Antonia Bruha

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Antonia Bruha (born Spath ; born March 1, 1915 in Vienna ; † December 27, 2006 there ) was an Austrian resistance fighter and author .

Life

Childhood and youth

Antonia Bruha and her sister spent the first six years of her life with her grandparents in Bohemia , as the parents did not have enough money to support the children. Back in Vienna, she attended a Czech-speaking Komenský school and would have liked to study Slavic studies afterwards . However, her mother did not feel this was appropriate to the image of women at the time and also prevailed over her father, a master brewer , when choosing a career . Antonia Spath officially completed an apprenticeship as a hairdresser and beauty therapist with a master hairdresser whom she had met in a youth group of Quakers . She received English lessons from him and she taught the Quakers in Czech because they wanted to set up a Quaker group in Prague . According to her own statements, she hardly learned anything from the hairdressing trade, but she was in Prague three times during this time.

In the corporate state and the Third Reich

In 1934 she met her future husband Josef Bruha in the Czech gymnastics club DTJ . He was a foreman and member of the Republican Schutzbund . Because of his participation in the battles for the Rabenhof , a large community building in Vienna- Landstrasse , he lost his job.

At the age of 18 she had already started to write poems and short stories under the pseudonym "Tanja Spatová" for the Czech newspaper Vídeňské dělnické listy (Wiener Arbeiterblätter). From their wedding in 1935, she wrote under the pseudonym "Tana Bruhova", among others, for the newspaper " Mladý dělnik (Young Workers) ", which appears in Czechoslovakia . Her husband also made it possible for her to actually begin the long-awaited language studies in 1936. However, Bruha had to abandon this in 1938 after the Slavic Faculty was closed by the National Socialists.

Together with her husband she smuggled illegal newspapers into Austria, which had been deposited by like-minded people in a forest near Pressburg .

After the annexation of Austria , the Bruha couple took part in the resistance group around Alois Houdek. In 1941, three months after the birth of her daughter Sonja, she was arrested by the Gestapo . While she was imprisoned in solitary confinement in the Rossauer Lände police prison for almost a year and then in the Schiffamtsstrasse district court , her husband was released after a brief detention for lack of evidence.

The National Socialists placed their daughter Sonja in the child transfer center of the municipality of Vienna in Lustkandlgasse. The head nurse there passed the child on to foster parents without permission so that Antonia Bruha's husband could keep in touch with his daughter. For the Gestapo, Sonja was a means of pressure to force Antonia Bruha to make incriminating statements against her comrades. But she managed to withstand this pressure and not betray anyone.

Antonia Bruha was transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp , where she met Rosa Jochmann . Here she witnessed forced sterilizations and human experiments . At risk of death, Bruha smuggled drugs into the political block and exchanged index cards. Shortly before the camp was liberated, she was sent on a death march with which the National Socialists wanted to evacuate the concentration camp . Together with some friends she managed to escape. Then they made their way through Poland and Czechoslovakia to Vienna.

The first meeting with the meanwhile four-year-old daughter Sonja turned into a fiasco. Her mother only knew her from a photo that showed a well-groomed and good-looking woman, and now she was faced with an emaciated and emaciated woman. It took about two years for Sonja to accept Antonia Bruha as her mother.

After the Second World War

After Sonja started school, Antonia Bruha translated German texts into Russian and Czech for what was then Radio Vienna of RAVAG . She practiced this activity for ten years. She also wrote contemporary historical articles for the book “Austria April 1945” (edited by Franz Danimann and Hugo Pepper ) and the Vídeňské svobodné listy (Wiener Freie Blätter) , the newly founded newspaper of the Czechs in Vienna .

At the request of Herbert Steiner , the former head of the documentation archive of the Austrian resistance , she started working for the archive. Around 1960 she also began attending schools as a contemporary witness and telling the students about the time of National Socialism and her own experiences in order to prevent history from repeating itself.

In 1984 her biography I Wasn't a Heroine was released , in which she mainly deals with the time between her arrest and the first meeting with her daughter.

Antonia Bruha died on December 27, 2006 in Vienna. She was buried at the Vienna Central Cemetery . In 2018, Antonia-Bruha-Gasse in Vienna- Donaustadt (22nd district) was named after her.

Works

  • I wasn't a heroine . Europa Verlag GesmbH, Vienna 1984, ISBN 3-203-50876-1 .
  • Everything was much better under Hitler than it is today. Experiences of a contemporary witness from the sixties . AZ-Thema, issue 11, Vienna 1987.
  • Chronicle of the Ravensbrück concentration camp based on the collection of files in the DÖW , in: "DÖW-Jahrbuch", Vienna 1991.
  • 50 active years , in: “Festschrift for the 50th anniversary of the Austrian camp community Ravensbrück”, Vienna 1998.

literature

  • Elisabeth Welzig: Live and survive - women tell of the 20th century , Böhlau Verlag Ges. Mb H. & Co. KG, Vienna - Cologne - Weimar, 2006, ISBN 3-205-77336-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary for Toni Bruha (1915 - 2006) , University of Innsbruck
  2. ↑ Elisabeth Welzig: Live and survive - women tell of the 20th century , p. 27.
  3. ^ Moving life by Antonia Bruha. ORF, January 8, 2007, archived from the original on July 21, 2012 ; accessed on June 8, 2015 .
  4. ↑ Elisabeth Welzig: Live and survive - women tell of the 20th century , p. 28.
  5. ↑ a b Beate Hausbichler: Unbroken through times of horror. In: derStandard.at. May 27, 2015, accessed June 9, 2015 .
  6. ↑ Elisabeth Welzig: Live and survive - women tell of the 20th century , p. 29.
  7. ↑ a b Elisabeth Welzig: Live and survive - women tell of the 20th century , p. 30.
  8. ↑ a b Elisabeth Welzig: Live and survive - women tell of the 20th century , p. 31.
  9. ↑ a b Elisabeth Welzig: Live and survive - women tell of the 20th century , p. 32.
personal data
SURNAME Bruha, Antonia
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bruha, Antonia Mari Karoline
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian resistance fighter and author
DATE OF BIRTH March 1, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH December 27, 2006
Place of death Vienna