Hofrat Dr. Arthur Lanc

"In the early summer of 1944, an elderly man with the Jewish star came into my surgery. I introduced him so as not to "force" the patients to stay in a room with such a person. He introduced himself: "Dr. Lipot Fisch, the doctor from the Hungarian Jewish transport, who was recently sent to work at the Kartoffelverwertungs-AG. I would like to ask if you would lend me a venipuncture needle for a patient with a stroke." I gave him my hand and the needle and asked him, "Mr. Colleague, what else can I do for you?" Confused and happy to be addressed as a human being and a colleague after all that had gone before, he asked for a cigarette. I brought him all the cigarettes I had from the apartment and instructed him to report to me every Friday after work on the state of health of the warehouse. In reality, we sat together on these evenings and my wife cooked whatever good food was still available at the time. He always carried what he and his fellow victims needed into the camp in a suitcase: medicine, food, cigarettes, clothes.

In the meantime, it had become late autumn and I was told that when the front had approached our borders, the Jews would be transported to a concentration camp for the final solution. As the medical officer, I myself would be informed the day before. In the meantime, I had long since noticed that the Jewish doctor usually stayed with me for an hour, and he was banned from going out. I myself was to find out about the sanitary situation by telephone or on the spot. In the meantime, I had agreed with Dr. Fisch that when I found out about the deportation, I would ask him the question in person or by telephone: How is the patient with varicella (wet leaf spot)? In response to this code word, he was to flee through a back door, which would then be open, and run across a meadow several hundred meters long and hide in a young forest beginning there. In the meantime, I had arranged with the official veterinarian, Dr. Krisch, that he should announce the fugitives there that night with a horn signal and bring them to the prepared hiding place. We had agreed with the master tanner Johann Weissnsteiner in Hoheneich that he would hide them in an out-of-the-way building.

In the meantime, an extremely harsh winter had set in when I suddenly received the news on December 23, 1944 that a transport of 1,700 Hungarian Jews had arrived in Gmünd and had been housed in a granary. I rushed there and experienced a situation that I will never forget: In sub-zero temperatures, 1700 people were lying on the concrete floor in the huge storage room on the thinnest layer of straw in inadequate clothing. There was a single coke oven in the middle of the room. A certain Dr. Darvas introduced himself as the doctor in charge, but he had no medication or medical aids at his disposal. He led me through the rows of people, who all lay there emaciated to skeletons. Almost all of them were suffering from dysentery-like diarrhea. Every few moments, some of them turned on their sides, pulled down their robes and defecated their watery stools. On this tour, the doctor told me the various professions of the patients and the names of well-known scientists, actors and other leading figures in Hungarian public life. I once saw the district leader named Lukas showing some uniformed guests - so-called golden pheasants - around and remarking at such scenes: "You can see what kind of pigs they are." In reality, these people were too weak to go to the latrine set up in front of the camp. At first I managed to get a wagon of straw made available. What I was able to obtain in the way of animal charcoal or other intestinal medicines was naturally completely inadequate for 1700 people. Our entire Christmas bakery, which my wife wrapped in a relatively small parcel that I dropped somewhere in the camp, was of course also just a symbolic act that could in no way improve the prisoners' diet - beet water and a slice of bread.

One scene remains shattering in my memory: a group of about 15 young girls, who had huddled together in a corner to avoid being infected too, kept offering themselves as perfectly healthy workers. They couldn't understand how you could do without them during the war. It made my heart ache not to be able to snatch these young girls from death. And yet 485 of these 1,700 people were spared the bitter fate of being gassed in a concentration camp, dying in 55 days between December 23, 1944 and February 16, 1945, i.e. about 10 a day contaminated by their own excrement. On February 16, 1945, I received the news that all the Jews were to be deported from both camps the next morning. I immediately went to the barracks where the sick Jews from the potato processing plant were kept. At the end of my tour, in the presence of the SA commander Schässl, I asked the casual question about the condition of the varicella patient. At this code word, Dr. Fisch turned pale with excitement, which went unnoticed. The zero hour had arrived. For us who had devised the plan and our three children, but above all for the selected helpers, the fateful hours of our existence began. At half past six in the morning, my phone rang. To my horror, it was Dr. Fisch on the line. "Where are you talking about?" - "From the station! We weren't picked up, can I speak to you?" Dr. Kirsch and the three fugitives had indeed missed each other, they had run too far into the forest. Now the madness had to be attempted in broad daylight. Dr. Kirsch fetched the other two from the forest and I took Dr. Fisch in my car along side roads to the prepared hiding place [in the attic of the Weißensteiner tannery in Hoheneich]. In the meantime, the tanner's brother, the clergyman and composer Raimund Weissensteiner, who had been sentenced to death, had managed to escape in the Zwettl area. So far, so unexpectedly good. No one was likely to have observed our action. There must have been a lot of excitement during the transport, and the SA commander said: "It's only Lanc behind it. He's always in cahoots with the fish. But if I catch him, I'll kill them both myself." But he didn't succeed in proving it, and on May 9, when the Russians arrived, we could all breathe a sigh of relief. The four of them marched into our apartment and Raimund Weissensteiner sat down at the piano and, while everyone was afraid to leave the house because of the Russians, an improvised hallelujah resounded fortissimo from our windows, which were open because of the heat, into the world that had been redeemed from the Nazi horrors."