Last spring, my wife Anne-Marie and I had traveled to Linz, Austria’s third largest city, to attend the May 4 ceremony marking the liberation, by American troops, of a concentration camp located in the woods outside the small town of Gunskirchen, 25 miles southwest of Linz. Both of our fathers had been liberated in Gunskirchen, though they did not know each other at the time and made the connection only when they first met after Anne-Marie and I became engaged.
Anne-Marie’s parents, Ivan and Julia Deutsch, had flown out to Chicago to meet my parents, Ferenc and Ilona Feldman, for the first time in person. All four were survivors with similar Holocaust experiences; as survivors do when they meet fellow survivors, they immediately began comparing their histories. Our mothers were from nearby cities in eastern Hungary and had been deported weeks apart to Auschwitz, while our fathers had both been impressed into the Hungarian forced labor battalions attached to the Hungarian army, which was fighting on the side of Nazi Germany during World War II. “I was liberated in Gunskirchen,” said one of the fathers (I no longer remember which one) at the end of his account of survival, to which the other immediately replied, “That’s where I was liberated!”
It turns out the Nazi past is never far away in Linz.
We arrived in Linz on May 1—May Day, a major holiday throughout Europe. After we checked into our hotel, facing Linz’s neo-Gothic Mariendom Cathedral, we strolled along Landstrasse, the city’s main street, past a tall column dedicated to the Trinity, to a bridge across the famed Blue Danube that flows down to Vienna and was immortalized in Johann Strauss’ waltz. There were many people along the city’s charming streets, all enjoying the holiday. By early evening the crowds had thinned, and Anne-Marie and I began to think about dinner. To our surprise, though, every restaurant we checked was closed for the holiday.
We were about to resign ourselves to eating at the one place that was definitely open—a McDonald’s—when we stumbled across a restaurant that was not only open but filled with customers. It was a Middle Eastern restaurant named Ayam Zaman (“Old Times” in Arabic), and it had been opened in the wake of the huge influx of refugees to Europe from Syria in 2015. The restaurant had an indoor section, but because of the pleasant weather we ate in the courtyard, formed by Landstrasse and the street perpendicular to it, Bischofstrasse. The food was delicious. And we seemed to be the only Westerners in the place—everyone was speaking Arabic, the men chain-smoking cigarettes and the women puffing on hookahs. Children were running happily between tables.
The next day we met Wolfgang Schmutz, a Holocaust educator in Austria. (Yes, Schmutz is his real name, and, yes, he’s heard all the comments about it.) Before our trip we had arranged with Wolfgang to visit the nearby Mauthausen concentration camp, where he had formerly been a guide; he would also join us two days later at the Gunskirchen commemoration. After introducing ourselves, we told Wolfgang, “You won’t believe where we had dinner last night–in the courtyard, of all things, of a Middle Eastern restaurant in the center of Linz!” The news was not as surprising to Wolfgang as we had expected. In fact, he had some surprising news for us. “Ah, yes,” he said. “That courtyard was the courtyard where the Eichmann family lived.”
I later confirmed in the late Holocaust scholar David Cesarani’s biography of the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann that indeed the Eichmann family lived at 3 Bischofstrasse—the apartment in the center of town that backed onto the courtyard where we had enjoyed our Middle Eastern dinner.
Inside the Syrian restaurant in Linz, Austria, that occupies what was once the courtyard just off where the Eichmann family lived. Photo by Anne-Marie Deutsch.
Linz was a heavily Catholic city, but the Eichmanns were prominent members of the Protestant minority. Eichmann’s father, Adolf Karl, was an elder in the Evangelical church; the family attended services at the Martin-Luther-Kirche, just off Landstrasse and only steps from the Eichmann family home. Adolf attended the Kaiser-Franz-Josef-Staatsoberrealschule, a secondary school, in Linz, which was the same school Hitler had attended some years earlier.
In Becoming Eichmann, Cesarani notes that one of Eichmann’s earliest jobs was as a traveling sales representative for an oil company. “Little attention has been paid to Eichmann’s commercial career,” Cesarani writes, “but it sheds light on his later activity. Eichmann worked hard and he was good at his job…Eichmann not only sold petroleum products, he scouted out sites for petrol stations and arranged deliveries of fuel for the company’s customers. He gained valuable experience locating and assessing transport intersections. He mastered the art of scheduling deliveries: getting products from supplier to consumer when they were needed and in the right quantities.”
Eichmann’s mastery of logistics, gained from traveling in the areas around Linz, would serve him well a decade and a half later, when his “deliveries” consisted of transporting millions of Jews from throughout Europe to the killing centers in occupied Poland.
It turns out that the Nazi past is never far away in Linz—as, indeed, it is never far away throughout Austria or Germany, or throughout much of Europe, for that matter. Adolf Hitler spent his youth in and around Linz and considered the city his hometown. As führer of the Third Reich, he had plans—never carried out—for making Linz a major city and a center of German culture. Two buildings that flank the approach to the bridge over the Danube that we had visited the day before had been, Wolfgang informed us, part of Hitler’s grand architectural plan; some of the building materials came from Mauthausen, and the work had been carried out by prisoners from the concentration camp there and by local forced laborers.
The street we had explored the day before had been where Eduard Bloch, the Hitler family doctor, had his office, at 12 Landstrasse. Dr. Bloch was Jewish; in 1904 he treated young Hitler himself and in 1907 he treated Hitler’s mother, Klara, who had incurable breast cancer. Because the Hitlers were indigent, Bloch treated the family at a reduced rate or did not charge them at all. Under the Nazis, Bloch was at first exempted from the restrictions placed on other Jews, and he was allowed to leave Austria for the United States in 1940; Hitler himself signed his emigration papers. Bloch died in New York on June 1, 1945, having outlived Hitler by just over a month.
Another important Linz link to the Nazi past was Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who became deputy to SS leader Heinrich Himmler in January 1943 and oversaw the extermination of the Jews of Europe. Kaltenbrunner, too, attended secondary school in Linz and was a childhood friend of Eichmann. He was among the major Nazi war criminals tried in Nuremberg after the war and was hanged in 1946.
My father and my wife’s father were among the estimated 130,000 Jewish men who had been impressed into the Hungarian forced labor battalions. Many were used to dig roads and ditches, and some were forced into performing especially brutal tasks, such as working in mines, where the conditions were particularly dangerous. In late 1944 and early 1945, as the Red Army was pushing west toward Germany, the forced laborers, by then starving and barely alive, were marched toward the Reich—first into western Hungary and then into today’s Austria. The marches were harrowing—the infamous death marches during the harsh winter, on which prisoners who could not keep up were shot or simply left to die in roadside ditches.
Once inside today’s Austria, our fathers were held for a time in Mauthausen, the notorious concentration camp built alongside a large quarry. Mauthausen lies 15 miles southeast of Linz and was the home of what the prisoners called “the stairs of death”—186 stone stairs to the bottom of the quarry on which the prisoners were forced to carry large stone blocks on their backs. Those who collapsed under their burden were shot. I don’t believe our fathers worked in the quarry; by the time they got there, Mauthausen could no longer hold the thousands of new prisoners who had been sent there. Our fathers were likely held in the “tent camp” (also called the “Hungarian camp”)—which amounted to flimsy tents erected alongside the Mauthausen camp itself, woefully inadequate shelters to protect against the Austrian winter.
At some point, likely in March and April 1945, the Hungarian prisoners were moved once again, to hastily constructed wooden barracks in the forested area near Gunskirchen. The camp, a subcamp of Mauthausen, was originally planned to hold 4,500 people; by May 1945 there were an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 prisoners there, the great majority of them with no choice but to sleep outdoors at night. Food and water, needless to say, were scarce. When American soldiers from the 71st Infantry Division arrived on May 4, 1945, they met a scene of horror: hundreds of corpses scattered among the trees and the surviving prisoners in terribly emaciated condition. Some of the American soldiers, understandably seeking to be kind, gave the prisoners some of their rations; many of the prisoners, in their desperate state, wolfed down the food they had been offered, but their tortured bodies could not handle the rich food, and they died as a result.
We had been encouraged to attend the Gunskirchen commemoration by Elisabeth Weixlbaumer, a high school teacher in a nearby town who is active in Holocaust education. Elisabeth had met my father-in-law in 1995 when Ivan, together with other survivors and American liberators, attended a ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the Gunskirchen camp’s liberation. Elisabeth and Ivan had stayed in touch over the years; my in-laws even hosted her and her kids when they visited New York in the early 2000s. In late 2022, Anne-Marie had to share with Elisabeth the news that both of her parents had died that year. Elisabeth asked if we would come to Gunskirchen for the next annual commemoration, noting sadly that no survivors had been able to attend the 2022 ceremony–they had either died or were too old to travel. It was too late for us to make it, but we decided to be there for the 2024 commemoration.
As it happened, this would not be my first time in Austria, which relates to a second reason to visit Linz and areas nearby. In the winter of 1956, in the chaos that followed the failed uprising against Communist rule, my family, who had returned to Hungary after the war, fled and escaped over the border to Austria. My parents had given away most of their belongings and headed to the western part of the country.
There were eight of us that I know of—my parents, my older brother, me in a knapsack on my father’s back, my father’s first cousin Imre, his wife and their two sons (one of them a newborn). It’s possible that there were others; in any case, my father and Imre bribed a local farmer to guide us over the border. I and the newborn were given sleeping pills so we would not suddenly cry out during the night. It was December 20, the longest night of the year; the group trudged through heavy snow and frequently had to crouch near the ground every time a flare was sent up by the border guards. At one point, or perhaps more than once, the group realized that the farmer had gotten them lost—they recognized an area they had walked through earlier in the night. Eventually, though, the group did make it across the border, finding shelter in the early morning in a barn—a scene whose symbolism would not be lost on Christians. The group had one further fright, however—the newborn could not be awakened. His parents feared that they had inadvertently killed him with too strong a dose of sleeping pills. Happily, that turned out not to be the case.
My parents had assumed that once we had made it to Austria we would soon be allowed to emigrate to the United States. That assumption was wrong. We would spend nearly five years in various refugee camps, at first in and around Vienna and later in and around Linz. The only refugee camp that I have any memories of was one near the small town of Asten, only 10 miles southeast of Linz. I remember wooden barracks painted black on the outside, and kicking a soccer ball with other kids in the dusty area in front of the barracks. When I became old enough, I was enrolled in the primary school in the town of Asten itself, which was a short walk from the refugee camp.
I now wonder if Simon Wiesenthal was the person who organized the most surreal excursion of my childhood.
The camp had been established to house Orthodox Jewish refugees from Hungary still stranded in Austria after 1956. We had a synagogue, a kosher communal kitchen, a cheder for the boys and even a mikvah. We received support from the New York City-based Joint Distribution Committee (commonly called the Joint), which provided us with kosher food and other necessities. Interestingly, the Joint and ORT (the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training), which focused on providing refugees with job skills, employed someone on our behalf who would later become famous; his name was Simon Wiesenthal. Of course, Wiesenthal’s fame is not due to his having been employed by the Joint and ORT to work with the Hungarian Jewish refugees in Asten—he became internationally renowned as a Nazi hunter, most notably for having helped track down Adolf Eichmann.
Wiesenthal, too, had been imprisoned in Mauthausen, and immediately after the war ended he began working with American officials to trace Nazi war criminals. In 1945 Austria was partitioned under Allied control. Mauthausen fell into the Soviet Zone, and Wiesenthal moved to Linz because the city was in the American Zone. He stayed in Linz even after Austria regained its independence in 1955 because he was living just a few blocks from Adolf Eichmann’s family and was hoping to find some information on Eichmann’s whereabouts by tracking them.
Wiesenthal’s doggedness eventually paid off. When Eichmann’s father, Karl Adolf, died in 1960, Wiesenthal arranged to have a photographer at the funeral take pictures of Otto Eichmann, who was Adolf Eichmann’s younger brother and was said to closely resemble Adolf. Because there were no up-to-date photos of Eichmann himself, these photos were a great help in identifying Eichmann later that year in Argentina.
I now wonder if Wiesenthal was the person who organized the most surreal excursion of my childhood—a visit by about 30 people, including about a dozen children, from the Asten refugee camp to the Mauthausen concentration camp, which was nearby. Holocaust commemorations and Holocaust tourism were far in the future at that point, so I don’t know what prompted such an outing and I don’t know exactly when it occurred, but it must have been in 1960 or 1961. In a further twist to this unusual excursion, we were accompanied by a photographer. I doubt that any of our fellow refugees owned a camera or had access to a darkroom, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the photographer had been hired by Simon Wiesenthal.
I remember the weather on our excursion as warm, with everyone wearing their best clothes. To the left of the main entrance we encountered one of the earliest memorials at the camp—a statue commissioned in 1959 by the Czechoslovak government depicting a very gaunt “Muselmann.” The name means a Muslim; concentration camp prisoners imagined Muslims as exotic, otherworldly beings, and they applied the term to fellow prisoners who were thought to be at the edge of death. As we gathered on the steps leading to the statue, the adult men and women instinctively moved into two separate groups to have our picture taken. We were Orthodox, and it would have been considered unseemly for the men and women to mix in public.
When we entered the camp itself, we paused to have our picture taken inside the main gate, and again the men and women separated themselves. As we began to move further into the camp, someone mentioned that we would be visiting the gas chamber. Even though I was only about six or seven, I knew enough to become very frightened. I told my father that I didn’t want to go any further; he assured me it would be all right and clasped my hand tightly for reassurance. I yanked it away and likely started crying. An older man, whom I remember as someone who was always gentle with us kids, told my father that he would take me back outside the gate and wait with me while the rest of the group finished the tour of the camp. I’m not sure how old I was when I realized that this was actually my father’s second time in Mauthausen—the first time as a prisoner and the second, albeit a refugee, as a free man.
I had told Wolfgang of my family’s time in Asten, and he tried to locate just where the refugee camp might have been. His research led him to believe that the barracks we had lived in had once housed forced laborers, as the site was near a steel works built in the Nazi period to the south of Linz. Wolfgang surmised that our refugee camp, though now long gone, was today the site of Austria’s prison for the criminally insane. (Incidentally, Austria does not imprison people for life—except the criminally insane.)
Wolfgang drove us by the prison, whose barbed-wire fence and stanchions were creepily reminiscent of the barbed-wire fences around the perimeters of concentration camps seen in historical photos. We approached the entrance and through an intercom asked if this might have been the site of a refugee camp in the 1950s. The voice through the speaker said he didn’t know and made it clear that we could not loiter in the area. Before we got into Wolfgang’s car, I took a picture of the entrance building. I later obtained some photos of the Asten camp in the 1950s, and comparing the photos of that building now to the one taken back then made it clear that the location had indeed been the site of our refugee camp.
Wolfgang drove us into the center of Asten and pointed out a two-story yellow building that he said was likely the place where I was a first-grade student. Entering a small church next to the presumed school building, I suddenly remembered it, and that I had always been a little frightened when I passed the church on my way to school. Even as a small child, I told Wolfgang, I had absorbed the idea that Gentiles were dangerous.
Wolfgang then drove us to the Mauthausen concentration camp; today it is well preserved, with imposing stone walls flanking the entrance. In addition to the main camp, Mauthausen administered nearly 50 subcamps. About 190,000 people were brutally exploited in that system; owing to the harsh conditions in those camps, about half of those 190,000 died. In addition to Jews, the Mauthausen prisoners included former Spanish Republicans who had fled to France following Franco’s victory in Spain, French and Polish prisoners, Soviet POWs, and Yugoslavs suspected of having been partisans. The main camp at Mauthausen was liberated on May 5, 1945, by American troops, just two days before Germany surrendered to the Allies and one day after my father and Anne-Marie’s father were liberated at Gunskirchen, about 33 miles to the southwest.
Today Mauthausen serves as a Holocaust museum and memorial. Scattered just outside stand some 30 memorials sponsored by various nations. The statue of the emaciated prisoner looks little different than it did more than six decades ago. Wolfgang led us through passageways beneath the barracks inside the camp that house displays describing the history of the Holocaust and Mauthausen’s role in it. Past the displays was the very gas chamber I was too frightened to visit as a child. Even for an adult, standing inside and viewing the nearby ovens is a bizarre and eerie experience. Flowers are frequently placed inside or in front of the ovens, and sometimes also small national flags.
Wolfgang then led us around the perimeter of the camp to the area where what had unofficially been called the “Hungarian camp” had been. He pointed out that farmhouses nearby had been there since before the war and had a clear view of the goings on both in the Hungarian camp and the main camp itself. In fact, the Mauthausen camp was well integrated into the neighboring locale. The camp guards had their own soccer team, which competed in the local league; its record and its place in the league standings were published in local newspapers. Even children were well aware of the camp and were given passes that allowed them to walk by on their way to school. At one point I absentmindedly poked the grayish earth with the toe of my shoe, and Wolfgang mentioned that some bits of human remains or ashes that had drifted over from the crematoria had been discovered around where we were standing. I stopped poking.
Adding to the eeriness of our visit to Mauthausen was the beautiful spring weather and the pleasant rolling hills of the nearby countryside, making it difficult to imagine the great evil that was perpetrated in such lovely surroundings.
Two days later, Wolfgang drove us to Gunskirchen for its annual commemoration. We met up with Elisabeth just as the first event was about to begin. There were about 100 or so people gathered next to two memorials erected alongside the main road to town. As a three-piece brass band played somber music, two local officials placed a wreath at one of the monuments. The group then walked about 15 minutes into the woods outside of town. We passed a memorial erected at the spot where the American troops first encountered the prisoners, and we walked a little further into the woods to where the barracks of the Gunskirchen forced labor camp had been. Here, too, the pleasantness of the surroundings belied the horrors that took place in the area.
One of the speakers at the commemoration was Rudolf Scholten, Austria’s former minister of culture, whose father Gerhard was a Holocaust survivor. The elder Scholten was a Jew captured in Prague in 1944, sent first to the Theresienstadt ghetto and later liberated in Auschwitz by the Red Army. The younger Scholten, alluding to the right-wing nationalism gaining ground in Europe, not to mention the United States, championed democracy and the European Union. According to a translation of his printed remarks, he concluded, “Let us remember the suffering here in Gunskirchen so our children and grandchildren do not forget the events, do not put them away like a history book. Let us be vigilant and responsible against everything that blurs the past, which questions and weakens democracy. We owe this to this place and to all who were murdered here and to those who lived through these horrors.”
When the event concluded, Elisabeth took us inside a simple hut. (No barracks remain at the site; they were dismantled after the war and used for firewood.) She pointed to some wartime artifacts that are still being discovered nearby—–rusted metal cups and plates and shoe leather, for example. We then backtracked to the memorial at the place where the American troops first met the prisoners. Next to a metal plaque embedded in a large rock stands a pole with white ribbons on which the names of prisoners are inscribed. Anne-Marie and I each added a ribbon with our father’s name and wished they could have been there to witness us acknowledging their suffering—and their survival.
William Faulkner had it right: The past is never dead. It’s not even past. In Austria’s parliamentary elections last fall, the largest share of the vote went to the far-right Freedom Party, which is opposed to sending military aid to Ukraine and supports a more “homogenous” Austria by tightly controlling immigration and suspending the right to asylum. It was founded in 1956 by a former SS officer. And Eichmann’s home is now a restaurant.
An insightful, well-written personal story. Thanks for this.