“I was very rebellious”: Doctor and contemporary witness Helga Feldner-Busztin passes away

Die Presse, October 22, 2024

German original: https://www.diepresse.com/18994187/ich-war-sehr-aufmuepfig-aerztin-und-zeitzeugin-helga-feldner-busztin-verstorben

Helga Feldner-Busztin survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp. She later practiced as an internist in Vienna and began talking about her memories of the Nazi era in the 1990s. She lived to the age of 95.

The contemporary witness and Holocaust survivor Helga Feldner-Busztin has died at the age of 95. She was born in Vienna in 1929 and was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943 as a so-called Jewish mongrel, where she remained until liberation. She campaigned against forgetting as a contemporary witness into old age and was awarded the Ute Bock Prize for Civil Courage in 2018.

"Then came the terrible star, you were really, really outcast. And that was a role that was very difficult for a rather rebellious twelve or 13-year-old to find her way into. Because I was very rebellious,” Helga Feldner-Busztin later reported on the fall of 1941, when Jews in Vienna had to wear a yellow star cut out of cloth by employees of the Vienna Jewish Community.

“I was walking along the (Franz-Josefs) quay with the star, and suddenly a woman came and gave me a slap and said, 'You Jewish Pig!' For nothing. Well, I was suitably shocked, wasn't I? But later, by chance, at a similar place, also on the quay, another woman came up and put a bag of fruit in my hand and said: 'You poor child!”

Helga Feldner-Busztin was born Helga Pollak in Vienna in 1929 into a largely Jewish family. Her mother, a Jew who had been baptized a Protestant as a child, officially converted to Judaism in 1931. In 1943, Feldner-Busztin, her mother and her sister Elisabeth, later Scheiderbauer, were imprisoned in Theresienstadt concentration camp. First by chance, then through the actions of her mother, she escaped deportation to an extermination camp, according to the memorial project “Weitererzählen”. (tes)