Heinz Landwirth / Jakov Lind (M / Austria, 1927-2007), Holocaust survivor

Heinz Landwirth / Jakov Lind (M / Austria, 1927-2007), Holocaust survivor

Biography

Lind (b. Heinz Landwirth in Vienna in 1927) and his sister were sent to the Netherlands with a Kindertransport in 1938. He was placed in various schools, and from late 1939 with Jewish families in different towns, also spending a year (1941-42) at a Zionist training farm in Gouda. In June 1943 he obtained false identity papers as a Dutch agricultural laborer. He then found work in Germany as a deckhand on a steamer plying on the Rhine, and afterwards got a job in the German Air Ministry. After the war, he emigrated to Palestine to join his father. (His parents had escaped to Palestine in 1940, where his mother died a year later.) In 1950 he returned to Vienna, and in 1954 he settled in London, eventually becoming a well-known writer.