Forgotten Hero: How an Indian Businessman Helped Jews Escape the Nazis

In 1938, Vienna seemed to collapse overnight from a thriving European capital into a place of fear and persecution. Until then, Austria's capital had been one of Europe's largest Jewish centers, home to tens of thousands of doctors, lawyers, merchants, journalists, intellectuals, and skilled tradespeople. But in March of that year, Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, and anti-Jewish laws were quickly imposed. Jewish institutions were shut down, community leaders were arrested, businesses were confiscated, and desperate crowds waited in endless lines hoping to secure exit permits and immigration papers.

Escaping Austria was becoming nearly impossible. A Jew could pay heavy exit taxes, register every possession, surrender property, and still remain trapped because country after country had closed its borders. One of the few paths to freedom was a legitimate job offer abroad. Anyone who could present an employment contract, a guarantor, and entry documents had a chance that thousands of others did not.

Around that time, Kundan Lal Gupta, a businessman from Punjab, India, traveled to Vienna for medical treatment. While recovering in an Austrian hospital, he met a young Jewish couple, Lucy and Alfred Wexler, who described how dramatically life had changed for Vienna's Jews after the Nazi takeover. Gupta was deeply shaken by what he heard.

An Extraordinary Rescue Plan

When he returned to India, he came up with an extraordinary plan: create an escape route for Austrian Jews through employment opportunities in India.

As an industrialist from Ludhiana, an important manufacturing city in Punjab, Gupta claimed to need skilled European workers in fields such as woodworking, textiles, machinery, commerce, and craftsmanship. In some cases, the positions genuinely fit his businesses. In others, according to historical accounts, companies and jobs were created primarily to provide the official paperwork needed for visas.

Gupta set an enormous bureaucratic effort into motion. Employment contracts, job advertisements, salary guarantees, housing commitments, entry permits, recommendation letters, signatures, and endless paperwork flowed through his office. At a time when Nazi bureaucracy was closing every escape route, Gupta used bureaucracy itself to open one.

When officials demanded proof of a destination, he produced one. When they required employment, he produced contracts.

Hans Loesch, a Jewish textile expert who had lost his job because of anti-Jewish laws, answered one of Gupta's newspaper advertisements. He received an offer to manage Kundan Cloth Mills, complete with housing and even a share of the company's profits on paper. Within weeks, he boarded a ship to Bombay and continued by train to Ludhiana.

Alfred and Lucy Wexler, the couple Gupta had met in the hospital, also reached India with their infant son. Gupta built them a home alongside another intended for a different refugee family. Alfred, a skilled woodworker, established a furniture workshop in Ludhiana. Some of the furniture he produced remained in use for decades. One table later stood in the office of Vinay Gupta, Kundan Lal Gupta's grandson, who would eventually research and document his grandfather's rescue efforts.

Alfred and Siegfried Schafrank, brothers experienced in woodworking and plywood manufacturing, also arrived through employment invitations arranged by Gupta. They established one of India's first plywood factories behind their home in Ludhiana. Sigmund Retter, a machinery trader, was among the many others who escaped before the Nazis tightened their grip completely.

A New Home, New Challenges

Life in India was far from easy. Ludhiana was nothing like Vienna. The climate, language, culture, food, and customs were all unfamiliar, and the refugees found themselves thousands of miles from the world they had known. Some soon relocated to Bombay, now Mumbai, while others remained in Ludhiana for years.

Then the war reached India as well.

In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, Britain declared war, and British India entered the conflict. Ironically, some Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi persecution were classified by the British colonial authorities as "enemy aliens" because Austria had been absorbed into the German Reich. Having escaped Nazi rule, they now faced new hardships under British administration.

Gupta returned quietly to his business and community work. In 1941, he founded a girls' school in Ludhiana that still operates today and bears his name.

A Legacy Rediscovered

Perhaps the most remarkable part of the story is what happened afterward.

Gupta never wrote a memoir, never sought public recognition, and never turned his rescue efforts into a defining chapter of his life. Even members of his own family knew little about what he had done.

The story resurfaced only decades after his death, when his grandson, Vinay Gupta, began investigating scattered family memories, locating historical documents, interviewing survivors and their descendants, and reconstructing the remarkable rescue operation. His research was eventually published in a book titled A Rescue in Vienna.

Kundan Lal Gupta passed away in 1966 at the age of 73, leaving behind not only a successful business, but also a quiet legacy of lives saved when the world had largely turned its back.