Ferien am Waldsee - Erinnerungen eines Überlebenden

The much-acclaimed rediscovery of Holocaust survivor Carl Laszlo's haunting text. - "A great text, a testimony to contemporary history." Alex Rühle, SZMarch 1944. The German Wehrmacht occupies Hungary. As a Jew, the barely 20-year-old Carl Laszlo is deported with his entire family from his hometown of Pécs (Fünfkirchen) to Auschwitz-Birkenau. 45 of his Family members are murdered in the gas chambers as soon as they arrive. The young man survives an initial selection by Dr Josef Mengele. But Auschwitz is only the beginning. Until his liberation by advancing Soviet troops in the spring of 1945, Laszlo lived through the hell of the Nazi concentration camp extermination machinery in four other death camps: Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Ohrdruf and Theresienstadt. First published in 1955 under the darkly ironic title FERIEN AM WALDSEE (HOLIDAYS ON THE WALDSEE), this fictionalised account of survival by the artist, who later became widely known in Basel and beyond, has since been unjustly forgotten.The fictionalised account of survival by the art collector, writer and psychoanalyst Carl Laszlo, who later became widely known in Basel and beyond, is one of the earliest literary testimonies to the Holocaust - and a rare document of aesthetic coping with the horror that ultimately remains unspeakable.