Auschwitz Officials Delay Auction of Family Mansion

City officials in Auschwitz, Poland, said Thursday that they have decided to delay for another month plans to sell a mansion that a Los Angeles family is trying to recover.

Haberfeld House--Auschwitz’s premier property--was taken over by the Nazis, the Russians and then nationalized by the Poles before falling into disrepair.

Meanwhile, its Jewish owners--who were at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York when Hitler invaded Poland--were unable to reclaim their home after moving to the United States, first because of Communist rules, then because of a lack of funds.

Even after a Times story prompted dozens of calls from well-wishers across the world, the family is still no closer to realizing their dream of regaining the home and liquor distillery, built by Jakob Haberfeld in 1804.

“We still don’t have the money or any reasonable prospect of it coming in time,” said Stephen Haberfeld, the American-born son of the last Haberfelds to live in the ancestral home. “I always remain optimistic that someone will come forward or that I’ll be able to think of someone or something that will save the house.”

War broke out when the Haberfelds were on a ship returning home; their vessel was diverted and the couple was barred from reentering Poland. Most of the family, including their 2-year-old daughter, was deported to the Jewish ghetto in Krakow and then taken to their deaths in Nazi extermination camps.

The small city they loved would be forever tainted by the gas chambers and human ovens of the German concentration camp just across the River Sola from the Haberfeld property.

The Haberfelds dream of reclaiming the 40-room mansion and turning it into a museum of Polish Jewish life before the war, when Jews were a majority of Auschwitz and enjoyed good relations with their Gentile neighbors.

Kazimierz Plonka, the Polish city’s vice mayor, said the local government agreed to postpone setting a date to auction the house at the request of a Haberfeld cousin in Australia.

The Haberfelds and an Australian cousin were told in a letter last month that they had until mid-March to come up with the money to buy--and restore--the home, or the city would be forced to put it up for auction.