Anna Peczenik

Anna Peczenik (born February 9, 1911 in Sofia as Anna Gadol, † 1944 in Buchenwald concentration camp ) was an Austrian communist and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Anna Peczenik was born on February 9, 1911 in Sofia to a Sephardic Jewish family. During the First World War, she moved with her parents to Vienna , where she attended elementary school and six classes in the secondary school. Then she trained as a Montessori kindergarten teacher. In 1928 she went to Belgrade , where her father worked in a management position in a jersey factory. She herself worked in an office as a German-speaking correspondent. She returned to Vienna in mid-1930 and worked as a kindergarten teacher and stenographer.

Peczenik was politically active from an early age. In 1926 she joined the Association of Socialist Middle School Students, was chairman of a district organization of the Socialist Workers' Youth and from 1929 to 1931 a member of the Social Democratic Party of Austria . On October 11, 1931, she married Hermann (Abraham Hersch) Peczenik, who worked as a journalist and publishing director. At the end of 1931 both joined the KPÖ. On April 21, 1934 she was arrested during a house search and sentenced to six weeks' arrest. In July 1934 she was arrested again for attending a secret communist meeting and detained for six weeks. In 1936 Hermann and Anna Peczenik emigrated to Prague , where the leadership of the KPÖ was at that time. Anna Peczenik worked in the Czech emigration as a stenographer for the Rote Hilfe .

In January 1937 both left Prague to join the International Brigades in Spain . Anna Peczenik stayed in Paris for three months , where she worked in the party office and took a course for nurses. She reached Spain by ship, where she joined the medical service of the International Brigades on April 12, 1937. She was first employed as a nurse in a hospital in Murcia and from October 1937 in a front hospital of the 35th Division as a nurse and employee of the Political Commissar. After the defeat of the Spanish Republic, she fled to France in 1939, where she belonged to the KPÖ group in Toulouse .

In 1943 Anna Peczenik returned to Austria disguised as a French foreign worker in order to become active in the anti-fascist resistance. She worked as a shorthand typist in a company, helped set up a new illegal Vienna party leadership and was a member of the Vienna-Floridsdorf district leadership. When a wave of arrests began in the summer of 1943, she was in Paris to maintain the flow of information between the party leadership in Vienna and France. In July / August 1944 the Gestapo succeeded in arresting her in Paris. She was taken to the Fresnes prison, south of Paris, and from there deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp .

In November 1944, Peczenik was transferred from the Ravensbrück camp in a transport of ten women to Magdeburg to the Polte ammunition factory , where a sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp was located. The exact circumstances of Anna Peczenik's death are not known, but everything indicates that she was murdered in Buchenwald.

literature

• Filip, Irene: Anna Peczenik. Biographical sketch of a Spain volunteer and resistance fighter , in: Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance, Association of Austrian Volunteers in the Spanish Republic 1936–1939 and the Friends of Democratic Spain (ed.): 80 Years of International Brigades. New research on Austrian volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. Vienna 2016, pp. 43–63.