A mensch from Ludhiana: Vinay Gupta's book on a Holocaust saviour

Vinay Gupta's book is a clear-eyed tribute to an unsung hero who saved Jewish families during the Holocaust through ingenuity and compassion

A Rescue in Vienna: The Story of an Unlikely Saviour

Author: Vinay Gupta

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Pages: 228

Price: Rs 599

The name Kundanlal doesn’t figure on the list of “Righteous among the Nations”, the Holocaust Memorial’s designation for those who helped victims of the Third Reich’s Final Solution. To Vinay Gupta, author of A rescue in Vienna, Kundanlal, a former Provincial Civil Service officer of the Raj and later Ludhiana-based machine tool manufacturer, is a hero. One survivor of the Jewish families he saved from certain death described him as a mensch, the Yiddish term for a person of honour and integrity. Yet nothing was known of his acts of humanity until his grandson chose to research casual family lore. Brijmohanlal Munjal, himself a prominent Ludhiana businessman, remembered him as an innovative businessman who didn’t achieve much success.

 

True, Kundanlal (he used no surname), though a vivid personality, would not have merited a biography for his admittedly far-thinking but poorly managed businesses. Indians know of the Maharaja of Jamnagar’s offer of refuge to about 500 Polish children, Jewish and non-Jewish, orphaned in the Soviet gulags in 1942. But, as the author points out, that humane act was done at the behest of the Polish Consul General. Kundanlal did not risk life or livelihood to save Jews. He stumbled on a way to help them when he travelled to Austria in 1938 for surgery and visited a premier European trade fair for business opportunities. By 1938, Austria had been annexed to Hitler’s Greater Reich and the process of driving out Jews had begun in earnest. Kundanlal probably got the first hint of this crisis when he arrived at the renowned hospital at which he had arranged to have surgery only to find that Dr Gustav Singer, the famous specialist who was to treat him, had been dismissed for being Jewish.

 

Kundanlal went ahead with the surgery, and during his recovery he met the first of the families he was destined to rescue: Alfred Wachsler, who ran an upmarket furniture business, and his wife Lucy, then expecting their first child. There were no complications with Lucy’s pregnancy but both were spending inordinate amounts of time in the hospital. Later, recovering in a sanatorium, Kundanlal met Fritz Weiss, a barrister, who had been admitted with serious injuries. These had been incurred after being attacked by a gang from the Sturmabteilung, the Nazi’s paramilitary organisation, and then imprisoned. Barred from practising, his assets confiscated and lacking an exit visa, Weiss was sheltering in the sanatorium to review his options.

 

Kundanlal, whose big-heartedness was legendary back home, offered Weiss the post of general manager in a new company he planned to start trading wood products and carpentry supplies called Kundan Agencies. That would give him a reason to get a visa to India. Once he recovered, he approached Wachsler, now a father but facing ruin because of the boycott of Jewish enterprises. Kundanlal offered him a job as master craftsman for his bespoke furniture in the same company. He was willing to sign the unrestricted guarantee the Raj required to provide for the maintenance of any refugees before they were granted an Indian visa.

 

Kundanlal then placed a “help wanted” ad in a local newspaper asking for experts on wood working and textile weaving (he owned a cloth mill) who were willing to work in India. The unwritten condition was that the applicants must be Jewish. That yielded a response from Hans Losch, a textile designer who had lost his job after the anti-Jewish laws were passed. Also responding to the ad was Alfred Schafranek, who ran a plywood business with his brother but had to “voluntarily” surrender their property. A third rescue and perhaps the best fit for his core business was Siegmund Retter, owner of a machine tool factory that had been Aryanised.

 

Neither Fritz Weiss nor Hans Losch stayed in Ludhiana long. Instead, they found lucrative jobs with foreign-owned firms through the Bombay-based Jewish Relief Agency (JRA). It is possible, the author muses, that they struggled in a backwater like Ludhiana after the vibrant and sophisticated culture of Vienna. Kundanlal’s austere life — a teetotaller and vegetarian — would have added to the difficulties of adjustment. Mr Gupta speculates that they never intended to work for Kundanlal and used his offer to exit Austria. He bears them no ill will since both lost family in the death camps. The JRA also found work for Retter, who arrived when Kundanlal could no longer afford to hire him because his fortunes had dipped owing to war-time controls on essential supplies. The two families who did work in Ludhiana were the Wachslers and Schafraneks, and the book has some interesting family photographs of the wives posing in saris. But their stay was cut short after the British interned all German citizens, Jews and Gentiles. The account of their internment is one of the most interesting parts of the book, revealing the Raj in all its venality. It comes as a surprise to learn that Kundanlal, a freedom fighter close to Nehru and saviour of Jews, was a member of the RSS, unabashed admirers of Hitler. He was arrested for a spell after Gandhi was assassinated and the RSS banned.

 

This is a clear-eyed tribute to an extraordinary man that should remind Indians and Israelis of the values of disinterested humanity. The lack of an index and poor proofing — the spellings of some Austrian names vary, for example — detract from the narrative.  It is also a pity that the author chose imaginary dialogue to portray events. A story sourced via the “assiduous interviews” he says he conducted and careful documentation would have yielded just as fascinating a story with a more authentic ring.