David Levy Kestenbaum

Born 1926 in Ťačovo / Tyachiv
Died 1945 in Gunskirchen

Biography

Kestenbaum David Levy, the youngest of eleven siblings born to Josephine Pearl Gombo and Moshe Joshua Kestenbaum, was about 19 years old when he was murdered in Gunskirchen, one of the sub-camps of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. A dental technician, he aspired to be a dentist thus traveled from his hometown Ťačovo/Tyachiv – at the time Carpathian Ruthenia, Czechoslovakia, now part of Western Ukraine – to Budapest, Hungary, to learn, work and fulfill his dream. But the winds of war carried him 400 km west of Budapest towards Upper Austria into the Mauthausen concentration camp where humanity as we knew it lost its battle and David Levy Kestenbaum his life.

David Levy, of blessed memory, his parents' home in Ťačovo, Czechoslovakia, was a warm and economically established home that was the center of the community, helping the needy of all religions and races, opening its doors to every passerby who came from afar.

Although the second world war took the lives of a large part of the family, the brothers and sisters that went through unimaginable torture in Auschwitz or on the roads of Ukraine as prisoners of the Notorious Hungarian Work Brigades, starving and freezing to death, lived to tell their unbelievable story of suffering and heroism through ghettos and extermination camps like that of all Holocaust survivors. And so, they left the slaughter fields of Europe and returned home to the Holy Land where they flourished and regained their decent life passing it on to their children, their grandchildren, and great-grandchildren for countless generations to come.

Moshe Kestenbaum Armon, nephew of David Levy Kestenbaum

Sources:

The American 71st Division account of the horrific scene they encountered in Gunskirchen Lager, a Mauthausen subcamp: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/liberation-of-gunskirchen-lager

Fred Friendly wrote this letter in 1945 when he was a master sergeant with the American Army unit that liberated the Mauthausen concentration camp: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-granite-of-mauthausen

Location In room