Olga Lengyel

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Olga Lengyel (born October 19, 1908 in Kolozsvár , Austria-Hungary ; died April 15, 2001 in New York City ) was a Hungarian Jew who survived imprisonment in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp .

Life

Olga was born as the daughter of the wealthy industrialist Ferdinand Bernat-Bernard in the Hungarian Transylvania and grew up in Kolozsvár, which from 1918 belonged to Romania as Cluj-Napoca and was again added to the Kingdom of Hungary in 1940 . Her husband Miklós Lengyel worked as a doctor in the city hospital, they had two children, she also worked as a doctor's assistant. In the spring of 1944, the Eichmann Command and the Hungarian gendarmerie organized the deportation of over 400,000 Jews from the Hungarian provinces to the Auschwitz concentration camp . Olga Lengyel was the only one in her family to survive the Holocaust ; her husband, children and parents were murdered by the Germans.

Lengyel came after the war over Odessa to Paris , where her father had left the family art collection before the Second World War. She published her memories of the Holocaust in a French publisher under the title Mémoirs de l'au-dela (Memories from the Beyond). She moved to the United States in 1947 and took the art collection with her. In 1954 she moved to Cuba with her second husband, Gustav Aguire , which they had to flee during the Cuban Revolution in 1959. The property of the US citizens, including their art collection, has been expropriated by the Cuban government. Complaints for return were always ignored.

In 1962 Lengyel donated the Memorial Library in New York under the care of the State University of New York in Manhattan, which is dedicated to the work of remembering the Holocaust. She bequeathed her property in Manhattan and the claim to the art collection to the Memorial Library .

After the political détente between the USA and Cuba in 2015, legal claims to the art collection were brought to mind by the Memorial Library. According to the directory created by Lengyel, the collection includes works by Hans Memling , Anthonis van Dyck , Francisco Goya and Edgar Degas .

Fonts

  • Souvenirs de l'au-delà . Translated from the Hungarian by Ladislas Gara . Paris: Éditions du Bateau ivre, 1946
    • Five Chimneys: The story of Auschwitz . Translation into English Clifford Coch, Paul P. Weiss. Chicago: Ziff-Davis Publ. Co., 1947
    • Reprint: I survived Hitler's ovens: the story of Auschwitz . New York: Avon, 1957

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Olga Lengyel , at Memorial Library
  2. ↑ Catrin Lorch: Loot art in a different way , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , December 24, 2015, p. 21
personal data
SURNAME Lengyel, Olga
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian Jewess
DATE OF BIRTH October 19, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Kolozsvár , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH April 15, 2001
Place of death New York City