Marko Feingold, who survived Auschwitz and other Nazi camps and went on to lead Salzburg's Jewish community for decades, has died. He was 106.
Austria's APA news agency reported Friday that Feingold died on Thursday, citing a notification distributed by the Jewish Community of Vienna to its members.
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Feingold was born in 1913 in what is today Slovakia and grew up in Vienna. He fled after the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938 to avoid persecution as a Jew, but was arrested by the Gestapo in Prague in 1939.
He was imprisoned in Auschwitz, Neuengamme, Dachau and Buchenwald until liberated by US troops in 1945.
"I told myself, 'If I get out alive, I must tell my story.' No one can imagine what happened there," Feingold would later say.
At the end of World War II, Feingold led 100,000 Holocaust survivors to Israel.
Feingold, along with Jewish Brigade fighters Asher Ben-Natan and Abba Geffen, served as a third prong to a movement to bring Holocaust survivors to Mandate Palestine at the end of the war, when the British embargo against Jewish immigration was still in place.
Former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz called Feingold an "unbelievably impressive personality" whose experiences "show clearly it is our responsibility never to forget the Nazi atrocities."
