Leon Zelman s.A.
A man of dialogue and reconciliation
By Chief Rabbi Paul Chaim Eisenberg
Contribution published in the official magazine of Jewish Cultural Community Vienna (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien) originally published August 2007, republished in English with permission.
Translation from German: Daniels Counter, London
Leon Zelman was born on the 12th of June 1928 (1926) in Szczekociny, Poland. When the Germans marched into Poland they shot Leon Zelman’s father. Leon fled together with his mother and his brother Shalek into Lodz. In 1940 they were registered into the Jewish ghetto in Lodz, where in 1942 his mother died. In 1944 he was freighted to Auschwitz, and from there to KZ Falkenberg. In KZ Falkenberg he lost track of his brother Shalek, who is presumed to have been sent back to Auschwitz. In Auschwitz Leon Zelman declared himself two years older than his real age, so that he would be counted as part of the workforce. In 1945 he was transported to Wolfsberg (Gross-Rosen), and lastly to KZ Mauthausen where he was liberated on the 6th of May 1945 by U.S. Forces.
Up until then the events of his life differ hardly from any other European Jew, who sick, skeleton-thin, somehow miraculously survived the sufferings within concentration camps.
Without prejudice, amongst these, there were some typical understandable reactions.
Some lost their G*d in Ausschwitz. They were now assured that it was dangerous to identify as Jewish and often tried to dive under anonymously in society. Some without purpose, others on the search for social justice, or in search for a humane humanity.
Others lost the faith in humanity. In the shoa they lost their faith in the goodness of humanity, and withdrew in Jewish piety, or inside the Jewish community, and they avoided contacts with the world surrounding them.
Leon Zelman was one of the great exceptions. A strongly convinced Jew he became soon president of the Jewish students and helped other students through their new lives.
But he did not stop on Jewstreet.
Instead, he remained open to other students and Austrians, remained open to the world, and social democrat and showed, perhaps earlier than others, willingness to reconciliation.
His keyword was encounter! Not only did he possess the accumulation of experiences of a multitude of people and ideas, but also the contradictions within that: Namely not to hide things from underneath the carpet, yet neither objecting to peaceful coexistence.
We don’t want to repeat the stations of his curriculum vitae, rather we would like to describe the sprit of Leon Zelman. He was a bridge builder, who desired to master the rifts opened by the shoa. More than others was he hurt when the voices in the Austrian publicity rejected his dream of reconciliation. In these questions of moral political significance he spoke his mind unreservedly, and so made himself unpopular with many.
Hence when the political leadership of Austria withdrew funding support for visits to Austria by Jews who were Austrian citizens before the shoa, Zelman received a compensatory finance plan from banks and other private sponsors.
It was not understood by politicians then, that the projects Leon Zelman had organized, were not meant to serve Jewish people, rather much more the interests of the Austrian public, who through these projects were given a chance to improve their internationally broken image. Hence the many honours he received from Austria were more than well deserved.
Extremely important for Leon was his family, his daughter Nadja, Caroline an their husbands, and his grandchildren Mario, Alexander, Raphael. Jonatan, Ella and Ruthi.
To me Leon was a fatherly friend, whose council I valued and often accepted. Unforgettable were the Friday evenings when he brought elderly Jewish guests into the synagogue of the city, where I was able to receive them, sometimes for a Kiddush.
A large figure of a man in our community is no longer amongst us.
He will continue to live in our hears, and it will be our task, to continue his workm as well as we can.
Chief Rabbi Paul Chaim Eisenberg
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Prof. Dr. Leon Zelman CV
Contribution published in the official magazine of Jewish Cultural Community Vienna (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien) originally published August 2007, republished in English with permission.
Translation from German: Daniels Counter, London
1926 (actually 1928) 12th of June born in Szczekociny, Poland
1939 Fleeing to Lodz
1940 Transfer into the Ghetto of Lodz
1944 Transfer to Ausschwitz, later Falkenberg
1945 Transfer to Wolfsberg (with Gross-Rosen), Mauthausen, Ebensee
1945-1946 Hospital and Regeneration in Bad Ischl and Bad Goisern, Austria
1946 Arrival in Vienna, attending A-Level Studies (Maturaschule)
1949 Natura (A-Levels)
1949 Begin of the study of publishing studies (Publizistikstudium)
1949-1952 Officer for Social Affairs of the Organization of Jewish Students
(VJHO)
1951 Cofounder of the magazine: Das Juedische Echo (Jewish Echo)
1952-1959 President of the organization of Jewish Students
1954 Publishing Studies
1963 Head of the Travel office City
1978 Opening of the Jewish Welcome Service am Stephansplatz
1979 Honoured with the silver emblem of the City of Vienna
1980 Foundation of the Society of the Jewish Welcome Service
1984 Exhibition: sunk City
1985 Zelman receives professorship
1986 Exhibition: “Welcome Vienna” Invitation program of Austrian Jews expelled in 1938 and exchange program for young people from Israel, USA and Austria.
1992 Awarded with the Karl Renner Foundation Price
1994 Awarded with the Golden Emblem of the City of Vienna
1995 Opens the Leon Zelman Hall in Rehavia Secondary School in Israel
1995 Autobiography: “ A life after survival” is published with the help of Armin Thurnher- Falter
1997 Opening of larger office at Stephansplatz
2001 Awarded with the honorary ring of the City of Vienna
2004 Warded the Grand Emblem for services to the Austrian Republic
2006 Honorary Award of the Concordia Press Association
Other awards: Honorary Medal of SC Ha Koah, Golden emblem of the Jewish Community of Vienna (20066), Golden Doctoral Award, Cross as Officer of the Honorary Guards of the Republic of Poland
Funeral Speech of Leon Zelman
By Prime Minister Gusenbauer (Bundeskanzler) 13th July 2007
Contribution published in the official magazine of Jewish Cultural Community Vienna (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien) originally published August 2007
Translation from German: Daniels Counter, London
Wednesday was the end of the second life of our friend Leo Zelman. To be able to say goodbye in an honourable way is the last tribute, which we are able to give him communally. To me, this act of sorrow represents more than an official obligation that is owed to him by the Republic of Austria as one of its great citizens.
For me, it is an inner and painful obligation to give honours to one of my political teachers, who showed the way to humanity without conditions or limits, and who was a political companion.
Regardless of the words left in his name today, he could have had honours earlier, in his real life, full of honours, awards and support. However often people did not wish him to have these. There are many bad reasons, always bad reasons, why the support for his work has not always received the necessary scope of support. May those feel to be addressed to made humane behaviour (Menschlichkeit) a victim of budgetary concerns, which it should never be.
His earlier life ended almost many decades ago, 63 years ago. Then nobody wanted or dared to shed tears publicly about him or to even accuse his murderers. Those who die followed him into the nameless mass grave dug for European Jews by the Nazi doers and denunciators of blind fanatism. It is shameful that many of these gravediggers were the neighbour of our parents and grandparents, for many it even were the parents or grandparents. Then in 1944, the arrival of Zelman to Auschwitz, that absurd location filled with the perversities, to which we humans are capable. To die, in order to exercise limitless power and voelkisch cleanliness, meant at the beginning of the European tragedy millions of singular misfortunes and also Leon’s path of life and path of suffering.
It is true that Leon survived the hells of industrialized inhumanity that Hitler and his lot clothed Europe in, and which reached up to Austria. He survived the ghetto of Lodz, into which he was incarcerated for many years, even Auschwitz, Mauthausen and its neighbouring KZ. But he did not survive it as that carefree child he was born as back in 1928.
Neither did he survive as that restless boy who would rebel against fatherly authority and tradition with one of many naughty acts. Neither as that young man which he would have liked to be in his dreams in 1945. His dreams of youth and high flying ambitions were broken in nightmares of horror, to only survive in crippled versions:
Leon wrote once: “Only crippling (lit. Abstumpfung: e.g. making an item less sharp or poignant) enabled survival. Abstumpfung of any morals one may have, whilst at the same time sharpening of all survival instinct. This Anstumpfung still makes it difficult for me the remember concrete things.”
On the 6th of May 1945, Leon entered a new world when the concentration camp at Ebensee was liberated by US troops, on the day after he escaped the very last attempt on his life through the National Socialists. Aged 17, he began his new life. Marked by hunger and the experience of the KZ imprisonment. Nothing was now as it once was, and not only for him. His life was already an episode of never to return history, often expressed in silence, without his father, without his mother, without a brother and without personal history, prior to it ever giving started. A silenced part also in the memory of culture in Europe also his Shtetl, once is Polish, Silesian home, where he once lived non-darkened moments of his childhood and to which he never desired to return.
“I did not go back. For long I attempted to remember, although I was sure that its picture would always accompany me. Now that I want to remember a sad song comes to me, which was a song to me by my mother. Mein Schtetele Bels. Our Shtetl has faded away, perished destroyed, burned and blown away, like the traces of my family, who died in the Nazi storm of annihilation.” This is what Leon wrote, who knew that it wasn’t just his shtetl that vanished from the map. He who later would invite back Austrian Jews to come to Vienna rejected to go back once more to the place of his childhood. Neither did anyone call him to come.
Everything had changed in this Europe of destroyed buildings and of civilian destruction. Only the killers, the murderers of his family and of his friend and all those who did look away then, when Europe faced its arch-catastrophe, they were ll still there, and they remained there. Many of them claimed even, in their other identity, to also have been victims. Some excused their or others murder with the excuse of having followed orders, or the fear for their own life. Others would not even do that. And they did not even need to, because only on rare occasions was justice called for after 1945 to convict those who committed mass murder, who tortured men, women and children. The Europe of the cold war era was content with pushing the suffering of its Jewish citizens behind, because, it was concluded in the historiographic normalization that after all, all were victims here. This is an accusation with which we have to judge our history and not just this accusation.
Leon however felt differently. About the day of his liberation, he wrote: “We did not feel hate, nor a lust for revenge.” And nothing in his continued life was mirroring hate against the former torturers or the nations out of which they came. That he would be continued to be hated as a Jew, he understood, and he experienced the open, as well as the hidden anti-Semitism in the decades to come, over and over again. This selective hatred against our own inheritance of religion and inheritance still exists. Quite a few parties in Europe, in his home regions, still plays the old tune in their hot runs for votes. But no democratic politician should be willing to pay this price, which is based not only on a deliberate ignorance of history but also on the theft of any future.
Conscious of his responsibility for future generations Zelman never tired to counter anti-Semitism and any form of inhumanity. He never stopped to claim the rightful place in history and memory of Europe’s culture for European Jews, often without any success. He was convinced that Hitler should not win the fight to annihilate the Jewish inheritance if Europe. In spite of many disappointments in his attempts, Leon did win the fight for memory, not only for himself but also for all those who are convinced that Auschwitz, Mauthausen or Ebensee should never be repeated.
Leon’s survival was initially a life in a human and cultural vacuum. Hitler and his helpers, who no longer only came out of Germany or Austria, but could be found amongst many nations and peoples, almost succeeded to totally extinguish the Jewish inheritance and Jewish life: “I was a child until I reached Vienna. From now on I had to be a man. A man without a youth. There is one thing though that I never stopped, perhaps in spite of the lost youth. To make the city, which the Fuehrer wanted to make judenrein, into my city.”
And he finally lived his dream, his second life, which ended on the 11th of July 2007. From now on we will no longer hear his stories, which he could tell so full of impression and touchingly. Over and over again did they touch me personally ever and again.
There is also a third, a symbolical life of Leon Zelman. It will still take a long time until we are willing to care for his inheritance. This inheritance can not only be found amongst those people who listen to his stories, or who read his articles or books, who saw features about him, or who were in personal contact with him. It also lives on in a special spirit. Leon desired that this world would get a better world. In it all religions and cultures should come together in mutual respect. As a political figure, Leon was for social justice and the secure existence of the State of Israel. To stand for this is my thank you to you, for the life achievements of Leon Zelman.
Mayor of Vienna about Leon Zelman.
Contribution published in the official magazine of Jewish Cultural Community Vienna (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien) originally published August 2007, republished in English with permission.
Translation from German: Daniels Counter, London
“With Leon Zelman, we lose a human being, whose life, how he came across, and his great heart was so full, so sad and so magnificent, that no novel could contain it. Leon Zelman did not seek distance, but reconciliation. He did not seek a final account, but togetherness and the future, as his oath of suffering and life.
For this human greatness and his continued dedication, I would like to thank in all humbleness a friend whom we shall not forget in Vienna.”
The contribution also includes a thank you note by the Jerusalem Foundation for his long-standing support signed by Ruth Cheshin.
