Kundanlal Gupta: the Indian who saved Jewish families from the Nazis
In 1938 Vienna, a Ludhiana businessman invented companies that didn't exist — to forge the job offers that got Jewish families out of Nazi Austria and into India. The forgotten story of Kundanlal Gupta, who saved about fifteen people, built them houses in Punjab, and never spoke of it.
In the spring of 1938, a businessman from Ludhiana walked into a Vienna that had just stopped being safe. Kundanlal Gupta — a cloth and machinery trader, and a former magistrate — had come to Austria for the Wiener Messe trade fair and to see a doctor. What he found instead was a city in the first weeks of the Anschluss: Austria absorbed into Nazi Germany in March that year, and its Jews suddenly stripped of work, property and any way out. Most of the world was busy looking away. A Punjabi trader on a business trip decided, quietly, not to.
His method was audacious in its simplicity. To leave Nazi Austria, a Jew needed somewhere to go, and to be let into most countries you needed a job waiting for you. So Kundanlal manufactured the jobs. He invented companies — Kundan Agencies, Kundan Cloth Mills — that existed only on letterhead, and wrote to Austrian Jews offering them employment in India. The offer letters were real enough to satisfy a visa officer; the businesses behind them were, in several cases, fiction. With an Indian job in hand, a family could apply for the papers that got them out before the door closed for good.
The people he carried out
These were not abstractions. Kundanlal's rescue has names, preserved because one of the families kept the paperwork and one of his descendants went looking. He arranged passage for Fritz Weiss, a lawyer who used a wheelchair; for Alfred and Lucy Wachsler and their newborn; for Hans Losch, a textile worker; for the Schanfranek brothers — Alfred, Siegfried and Bruno — who worked in wood; and for Dr Siegmund Retter, a machine-tools businessman. By his grandson's reckoning, he brought roughly fifteen Austrian Jews to safety in India. The exact number may never be known, which is its own kind of tribute: he did not keep count, because he was not keeping score.
What makes the story more than a clever visa trick is what happened after they landed. Kundanlal did not deposit them at the dock and move on. He opened his home in Ludhiana, sat them at his family's table, and — because the imaginary companies needed somewhere for their new "employees" to actually live and work — built two houses for them. Some of the refugees eventually moved on to Bombay and the bigger cities. Alfred Wachsler stayed, and made fine wooden furniture that was still in use in Ludhiana homes decades later. A Jewish cabinetmaker from Vienna, plying his trade in Punjab, because an Indian stranger had invented a job for him.
Saved from the Nazis, jailed by the Raj
The story does not resolve into a clean fairy tale, and it is more honest for that. When the Second World War began in September 1939, the British Raj classified these refugees by the only passport they held — German and Austrian — and interned them as enemy aliens. People who had fled the Reich because it wanted them dead were now locked up by the British in a camp at Purandhar, near Pune, as potential agents of the very regime that had hunted them. Most were not released until 1946. Kundanlal had got them out of one country's cruelty and straight into another's suspicion. That he could not protect them from the colonial state, even in his own country, is part of the diaspora's long education in the gap between a government and a people.
The man who never mentioned it
The most remarkable thing about Kundanlal Gupta may be that almost no one knew. He sought no medal, gave no interviews, started no foundation. He went back to his business, raised his family, and died in 1966 with the story largely untold — not out of modesty performed for an audience, but because, to him, there did not seem to be a story. You saw people in danger; you had the means; you acted. The arithmetic was that plain. How many comparable stories dissolved completely because the person at their centre felt exactly the same way — did the decent thing, told no one, and carried it to the grave — is one of history's quiet, unanswerable losses. Kundanlal's survived only by the accident of a grandson who refused to let it.
The world knows now only because his grandson, Vinay Gupta, pieced the account together from family memory and surviving documents and set it down in a book, A Rescue in Vienna: The Story of an Unlikely Saviour. It belongs on a particular shelf of Indian history — alongside the Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, who sheltered Polish children through the war — the shelf marked things Indians did for strangers, and then declined to talk about.
1938 and 2026
It is worth holding this story next to the present. This month, another Indian far from home — Captain Smit Machchhar, the Mumbai pilot who kept a hijacked Flydubai jet in the air long enough to save 174 people, many of them Israeli — was praised by the prime ministers of India and Israel within the same news cycle. Eighty-eight years separate a Ludhiana trader forging visas and a Mumbai captain opening a cockpit door, but the instinct is the same one, and it keeps surfacing wherever the diaspora reaches: an ordinary Indian, a long way from India, deciding that someone else's life is worth the risk to their own comfort or safety.
India's connection to the Jewish story is older and deeper than most on either side remember — a country that, almost alone, never produced a homegrown antisemitism, and whose own small, ancient Jewish communities lived unmolested for two thousand years. Kundanlal Gupta is one unlikely, undecorated chapter of it: a man who answered the largest horror of the twentieth century with a stack of letterhead for companies that did not exist, and fifteen people who got to live.
Sources: the account of Kundanlal Gupta's rescue as documented by his grandson Vinay Gupta in "A Rescue in Vienna: The Story of an Unlikely Saviour," and as reported by The Jewish Chronicle and Aish. This is a work of history; details of names and numbers follow the family's own record.
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