Lanc Artur & Maria (Jenewein)

Lanc, Artur Lanc, Maria Artur Lanc, a physician by training, was born in 1906. He lived in Gmünd in Lower Austria, where he served as regional doctor. A former activist with the Social Democratic Party, Lanc was a member of the Austrian resistance. By 1944, almost all the men in Austria had been called up to the army. Therefore, with the cooperation of the government of Hungary, Hungarian Jews were sent to Austria to serve as a forced substitute work force, doing manual labor in various industries and municipal services. A transport of Hungarian Jews arrived in Gmünd, where they were put to work in a potato-processing factory. The Jews were housed in a camp on the factory grounds. One day, a man wearing an armband bearing a Star of David that identified him as a Jew arrived in Lanc’s office and presented himself as Dr. Lipot Fisch, the camp doctor for the Jewish laborers. He told Lanc that he needed a syringe. Lanc asked Fisch about health conditions among the Jews and began to visit the camp regularly. Lanc and his wife Maria (née Jenewein, born 1911) supplied clothes, food and medicine for the Jews of the camp. Dr. Lanc also helped in the camp hospital and saved the lives of many Jews. Towards the end of the war, Lanc found out that when the Russian forces would close in on the area, it was planned that all the Jews of the camp would be transferred to a concentration camp, where they would be killed. Lanc decided to try to save a number them before the order could be carried out. According to the plan, Lanc would get word to Fisch one day before the expulsion was scheduled. Then Fisch, together with two other Jews, would escape the camp, and with the help of Lanc and some of his friends, would go into hiding. On December 23, 1944, before the transport of the camp’s Jews began, a group of 1700 Hungarian Jews arrived in Gmünd on their way to Theresienstadt. Lanc did everything he could to help them, gave medicine and disinfectants to the doctor thataccompanied them, convinced a local bureaucrat to authorize delivery of a carload of straw for the Jews to rest on, and also brought them cakes his wife had baked for Christmas. Despite Lanc’s efforts, over 400 Jews from this group died while they were in Gmünd. The rest were transferred to Theresienstadt where they were murdered. In the beginning of March 1945, Lanc received word that the expulsion of the camp’s Jews would begin the next morning. He passed this information along to Fisch, who escaped that night with Piroska Blau, a Yugoslavian Jewish woman who had served as a nurse in the camp hospital, and Georg (Gyorgy) Ujhely, an attorney from Ödenburg. Lanc brought them to a hiding place, where they remained until they were liberated by the Russians on May 9, 1945. Lanc and his wife Mina endangered themselves by helping Jews, and by assisting Jews who were hiding from the authorities, although they knew the punishment for such activities was likely to be deportation to a concentration camp and eventually, death. After the war, the three Jews Lanc had helped save returned to their homelands. Fisch continued to work as a doctor in Kiskunfelegyhaza, Hungary. On June 19, 1986, Yad Vashem recognized Artur Lanc and Maria Lanc as Righteous Among the Nations.