A Holocaust Survivor Voices His Alarm

VIENNA —  Leon Zelman came to Austria as a boy, along a tortuous road through concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Wolfsberg and Mauthausen-Ebensee. By the time he was 17, and safe, his whole family was long dead.

More than half a century later, in a week when Austria provoked a rage of international condemnation by raising Joerg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party to national power, it is strange to hear Zelman speak of the gratitude he owes this country.

“They gave me a new identity, a young, sick boy of 17 years old, with no family, no language, no history, no school--no nothing,” Zelman explained in an elegant Viennese cafe where the staff addresses him as Herr Doktor. “They gave me many things.”

There were almost 200,000 Jews in Vienna before Adolf Hitler annexed Austria into his Third Reich in 1938. Today, the Jewish community numbers only 7,000, Zelman said. Almost 10 times that number of the city’s Jews perished in the Holocaust.

The rest fled to other countries, and in the early days after the war, Zelman--originally from Poland--wanted to follow them. But he reluctantly stayed and faced his own horrors and tried to get other Austrians to do the same.

As a university student, Zelman quickly proved himself a leader. In 1951, he was the founding editor of “The Jewish Echo,” a newsletter through which he and other students voiced their rage at Vienna’s Jewish establishment, whose members Zelman saw as elitist strangers.

The newsletter grew to become a respected journal whose contributors included such writers as Jean-Paul Sartre and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

His activism was driven by a simple desire: to reclaim the life the Nazis had tried to exterminate along with those of about 6 million other Jews who died in the Holocaust.

“I won my fight against Hitler because against all hopes there is a lively Jewish community [in Vienna] again, because he did not succeed in making the city free of Jews,” Zelman wrote in his memoir. “And I won because I succeeded in living my life after survival.”

As an outsider who overcame his deepest fears to make Vienna his home--and who received the city’s gold medal of honor in 1994 for his struggle to bring better understanding between generations of Jews and other Austrians--Zelman has an uncommon understanding of the Austrian mind. His love for his adopted country is stronger than his hatred for the horrific crimes it committed.

Like many other Austrians, Zelman refuses to believe that many of the nearly 27% of voters who supported Haider in last October’s federal elections share his xenophobia or would blindly follow a demagogue like him.

“Many people voted not for him but against the policies of the old government,” Zelman said. “I still cannot understand it because the economy is excellent. But I will never say Austrians are Nazis.”

Zelman lost 82 members of his family to the Holocaust. His closest surviving relative is a cousin now living in Florida. It is all far too much for Zelman to forgive, but he still tries to understand and to teach young Austrians about an ugly past many here still refuse to confront.

Zelman, who has spoken to Austrian children in 220 schools about the dangers of prejudice and hatred, thought that he saw Austria transforming itself into a more tolerant society--until he watched Haider negotiate a share of national power.

“I see him as a very dangerous man because he hates,” Zelman said. “When he spoke once at the Stephansplatz [in Vienna], he said: ‘Foreign people come and throw our children out of their schools, take their bread and our jobs!’ It reminded me how things were started by Hitler.

“Auschwitz was not the beginning,” Zelman added. “Auschwitz was the end. The beginning was intolerance and racism.”

In August 1944, Nazi SS troops cleared the Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Lodz, and the soldiers herded Zelman, his little brother, Shayek, and hundreds of other Jews onto cattle cars and bolted the doors shut.

When the doors finally slid open again, and Zelman squinted in the beautiful sunlight, he was at the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. The Nazis were killing at least 10,000 people a day at Auschwitz the summer that Zelman arrived.

But he and his brother survived long enough to be transferred in September 1944, first to a Wehrmacht barracks at Falkenberg, then again, after a death march through southern Poland, to a concentration camp at Wolfsberg, outside the Gross-Rosen concentration camp near Wroclaw, Poland. It was there that he became separated from his brother, who fell ill and was later killed.

As Allied troops advanced across Europe, the Nazis closed one concentration and slave labor camp after another, forcing prisoners like Zelman to move with them as Hitler’s great war machine slowly collapsed.

On March 3, 1945, yet another of the Nazis’ death trains delivered Zelman to Austria’s notorious Mauthausen-Ebensee camp in the mountains outside a small town, on the southern banks of Lake Traunsee.

Today, it is the stunning view of an alpine paradise that takes the breath away at Ebensee. It was fear, and sheer exhaustion, that made Zelman gasp for his.

Struggle to Stay Alive in Slave Labor Camp

Each day, Nazi SS troops with guard dogs marched Zelman and the other slave laborers, emaciated and struggling just to stay alive, to an old mine shaft dug deep into the mountainside.

They lifted large rocks with their bare hands onto carts until evening, when it was time to march back, beyond pain, to the camp.

“The dogs were immediately on the spot with their sharp barking when someone collapsed,” Zelman, 72, wrote in his 1998 memoir, “After Survival.” “Anyone who couldn’t get up was immediately shot in the neck by SS men. They merely noted his number; no one was concerned about his name.

“We other prisoners had to bring the body back to the camp, where his name was taken down by the bookkeepers of death. Right up to the end, they placed great value on exactness.”

Sixteen years before Zelman was struggling to survive in an Austrian slave labor camp, Haider’s father joined the Hitler Youth. He signed up with the Nazi storm troops a year later. Haider’s mother was a member of the Nazi Party’s League of German Girls.

To this day, Haider enjoys the fruits of his late father’s fine Nazi pedigree. Haider lives in Carinthia on a vast estate that he inherited. It was once owned by Jews who were forced to sell it after Germany annexed Austria.

In June 1991, it was as if one of the SS dogs that had snapped so many times at Zelman had come back to life when Haider said: “In the Third Reich they had an orderly employment policy.”

Coming from the governor of Austria’s southern Carinthia province, Haider’s smug remark set off a storm in the local parliament--and a sharp pain in Zelman’s heart. The best response Haider could offer parliament was: “If it reassures you, then I take back the remark with regret.”

That wasn’t good enough to save Haider, who was forced to step down and became deputy governor. But he kept to his rabble-rousing style, and in 1992, he was elected to the federal parliament. Seven years later, he was reelected governor of Carinthia with 42% of the vote.

Last October, Haider’s party stunned the world by winning just less than 27% of the vote in Austria’s national elections, a second-place finish.

By negotiating seats in the federal Cabinet for six of his party members Thursday, Haider served as a reminder that another man with Austrian blood--Hitler--rose to power in Germany through democratic elections.

Far-Right Leader Not Another Hitler

Zelman knew the Nazis far too well to think that Haider is another Hitler. But Zelman is worried just the same because he fears that the U.S. and European governments, by isolating Austria, might only make Haider the hero of a nationalist backlash.

He isn’t alone in that fear, especially among Austrians who remember a similar confrontation with the world over Kurt Waldheim. He was elected Austrian president in June 1986 despite election campaign allegations that he was a Nazi officer in the Balkans, where the occupying German army was accused of atrocities.

Zelman, who is now an Austrian citizen, is proud that he spoke out against Waldheim, whose best defense at the time was, “We only did our duty.”

Austria was isolated then, too, but nationalists rallied and blamed it all on Jewish and Communist conspirators. That wouldn’t work today because Austria is part of the European Union and doesn’t want to suffer as a pariah state again, said Georg Hoffmann-Ostenhof, a respected commentator who writes for Austria’s Profil magazine.

“The mood of isolation will turn against this government very, very quickly,” he said, predicting that the center-right coalition will collapse under the strain before the year is out.

“The majority of voters didn’t vote for the Freedom Party to get them in government. They voted for this party because they think it’s a good opposition.” And more than 70% of Austrian voters cast their ballots for someone else, he said.

As Zelman contemplated the new isolation Austria faces, his mind drifted back to the early months after May 5, 1945, when U.S. troops liberated him from Mauthausen-Ebensee, one of 49 branch concentration camps where, collectively, more than 100,000 prisoners died.

When he was well enough to move, Zelman headed for Vienna hoping to immigrate to the U.S., but he was turned down because he had tuberculosis.

So he decided to study philosophy at Vienna University, and during the introductory classes, he and other concentration camp survivors sat among demobilized Nazi soldiers, many of whom had lost limbs in the war.

One was a man of about 22 who was missing a leg. He wanted to talk with Zelman about the war while the wounds were still fresh.

“He said to me, ‘Look, I understand we took your young life, but do you see what Hitler did with my young life? I spent four years at the front. Look at my leg.’ At that moment I couldn’t say: ‘So why did you go?’

“It made me a new person,” Zelman continued, over the cafe chatter. “I had no right to forgive him and told him so. I said to him, ‘I believe you. But I cannot forgive you.’ And he told me, ‘My dear, it was not the time to be heroes.’ ”