Ladislaus Löb (1933–2021)

Ladislaus Löb was born to a Hungarian Jewish family in Cluj (Hungarian name Kolozsvár), northern Transylvania, then under Romanian rule. His parents were Jolán (Rosenberg) and Izsó Löb, a businessman. He was raised in Marghita, a small town northwest of the city. His mother died in 1942. In 1944, during World War II, 11-year-old Löb was deported with his relatives to the Kolozsvár Ghetto, then to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. After five months there, he and his father became part of the "Kasztner group" of about 1,600 Jews who were given safe passage to Switzerland as a result of a ransom deal between Hungarian Zionist lawyer Rudolf (Rezső) Kasztner and Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann. In Switzerland, Löb resumed his formal education. and earned a PhD at the University of Zürich in 1961. He spoke Hungarian, German, English, French, and Italian. In 1963, he moved to the UK to join the faculty of the University of Sussex in Brighton, where he taught German language, German literature, and comparative literature for some 35 years. He held visiting professorships at the University of Constance and Middlebury College. He became a distinguished scholar and author on the literature of the German Enlightenment, particularly its drama, and an accomplished translator from Hungarian and German into English. He retired as Emeritus Professor in 1998 and directed the Sussex Summer School for 20 years afterwards. He wrote about his experiences in the Holocaust in his book Dealing with Satan: Rezső Kasztner's Daring Rescue Mission (2008), which won the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award in 2012. Löb was a naturalized citizen of both the UK and Switzerland, and in 2017, he returned with his wife Sheila Deasey to live in Zürich.