Anna Vavak

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Anna Vavak (born March 4, 1913 ; † November 18, 1959 in Vienna ) was a Czech member of the communist resistance against National Socialism in Vienna from Vienna.

Life

According to later comrades, Vavak was a saleswoman by profession. After the "Anschluss" of Austria , she joined the "Czechoslovak Resistance Group" Viennese Czechs, commonly known as the " Czech Section of the KPÖ ". This organization carried out attacks on fire, explosives and sabotage on the one hand, and on the other hand they produced and distributed leaflets, observed the Wehrmacht and conveyed news to Czechoslovakia. According to Irma Trksak , Vavak and Antonia Bruha were the female members of the group who were actually active in the resistance. The group was broken up by the Gestapo in 1941 . Vavak was arrested during the first arrests in September 1941.

Vavak was deported to the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp on October 2, 1942 via the Pankrac prison in Prague , a workhouse in Leipzig and the police headquarters at Alexanderplatz in Berlin . At that time, inmate women were selected for the Siemens camp in Ravensbrück , including the bilingual Vavak. Anna Vavak really wanted to get in touch with the civilian workers to inform them about what was happening in the camp. She reported for the armaments factory outside the concentration camp , the Siemens camp in Ravensbrück. With the support of prison functionaries, especially the block elder Rosa Jochmann, she quickly achieved important positions in the prisoner functionaries system. With the increase in the number of prisoner women employed there, Vavak's influence also grew and made her indispensable for the plant management. She was given the role of main instructor for the other clerks. According to her memory report, she conducted the entrance exams for the prison column and thereby influenced the occupation of the workplaces. In this function, she also contributed to the fact that lists with the names of prisoner women who did not show up for work or who reportedly did insufficient work were no longer presented to the “Arbeits Einsatzführer” or were destroyed. The very risky manipulation of the piecework calculations offered an important opportunity to protect prisoners from impending punishment and / or transfer to a detachment with heavy physical work. As the main instructor for the typists, she succeeded in accommodating an increasing number of female prisoners in the offices, which she was able to encourage to slow down production by not only compensating for the corresponding differences in performance of individual women on the control cards, but also covering more systematic forms of sabotage. The historian Anette Neumann considers Vavak to be one of the main organizers of the resistance in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

On April 28, 1945, the day of the evacuation, the prisoner women working at Siemens, guarded by the SS , almost closed, moved out of the camp towards Malchow . On the way, Anna Vavak disappeared the next day at the rest area with another woman in a barn where they were hiding. In 1946 Anna Vavak married Hans Maršálek , who himself was in a concentration camp and who worked as a chronicler of the Mauthausen concentration camp after the Second World War.

Probably for one of the Ravensbrück trials at the end of the 1940s, Vavak prepared a reminder report about the Siemens work office in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

After her death in 1959 Anna Maršálek was buried in the family grave of the Vavak family in the Jedleseer cemetery (group 2, row 6, number 20).

literature

Anna Vavak's tomb
  • Bärbel Schindler-Saefkow: Siemens & Halske in the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp. In: Utopia Kreativ. Issue 115-116 (May-June 2000), pp. 512-519. (PDF) . (Contains the reprint of the testimony report by Anna Vavak: Siemens & Halske AG in the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp .)
  • Bernhard Strebel : The Ravensbrück concentration camp. History of a camp complex . Schöningh, Paderborn 2003, ISBN 3-506-70123-1 . (Zugl .: Hannover, Univ., Diss., 2001 udT: Bernhard Strebel: The camp complex of the Ravensbrück concentration camp. )

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Bärbel Schindler-Saefkow: Siemens & Halske in the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp. In: Utopia Kreativ. Issue 115-116 (May-June 2000), p. 513.
  2. ↑ Cécile Cordon: I know what I'm worth! Irma Trksak - A life in the resistance . Mandelbaum, Vienna 2007, p. 88.
  3. ↑ Erika Thurner: Hans Maršálek - The way of a Viennese Czech to the concentration camp. In: Contemporary History. Issue 2/1989, p. 102.
  4. ^ Sarah Helm: If This Is A Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women . Hachette, London 2015, p. 315 f.
  5. ^ Bernhard Strebel: The Ravensbrück concentration camp. History of a camp complex . Schöningh, Paderborn 2003, p. 238.
  6. ↑ a b Bernhard Strebel: The Ravensbrück concentration camp. History of a camp complex . Schöningh, Paderborn 2003, p. 405.
  7. ↑ Silvija Kavčič: Survival and Remembering. Slovenian prisoners in the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp . Metropol, Berlin 2007, p. 161.
  8. ^ Sigrid Jacobeit, Lieselotte Thoms-Heinrich: Kreuzweg Ravensbrück: Life pictures of anti-fascist resistance fighters . Röderberg, Frankfurt am Main 1987, p. 68.
  9. ^ Bernhard Strebel: The Ravensbrück concentration camp. History of a camp complex . Schöningh, Paderborn 2003, pp. 541f.
  10. ^ Annette Neumann: prisoner functionaries in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. In: Werner Röhr, Brigitte Berlekamp (ed.): Death or survival. New research on the history of the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Edition Organon, Berlin 2001, p. 21.
  11. ↑ http://www.friedhoefewien.at/grabsuche?submitHidden=true&name=Marsalek+Anna&friedhof=-1&jdb_von=&jdb_bis=&historischerGrab=false&latitudeWGS84_y=48.0552&longitudeWGS84_x=14.1335
personal data
SURNAME Vavak, Anna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vavak, Anni
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czech-Austrian resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH March 4, 1913
DATE OF DEATH November 18, 1959
Place of death Vienna