The Germans wanted total war. They got it with everything that goes with it
Ivan Lefkovits was born on 21 January 1937 in Prešov, as the son of a dentist and a pharmacist. After the establishment of the Slovak State, he and his entire family were persecuted for their “Jewish” origin. His father was murdered in Budapest, where the family tried to escape. In November 1944, he was taken with his mother and brother to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where his brother was also murdered. With his mother, Ivan Lefkovits lived through the last months of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After returning to Prešov, his mother did not recover her stolen property, remarried and left for Prague with her son in February 1949. There Ivan Lefkovits graduated from the higher industrial school of organic and food chemistry and later from the University of Chemistry and Technology. From 1964 to 1966 he worked as a trainee at the Laboratorio Internazionale di Genetica e Biofisica in Milan. In 1967, after a short stay in Czechoslovakia, he moved with his wife and son to Nuremberg, where he began his career as an immunologist at the Paul-Ehrlich Institut. With Niels Kaj Jerne, he founded the Basel Institute for Immunology, where he worked for many years and was also a researcher in the laboratories of the University Hospital of Basel. He has also been a professor at Philipps University of Marburg, lectured at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology in Oxford, Erasmus University Rotterdam and the Trudeau Institute in Saranac Lake, New York. He is a recipient of numerous awards and a member of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic. In addition to his scholarly works, he has also prepared a collection of memoirs of survivors for publication, Žiji se svou minulostí. He has long collaborated with IHRA Switzerland and the Center for Theoretical Study.