A mensch from Ludhiana

The name Kundanlal doesn't figure on the list of "Righteous among the Nations", the Holocaust Memorial's designation for those who helped victims of the Third Reich's Final Solution.

- KANIKA DATTA

To Vinay Gupta, author of A rescue in Vienna, Kundanlal, a former Provincial Civil Service officer of the Raj and later Ludhiana-based machine tool manufacturer, is a hero. One survivor of the Jewish families he saved from certain death described him as a mensch, the Yiddish term for a person of honour and integrity. Yet nothing was known of his acts of humanity until his grandson chose to research casual family lore. Brijmohanlal Munjal, himself a prominent Ludhiana businessman, remembered him as an innovative businessman who didn't achieve much success.

True, Kundanlal (he used no surname), though a vivid personality, would not have merited a biography for his admittedly far-thinking but poorly managed businesses. Indians know of the Maharaja of Jamnagar's offer of refuge to about 500 Polish children, Jewish and non-Jewish, orphaned in the Soviet gulags in 1942. But, as the author points out, that humane act was done at the behest of the Polish Consul General. Kundanlal did not risk life or livelihood to save Jews. He stumbled on a way to help them when he travelled to Austria in 1938 for surgery and visited a premier European trade fair for business opportunities. By 1938, Austria had been annexed to Hitler's Greater Reich and the process of driving out Jews had begun in earnest. Kundanlal probably got the first hint of this crisis when he arrived at the renowned hospital at which he had arranged to have surgery only to find that Dr Gustav Singer, the famous specialist who was to treat him, had been dismissed for being Jewish.