Portrait of a survivor Page 1

Membership card for the KZ-Verband issued to Kurt Herzog. The ‘Foundation of the antifascist Austrian concentration camp-inmates of protective custody’ includes a photograph of Kurt and a list of where he was imprisoned from 16 January 1939 to 30 April 1945.

Kurt was born in 1918 in Vienna to Hermann and Maria Herzog. He had a happy childhood, along with his sister, Elise, who was 10 years older, and experienced little antisemitism until around 1935, when he lost his job as a shop assistant and could not find employment again for several years. Kurt escaped from Austria to Belgium following the Anschluss in 1938, after witnessing a pro-Nazi rally. He begged local Jewish businesses for the money to leave.

Kurt was interned in a refugee camp in Belgium in January 1939, and when war broke out, he was deported to internment camps in France. His parents were deported to the Lodz Ghetto where they both died of Typhus in June 1942. On 12 August 1942, Kurt was deported to Auschwitz, tattooed, and immediately marched to the sub-camp Jawischowitz, to work in a coal mine. Though the conditions were terrible, he survived there for over two years as he was able, through friendship with a camp doctor, to secure a medical exemption that allowed him to work at the camp rather than in the mines.

From January 1945 Kurt was transferred through a number of camps; Auschwitz III-Monowitz, Mittelbau-Dora and finally Ravensbrück. In late April, SS guards forced most of the remaining prisoners of Ravensbrück on a brutal march toward northern Mecklenberg, but Kurt managed to escape and hide in the woods until liberation. After the war he returned to Vienna, but decided to follow his sister who had immigrated to Australia in 1947. Kurt arrived in November 1948.

Documents like his KZ-Verband membership card assist us in constructing his Holocaust narrative and experiences, and contextualising the photographs and documents in the collection.