of us admitted to the holding camp in Budapest where the group was waiting to leave Hungary.

On 30 June 1944 we were marched to a marshalling yard, with the Hungarians masses watching our departure with glee. When the train arrived to take us away we were shocked to see that it consisted of cattle trucks. With the ubiquitous gendarmes harassing us, we pushed and shoved to conquer a small space on the bare floor of the trucks, as near the bucket that held drinking water and as far from the other bucket that served as a toilet, as possible. The journey in the deadly heat of summer was rife with frightening rumours and bitter arguments. On 9 July the train stopped, not, as we expected, at a Mediterranean port to leave for Palestine but on the Lüneburg Heath in North Germany. With German SS screaming and angry German shepherd dogs baring their teeth at us, we marched 7 or 8 km to a collection of unfamiliar buildings called Bergen-Belsen.

Today everybody knows what a concentration camp looks like, but when we were faced for the first time by the dreary rows of huts, the watchtowers with their threatening machine guns, the endless barbed wire fences, the chimneys of the crematoria, and the dehumanised figures in their convict clothes, we were amazed and deeply frightened.

Since the Germans regarded us as valuable merchandise they treated us a little better than their other prisoners. We wore our own clothes. Our families were not broken up. We were not forced to do any slave labour. We had some medication to prevent the worst diseases. The guards were forbidden to ill-treat us. We enjoyed a degree of autonomy in running our everyday affairs. In short: we were not meant to die. Nevertheless, the five months we spent in the camp were torture without end. I could easily have died if my father hadn’t made every possible sacrifice, not least giving me almost all his rations, to keep me alive.

We were constantly hungry. We dreaded having to stand for hours out of doors to be counted over and over in all weathers. The huts were dark, damp, overcrowded, filthy and infested by bugs. Our nerves strained under the lack of privacy. We quarrelled and stole from each other. We were driven to distraction by not knowing what was going on in the world outside, how our loved ones were coping with the hardships at home, and what was waiting for us round the corner.

The adults realised that the Germans could kill us at any time. We children thought more of our improvised games. I had daydreams of being the hero of exciting adventures in Palestine, Switzerland or anywhere else so long as it was not Bergen-Belsen. Just before we finally left Bergen-Belsen I handed a small jar of vitamin tablets we had received from the Red Cross through the barbed wire to one of the miserable figures in the neighbouring compound. I suddenly felt certain that the SS guard in the nearest watchtower had seen the forbidden event and was going to shoot me, but he didn’t bother.

Arrival in Switzerland

In the clammy autumn contradictory rumours about our impending release had piled up. The negotiations between Kasztner and Eichmann had continued since the summer. Further important parts were played by Kurt Becher, who ranked equal to Eichmann in the SS, and Saly Mayer, who was the President of the Federation of Swiss Jewish Communities and the Swiss representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. They met mostly in Budapest but occasionally in the freezing cold on a bridge over the Rhine between the Swiss town of St Margrethen and the Austrian town of Höchst. They made progress in spite of a personal incompatibility and we were suddenly ordered to prepare ourselves for the departure.

After weathering a violent snow storm without any shelter on the same platform in the Lüneburg Heath where we had arrived five months earlier in cattle trucks, we were loaded on a train designed to carry humans. Many of the passengers had upset their stomachs by devouring all the food they had hoarded till they believed that we were on our way to Switzerland.

At a station somewhere along the line my father got out to fetch me some water, but he had hardly set foot on the platform when he was thrown back into the carriage with a blow to his face from one of the teenage boys the Germans by that point in the war were putting into SS uniforms to serve as cannon fodder. I closed my eyes and continued to doze as the landscape outside the window became more and more hilly and gradually disappeared behind a curtain of falling snow.

Eventually the train stopped in Lustenau near the Lake of Constance, which was the border between blacked-out Germany and brightly lit Switzerland. A few hours after, during which time the Germans probably tried to extract an increase to the agreed ransom from Kasztner, we changed to a Swiss train, and after a few more minutes were greeted by friendly Swiss soldiers and Red Cross helpers in St. Margrethen on the Swiss side. It was 1 o’clock in the morning of 7 December 1944. In nearby St. Gallen breakfast and comfortable mattresses awaited us in a warm gym hall. For the first time in many months we slept without searchlights circling our windows.

During the next day or two the Swiss authorities noted our personal details, photographed us with numbers hung round our necks and took our fingerprints. We responded to this procedure with slight misgivings.

**My father, on arrival in Switzerland**

Caux

From St. Gallen in the north-east we travelled diagonally south-west through Switzerland to Caux, a village high above Montreux on the Lake of Geneva. I was amazed at such beauty as I fought my nausea on the sharp bends of the railway. During the war Switzerland was visited by very few tourists. Many hotels stood empty or were used as refugee homes. We were put up in the Esplanade, which, known as the Caux Palace, had earlier been the most luxurious hotel in Switzerland.

Unfortunately, conditions inside the Esplanade fell far short of its magnificent external appearance. Although there were many large bedrooms they were so overcrowded that some of us had to sleep in the bathrooms. There was no heating in the middle of winter. An unscrupulous Jewish supplies manager sold food stocks delivered for us for his own profit. There were more quarrels, serious illnesses and suicides than there had been in Bergen-Belsen. The euphoria over our liberation had soon faded away as more and more terrible news arrived about the Holocaust. When the Swiss government decided to deport us to Algeria there was an outcry both in Caux and in the press beyond. In the ball room of the Esplanade noisy protest meetings were held at which those present unanimously refused to obey the deportation order. Somehow I had got hold of a toy pistol and at every rhetorical climax fired a capsule into the general hubbub. Finally the government gave in to public opinion and we were allowed to stay in Switzerland at least for the time being. I returned to my favourite occupation of exploring the jumble in the cellars or crawling around the ornamental turrets on the roof.

Bex

A question that became more acute with every passing day was what to do about the education of us children. One answer was provided by the so-called “Youth Aliyah Homes”, which regarded it as their duty to prepare young people for emigration to Palestine and life in a kibbutz. In addition to agricultural training, these institutions were meant to supply all the knowledge that the citizen of a modern Jewish state was supposed to possess. In fact, rather than delivering a balanced education, they tried to promote their own ideology, which – within the framework of militant Zionism – could cover all shades from far left to far right. In the spring of 1945 I was sent to such a home in Bex in the canton of Valais, where the socialist Hashomer Hatsair party tried to indoctrinate children of my age by means of song and dance.

For my father and me this was a very anxious time. The British, who were still occupying Palestine, readily allowed Jewish children to migrate to the country, but often did not even acknowledge receipt of adults’ applications for a “certificate” or entry permit. After all that we had suffered together, neither my father nor I could face such an indefinite separation.

Remembering his habit of looking for reassurance everywhere between earth and heaven, my father sought advice from Leopold Szondi, the well-known psychiatrist, and Joel Teitelbaum, the charismatic rabbi, before he finally made up his own mind to find a different school for me.

École d’Humanité

The school I was sent to in August 1945 had a few dozen pupils and a handful of staff. It was run by Paul and Edith Geheeb, who had escaped to Switzerland from the Nazis in Germany.

Despite its French name the École was German-speaking. I spent two years there. One year after my arrival the whole school relocated from Schwarzsee near Fribourg to Goldern-Hasliberg in the Bernese Oberland.

Today that kind of school would be called “anti-authoritarian”. The motto of the Ecole was “Become what you are”. It intended to develop the internal qualities of the children entrusted to it, rather than trying to influence them from without. In other words, it placed as much emphasis on the human as on the academic development of the pupils, who in turn were able to exert considerable influence on the content and method of the teaching. Whether from the war or from broken families, most of us were carrying wounds that could best be healed by tolerance, understanding and a relaxed relationship between the generations. The teachers worked for a pittance and the pupils’ fees were often paid by charities.

I was twelve when I arrived in the École, speaking only Hungarian, but became fluent in standard German within weeks. My physical strength developed rapidly through hiking and skiing in the clean air. My appreciation of cultural values grew through encounters with classical music and literature. The glorious environment instilled a deep love of mountains in me. The tact and sensitivity of the adults gradually replaced my anxieties with confidence.

Although I was never to lose my shyness or my fear of unfamiliar people or situations, the effects of persecution in my village, the shock of the ghetto and the attrition of the concentration camp began to wear off.

But my father thought that I wasn’t learning enough. Once more he consulted Szondi and Teitelbaum, and when autumn came he didn’t allow me to return to the École.

Cheese

While I was in the École my father decided to make the most of his own stay in Switzerland by learning how to make cheese. From 1 April 1946 he completed six months of study at the Agricultural Institute of Grangeneuve near Fribourg, followed by brief internships in Oberhünenberg and Horw in the Canton of Luzern. His maintenance was covered by the VSJF. In his diploma from the Institute he is described as a “conscientious student and worker”, whose “attitude can only be praised”.

In August 1947 my father and I set out for Romania to test whether we could live – let alone open a cheese factory – in the city from where most of our relatives had been deported and murdered.

World history had stolen both our Romanian and Hungarian nationality, but we had a “Nansen pass” for stateless people, which got us as far as Hungary. From there a gipsy smuggled us in the dead of night across the Tisza river into Romania. At fourteen I thoroughly enjoyed the adventure. We tried to strike roots in our old city, but given the hyperinflation, which made me a millionaire, and the communists’ grab for power, which my father understood only too well, there could be no question of us staying in Romania. A different smuggler led us back to Hungary watched by bribed border guards, and by Christmas 1947 we were again in Zürich with our legitimate Nansen passes. Sewn into our coats we carried the furs of eight beavers and forty martens. By selling these my father acquired a modest business capital, while I embarked on my transformation into a Swiss citizen.

The uncharitable Charities

My father spent the next few years in gruelling arguments with the charities that were supposed to make the lives of refugees more bearable, but did not always do so. As we had no income of any kind we had to be supported by various organisations, among which the Swiss Association of Jewish Refugee Relief (VSJF) and the Federal Justice and Police Department (EJPD) played the most important parts. We received the assistance in small portions, for which my father had to submit humiliating applications, whether they concerned our monthly food and furnished room or some petty cash for my school exercise books and my father’s shoe repairs.

The organisations repeatedly tried to reject my father’s applications or resorted to petty bureaucratic harassment before granting them. This often drove him to despair, as is shown, for example, by his letter of spring 1948 to the VSJF, in which he claims that he has “actually no longer anything to live on”.

There were several reasons why the organisations made it so hard for my father to obtain the support we so badly needed. On the one hand their means were indeed seriously limited, but on the other hand they also acted on what they regarded as a matter of principle. They were trying to get rid of awkward refugees and they thought they could achieve this by putting pressure on my father and me to go and work abroad.

But my father was over fifty years old and had been badly wounded in the first world war. In addition he had different plans for his son. Some organisations and individuals could appreciate this, while others lacked the necessary understanding or tact. One doctor in the surgical department of the Zürich Kantonsspital, wrote a detailed report on the devastation caused by the dumdum bullet in my father’s leg, but ended with the contradictory statement that the wound “can be regarded as healed”. In his next assessment the same hospital doctor repeated the diagnosis of heavy injuries but added insult to injury by declaring that my father “despite his condition is capable of building up a new existence abroad”.

Nor do some attitudes seem to have changed much a year and a half later, when a senior employee of the VSJF explained to the heavily wounded refugee who had lost most of his family and his possessions and had almost died in a concentration camp that the organisation was “not concerned to solve a financial problem” by trying to persuade him to emigrate, but was pointing to a “moral problem” that my father must resolve himself by earning his own living “as soon as possible”.

As far as I was concerned, the organisations were prepared to support me to the end of a one-year apprenticeship in any craft, while my father wanted me to attend a secondary school and obtain the “Matura”. He hoped thereby to secure a good education for me and the opportunity for the two of us to stay in Switzerland together. What the moralist of VSJF had in mind one may guess when one reads his praise of “the professional training in the USA and Australia and also in Israel”, but finds no reference to Switzerland. Although we were urged more and more firmly to leave Switzerland we stayed put and the organisation began to suspect that my father had found some secret sources of income. In fact he succeeded during the 1950s in setting up some business contacts and was not only earning a living but also repaying in small monthly instalments the support we had received. Gradually some influential individuals began to respond to his mixture of argument, emotional appeal and sheer perseverance. His letter of 24 august 1948 to the VSJF is a striking example of calculation and fatherly pride with which he declares that given my “above-average talent” and my “outstanding intelligence” I was “predestined for an intellectual career”.

Thanks to my father’s untiring efforts, then, we stayed together in Zürich, and in August 1948 the Appeals Commission of the VSJF ruled that it would be “exceedingly harsh” to “separate father and son now”. On 24 October 1949, the Commission formally committed itself to supporting me until I was ready to emigrate. Meanwhile my father had decided that the best school for me would be the cantonal Realgymnasium in Zürich. At the age of fourteen I was too old to join the first class of the Realgymnasium. On the other hand the Holocaust had left me with serious gaps in the material of the less advanced classes. I therefore had to take an entrance examination to determine my proper position. Since the winter of 1947 I had attended “Dr. A. Held’s School”, which specialised in such exams. Dr. Held was not only the director of the school but she also taught. As a result she was able to assure the VSJF from her own observation that “according to all those teachers who have examined him, Ladislaus really has the brain for university study”.

As in the village primary school in Romania, in Zürich too I had proved to be a talented and hard-working pupil, and on 4 April 1948 my father could report to VSJF that I had “passed the examination for the future 3rd class of the Realgymnasium”.

**My father’s letter to VSJF, 23 March 1948**

**My father [right] with a friend, late 194s**

**Doctor’s reports to VSJF, 7 and 20 January 1948**

iDoctor’s reports to VSJF, 7 and 20 January 1948 — **Doctor’s reports to VSJF, 7 and 20 January 1948**

**VSJF’s letter to my father, 22 June 1948**

**My father’s letter to VSJF, 20 August 1949**

**Dr. A . Held’s letter to VSJF, 5 January 1948**

Realgymnasium Zürich

I attended the Realgymnasium Zürich for four and a half years with mixed feelings. In the strict discipline that prevailed I missed the freedom and warmth of the École. Among the exclusively male teachers and pupils I missed the female element that, in a mixed school, would have softened the atmosphere. As a result of my early experience of persecution I felt superior to the innocent Swiss in their sheltered surroundings, but at the same time I envied them for their stable and secure background. Although I kept my history to myself people could feel that my silence was hiding some memories of early loss and pain. Where I encountered sympathy I flourished, but on the whole I tended to be shy. I owed some successes to my abilities, but I might have achieved more if I had been more assertive. It was during my time in the Realgymnasium that I called most frequently on Leopold Szondi, who counselled me on questions of vocation, education and life in general. But as before, I didn’t acquire the instinctive self-confidence that my intellectual capacity would have justified.',

As far as academic learning was concerned I more or less managed to close the gaps in my knowledge. My best subjects continued to be foreign languages and German. My particular affinity to German language and literature in spite of my experience of the Holocaust was generally regarded as a sign of open-mindedness. My behaviour in school was good. At home I did my set tasks promptly and carefully. The only sport I enjoyed was skiing. I remained a member of Hashomer Hatsair and took part in some Jewish educational and social events, occasionally knocking on the more prosperous-looking front doors to collect money for Israel, but neither Jewish religion nor Jewish politics meant much to me. Sometimes I dreamt of a career as a concert violinist or an actor, but I lacked the necessary talent. I did not realise till later that I was happiest when I was writing.',

Naturally xenophobia and anti-semitism existed in Switzerland as everywhere else. When my father inquired about a furnished room on the phone his accent often provoked the untrue reply “already let”, and when I once decorated my bench with carvings with a Swiss army knife one of the teachers accused me of not being grateful for having been granted “asylum in Switzerland”. When I applied for some Christmas work at the post office, as did most other pupils of the Realgymnasium, I was told that no foreigners were wanted. Events of this kind seemed unfortunate, but of course they did not reach the murderous level of German or Hungarian anti-semitism. Despite a certain reserve on both sides I became friendly with a few class mates with whom I frequented cinemas, theatres and the non-alcoholic tea rooms popular at the time, sailed on the lake in boats hired by the hour and went on excursions in summer and skiing in winter. Once I lost all the money my father had given me for ski school in the casino in Arosa. Another time my father followed me to a café in the old town and found me in the middle of a group of boys in a cloud of cigarillo smoke, practicing Latin verbs and not even trying to flirt with the waitress.',

The proverbial upheavals of puberty and adolescence were made even more difficult for me by the miseries of exile and the after-effects of deportation, but while my father was slowly building up a material existence in Zürich, which his supporters would much rather have seen abroad, I developed an emotional attachment to that city of which I only became aware later when I was looking back on it across a deep gulf of time and space. I have often regretted my failure to question my father about his life or to thank him for making all the sacrifices without which I would hardly have emerged from the Holocaust alive. I feel even worse about our blazing rows, mainly during my years at the Realgymnasium, when I was embarrassed by his Yiddish-tinted German, repelled by his East European manners and resentful of his requests for help with his business correspondence. Sadly, I was unable to appreciate his energy , kindness and simple humour, while he probably wished that I would descend from my daydreams to everyday life, where a perceptive teacher advised me to abandon my obsession with poetry and take boxing lessons instead. Rows and silences between adolescents and their parents are common, but with us they were exacerbated by the ravages of the Holocaust.',

And so in the summer of 1952 I passed the “Matura” without ever having really talked to my father. In the language-based subjects my marks were good. In the other subjects, apart from mathematics, they were acceptable.',

It was about this time that some relatives in Israel decided that my father needed to be looked after. According to good Jewish tradition Rosa, a widow, whose husband had been murdered by a Nazi soldier during the Holocaust, was sent to Zürich to meet us and agreed with my father to give him a comfortable life while he would provide the finance for her son David to study medicine at the University of Zürich. Later David became a highly respected geriatric specialist in Israel, where Rosa joined him ten years after my father’s death. David and I are still good, if somewhat distant, friends.',

**I (in the centre) with Realgymnasium fellow-students**

**“Matura” celebration of my class, summer 1952**

Zürich – Cambridge - Zürich

Released from the Realgymnasium, I again didn’t know what to do with myself. My father would have been delighted if I had become a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer, but I found the courses unappealing and only began to feel a little more at home once I was standing in the foyer of the University in front of the lists of offerings by the various humanities subjects.

After many hours spent agonising between the lecture theatres and the “Unibar” I finally took the plunge and in the autumn of 1952 registered for English as my main subject and German as my secondary subject. For many more semesters I kicked my heels in the University, tried out or skipped many lectures, and flushed with embarrassment on the occasion when the lecturer offered to keep silent so that I could chat with my neighbour undisturbed. Later I began to take a more active part in the advanced seminars, till the corridors began to echo with the slogan “Löb knows everything.” In English philology and linguistics I learnt a great deal from both the traditional historical approach of Eugen Dieth and the modern semantic method of Ernst Leisi. I acquired wide vistas of English and American literature of many different periods from Heinrich Straumann, who also became the supervisor of my doctoral thesis. A misunderstanding with Emil Staiger was happily resolved in the exam by a discussion of some Swiss authors, which was enjoyed by both the examiner and examinee.

But I was still more interested in the practical application of a language and literature degree than in its theoretical implications. Thanks to the generosity of my father and the university regulations at the time I wasn’t obliged to rush into the exams and gainful employment but was able to take my time to produce and perform plays or create home-made magazines with more or less willing fellow-students. At the same time I began to publish travelogues, book reviews, theatre critiques and short stories, mainly in the monthly Du and the daily Tages-Anzeiger. These efforts may have seemed somewhat amateurish, but as exercises in creativity, discipline and initiative they proved to be a valuable preparation for the world of adults. Almost ten years after my “Matura” my father and I passed a somewhat different exam together. Since our trip to Romania my father had been trying to obtain permanent Swiss residence permits for both of us, but without success. In contrast, on 12 December 1961 we became citizens of Zürich and therefore of the Swiss Federation. Obviously the investigations of communal, cantonal and federal detectives and the judgement of a committee of Zürich city councillors had produced a more positive assessment of our suitability to be Swiss than the views of some representatives of the Jewish charities. During our examination on Swiss history, institutions and values I naturally spoke in Schwyzerdütsch, albeit with a slight Hungarian accent, while my father was allowed to reproduce his assiduously learnt red and blue notes in not quite grammatical Schriftdeutsch.

I spent the compulsory year abroad at the University of Cambridge, where I studied mainly English literature. The vast amount of knowledge stored in the ancient buildings and the accessibility of some of the best minds in the country encouraged me to study hard, although I was even more enchanted by the student sub-culture which allowed a spoilt “jeunesse dorée” to pursue all their interests from politics or sport to vegetarianism or stamp collecting with others of the same inclination. The beauty of the colleges on the river completed the idyll. Looking back on these brilliant teachers and these charming students, I realise that they could be petty, narrow-minded and snobbish, but when I arrived back in Zürich I had learnt a great deal from Cambridge.

In my last semesters in Zürich I concentrated on my dissertation. The topic was “Mensch und Gesellschaft bei J. B. Priestley“. I had come across Priestley when I was looking for a play for a student performance. What I still admire about the many plays, novels and essays of this author is his sense of humour and his sharp eye for social trends in the making.

Having passed all the written and oral exams I was awarded the Dr. Phil. degree of the University of Zürich on 25 May 1962 with the comment “magna cum laude”. Once I had obtained my doctorate I still didn’t know what I wanted to be. The Dr. Phil. degree in modern languages normally led to employment as a teacher in a secondary school. I had already worked as a supply teacher and given private lessons. So I enrolled for the language teachers’ exam and on 15 July 1963 obtained the Diploma for High School Teachers of English and German with the average mark of 28/30.

I, as a university student — **I, as “Professor Higgins”**

I, as “Professor Higgins” — **I, as a university student**

The long year in Sussex

While I was studying in Zürich a tragedy unfolded in Israel the full significance of which I did not understand till later. In 1953, Rezső Kasztner, the man who had rescued me from Bergen-Belsen, was accused of collaboration with Eichmann. In the libel trial which followed a district judge confirmed Kasztner’s guilt. On appeal the Supreme Court of Israel reversed the lower court’s judgment, but by then Kasztner was dead – shot by a Jewish extremist. The affair was loosely connected with Israeli politics and is still extremely controversial. Its shock wave reached me late but all the more powerfully.

In summer 1963 I was briefly employed as a sub-editor in the Zürich branch of United Press International (UPI). The most sensational event was the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, which I followed breathlessly on the telex machine, but in reality the sub-editor’s work did not intellectually challenge me. In September 1963 the job of a Lektor in German became available at the University of Sussex in Brighton and I accepted it, thinking that I would only stay in England for one year. As it happened, I stayed till 2008, ten years after retirement age.

Shortly before I took the job at Sussex I met Jill, an English divorcee living in Zürich. She wanted to return to England, I was going to teach in England, and we married. We were incompatible, but we both refused to see it for eleven years, during which time our two daughters, Dinah and Susi, were born in Brighton. Dinah has a daughter and a son by now in their twenties, Susi twin daughters in their upper teens and a third daughter who is nearly fifteen. I don’t know how I would have survived without seeing Dinah and Susi at more or less regular intervals, but after the divorce and some years of loneliness I met Sheila at a “progressive dinner” and we have been happily married for three decades.

The University of Sussex had been opened with overheated hype in 1961. As the first “new university” after the second world war it was known for some radical reforms. As in “Oxbridge”, students were often taught in groups of one or two. Instead of separating the disciplines, Sussex combined them in interdisciplinary research and teaching. The modernity of its academic and administrative structures was reflected in the revolutionary architecture of the campus.

After a phase of sexual liberation under the motto of “Swinging Sixties” and of left-wing militancy involving a great deal of red paint in the 1960s, the economic and political crises of the 1970s brought a more sober mood, which still persists today.

It was in this changing atmosphere that I worked in Sussex for over 50 years, climbing all the steps on the ladder from Lektor to full Professor. I taught German language, delivered lectures and seminars on German and English literature and published scholarly books and articles on both. I wrote several books on German drama, including From Lessing to Hauptmann (1974) and Christian Dietrich Grabbe (1996), and translated others into English from Hungarian, e.g. Béla Zsolt’s harrowing memoir of forced labour and ghetto, Nine Suitcases, (2005) and German, e.g. Otto Weininger’s astonishing treatise Sex and Character (2003), Friedrich Nietzsche’s seminal Writings from the Early Notebooks (2009) and Kurt Guggenheim’s great novel about Zürich, All in All (2019).

I was Chair of German, Sub-Dean for Academic Affairs, Convenor for relations with Continental European universities and Honorary Secretary of the Conference of University Teachers in Great Britain and Ireland. I taught as a Visiting Professor in the University of Constance in Germany and in Middlebury College in Vermont, USA. When a Centre for German-Jewish Studies opened at Sussex in the 1990s more of my work began to focus on Jewish literature and society. In 1970 I acquired British nationality. The procedure involved less study of history than my naturalisation in Switzerland in 1961, but I still wonder what my British referees said to the detective who was inquiring about my “loyalty to the Crown”.

There were, of course, some disappointments. A book I had been commissioned to write was never published because I was unable to raise any money for it when I was asked by the editor to do so after we had signed the agreement. An intrigue involving the appointment of a foreign academic and the promotion of a local one almost cost me my own job without my own fault. I was hurt most deeply when a close colleague persuaded me against my better instincts to stand for election to an important post by assuring me of her unwavering support, but when the time came broke her promise and made sure that she got the post herself. Those were some of the uglier sides of academic life. For the more beautiful ones I prefer to remember the many letters of thanks I have received from grateful students all over the world.

In 2016 a misguided section of the British people voted in a dubious referendum for the UK to withdraw from the European Union. Since 2 April 2017 I have been living again in Zürich. Two years later the future of the UK looks more uncertain than ever.

**My British Certificate of Naturalisation**

**I, with students in a seminar, in the1980s**

Kasztner and After: The Truth in a Dark Time

I am often invited to schools to give talks and to answer questions from the young audiences. Some of the questions are naive, but time and again they force me to revisit my own views and restate them as clearly as I can. A popular question is “What can we do to make our bad world better?” I usually answer: “Fight for the truth” and by way of illustration I tell the – true – story of Rezsö Kasztner.

Rezsö Kasztner was a Zionist activist from Transilvania, who made an astonishing deal with Adolf Eichmann, the “architect of the Holocaust”, whereby 1700 Hungarian Jews (including me, aged eleven) were released from the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen to Switzerland in 1944. After the war Kasztner became the focus of a violent argument, which still continues. His supporters see him as a heroic saver of lives, while his enemies condemn him as an accessory to the murder of half a million Hungarian Jews, whom he failed to alert to their impending fate in Auschwitz to make it easier for Eichmann to deport them.

In a subsequent libel trial in Israel Kasztner was transformed from witness to collaborator and, with his wife and daughter, became the victim of a furious witch hunt. On appeal the Supreme Court cleared him but by that time he had been assassinated in Tel Aviv by a Jewish extremist.

When I retired from the University of Sussex I wrote a book of combined autobiography and history about my experience of Bergen-Belsen and the fate of Rezsö Kasztner. It was called Dealing with Satan. Rezsö Kasztner’s Daring Rescue Mission and followed by translations into several other languages. For this book I received the “Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award 2012”. I explain at the outset that I may seem biased in favour of the man who saved my life, but that I had tried to present the facts as objectively as I could, precisely because I was aware of that risk.

Most reviewers approved. One called the book “balanced and well written”. Another appreciated my “detached calm and appropriate empathy.” A third praised me for recording the facts accurately and at the same time “convincingly refuting the allegation that Kasztner saved only his relatives and associates.” Yet another stressed my impartiality: “The author clearly identifies with Kasztner . . . while even-handedly providing enough facts to enable readers to form their own judgement.“

There were also objections. For the press one particularly crude example may suffice: “Kasztner and his gang were the most hideous Hungarian Jews known to history. And the book belongs into a recycling bin“. Critical listeners to my talks included a professor who interrupted me to complain that the university whose guests we were had allowed a liar like me to speak; a well-known freelance researcher who claimed that my father and I were saved only because we were rich and could pay while others could not; and an angry man who tried to make me feel guilty by suggesting that my survival was causally linked with the death of thousands of other eleven year olds. An awkward student threatened to disrupt a meeting, but when I asked him to explain his objections in public he suddenly remembered that he had an urgent appointment somewhere else and left. Each time the chair supported me.

As for Kasztner himself, it is difficult to arrive at a fair judgment. Two trials and decades of bitter arguments have not produced any consensus. Whether he is seen as a traitor or a hero continues to depend on the preconceived notions, wishful thinking or vested interests of the speakers. Where an element of truth seems to emerge it is confounded by either involuntary or deliberate untruths. Kasztner himself, who preferred action to speculation, may at times have been unsure of his own motivation.

The impossibility of obtaining a clear overview created an atmosphere of disorientation, frustration and anger, in which anything was possible, including murder. But even after Kasztner was murdered the truth remained undiscovered. To this day nobody seems to offer, or even to look for, solid evidence or reliable conclusions. My own cautious efforts to disentangle Kasztner’s intentions from the distortions are ignored.

Kasztner died because too many people were acting on prejudice rather than making an honest attempt at establishing the truth. He was destroyed by a tragic combination of his own equivocations and the manipulations of others, all of whom believed that they were free agents, but who did not really understand the driving forces of their own conduct. Then as now humanity was unable, or unwilling, to face the truth about its own impulses.

The world has not become a better place since Kasztner’s death. We live in a dark age dominated by greed, ambition, self-interest, treachery and mendacity. Our rulers feed the masses with more and more blatant lies in order to advance their schemes, and the masses, whether dutifully producing votes or reluctantly obeying orders, allow themselves to be used for any purpose, good or bad. As we keep refusing to see the truth, the hidden violence in us is waiting for a chance to turn into unlimited genocide and global conflagration.

We shall probably never know the whole truth about Kasztner – or about any of the complex issues of our lives. But if we were prepared to question our own motives fairly and squarely we might halt the stampede into destruction and commit our energies to more positive uses. Where possession of the truth is impossible the quest for it alone may bring about a more satisfactory existence. I must confess that I see little hope for such a change happening under our old establishments. But if we are to be saved perhaps we shall be saved by the young generations who ask what we can do to make the world better than it is.

**Certificate of the “Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award 2012”**