A mensch from Ludhiana: Vinay Gupta's book on a Holocaust saviour

Vinay Gupta's book is a clear-eyed tribute to an unsung hero who saved Jewish families during the Holocaust through ingenuity and compassion

A Rescue in Vienna: The Story of an Unlikely Saviour

Author: Vinay Gupta

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Pages: 228

Price: Rs 599

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. 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