Karl Littner was born on January 15, 1924 in Auschwitz, the city that became synonymous with the mass murder of European Jews. He miraculously lived through and survived the hell of numerous camps, including Gusen II. Karl Littner’s new life began on 5 May 1945 with the liberation from Nazi terror. But it was a difficult road back to normal life. His journey took him with his German wife Miriam from Straubing in Bavaria to Tel Aviv, from there to Chicago and finally to Los Angeles. Karl Littner died on January 15, 2014, on his 90th birthday.

We conducted the interview with Karl Littner in Los Angeles in July 2013.

Stanislaw Leszczynski was born on May 29, 1922 in Lodz, Poland. Because of his parents’ resistance activities, he was arrested together with his siblings and mother, taken to Auschwitz and transferred from there to Mauthausen together with his younger brother, and shortly afterwards to Gusen I, before he too was liberated on May 5, 1945. Leszczynski attended the liberation ceremonies in Mauthausen and St. Georgen a.d. Gusen every year and worked as a radiologist in a Polish hospital until his old age. Stanislaw Leszczynski was vice president of the CIM, the Comité International de Mauthausen. He died in Poland in 2017 at the age of 94.

We conducted the interview with Stanislaw Leszczynski in April 2013 in Gallneukirchen, Upper Austria.

Dušan Stefančič was born in Slovenia in 1927 and experienced the invasion of the German Wehrmacht at the age of 14. He was arrested as a schoolboy for running errands for the Slovenian resistance and deported to the Dachau concentration camp, from there to the Natzweiler concentration camp in Alsace and on to the “Sainte-Marie-aux-Mînes” subcamp, from there to Gusen I and finally Gusen II. After liberation, he completed his high school diploma, was employed by the film studio Triglav-Film as an industrial mechanic, began to study law, and then worked at Ljubljanska Banka, among others. Then he spent eight years in India in Chennai and New Delhi. To this day, he spends his retirement in Ljubljana and Gornji Grad.

In May 2017, the interview took place on the former towbar line and the conversation between Dušan Stefančic and President Van der Bellen at the Memorial Gusen.