The oldest Austrian Holocaust survivor has died at the age of 106, Vienna’s Jewish Community organization confirmed on Friday.
Marko Feingold passed away in Salzburg, Austria, on Thursday from a lung infection after surviving Auschwitz and three German concentration camps during World War II. Feingold was born on May 28, 1913, in the area of the Austro-Hungarian Empire now known as Slovakia. In 1940, he was arrested in Prague and deported to Auschwitz.
“They said I had three months to live. And in fact after two and a half months, I was about to succumb to exhaustion when I managed to get transferred to the Neuengamme camp,” he recalled to Agence France-Presse.
From there, he was taken to Dachau and then on to Buchenwald. Once there, he survived as a construction worker but lost his father and siblings in the camps. He was then finally freed when American forces liberated Buchenwald in 1945.
Unable to return to Vienna, Feingold traveled to Salzburg, where he founded a network that helped 100,000 Jews emigrate to Palestine. He also started a clothes shop.
Despite his age, Feingold remained dedicated to speaking out about the Holocaust through numerous conferences and events until the end.
“I must have spoken to around half a million people all in all,” he told AFP in 2018.
