Ester Tencer

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Ester Tencer , originally Ester Kornmehl (born April 1, 1909 in Ryglice ; died 1990 in Vienna ) was an Austrian resistance fighter against National Socialism and a survivor of the Holocaust . After the Nazi era, she was one of the first employees of the documentation archive of the Austrian resistance .

Life

Tencer was born the daughter of a rabbi in Galicia . In 1914 the family moved to Vienna. Ester Tencer graduated from business school and trained as an accountant . She joined the communist student movement and from 1936 onwards she was active in the Austrian Red Aid , which had been banned by the Austro-fascist regime . At the end of January 1939 she fled to Antwerp and took part in the Jewish communist party there. After the attack on Belgium by the Nazi regime in May 1940, she resisted National Socialism , produced propaganda material against the war and the Nazi regime and distributed it together with other resistance fighters from Austria in front of and in German barracks.

In 1942 the deportations also began in Belgium . Her mother and her two sisters Chana and Chaja were arrested at the end of February 1943 and taken to a concentration camp. They are believed to have been murdered by the Nazi regime. The last sign of life for the three of them was a card: “We're going to a camp, we don't know where.” Tencer continued the resistance against National Socialism unbroken. As in Paris, young German-speaking communists also sought contact with soldiers in Belgium and handed them pacifist propaganda material to disseminate in the barracks. This so-called "girl's work" was extremely dangerous and led to the arrest of numerous female comrades. Tencer later said about it:

“In the party there was then a discussion about the question of whether it was worth it in relation to the successes that one had, because the successes were rather minor. Because this group couldn't do much either. They probably distributed newspapers within the barracks, but they certainly didn't influence the war so much that it ended more quickly, while almost all of the comrades who did the work went up. "

- Ester Tencer : Nothing left to lose, documentation archive of the Austrian Resistance

Tencer was also arrested in the spring of 1943, regularly interrogated and held in solitary confinement until January 1944. This was followed by deportation via the Malines transit camp to Auschwitz , where she barely escaped being exterminated in the gas chambers . After the evacuation of the concentration camp in mid-January 1945, concentration camp inmates sent her to the Ravensbrück concentration camp on one of the so-called death marches , where she witnessed the fall of the Nazi regime.

In mid-April 1945 Tencer was evacuated by the Red Cross to Sweden, then returned to Vienna and volunteered in the documentation archive of the Austrian Resistance . As a contemporary witness , she was available for a number of publications.

See also

literature

  • Berger, Karin, (Ed.): I'll give you a coat that you can still wear it freely. Resist in the concentration camp. Austrian women tell. Vienna 1987
  • Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance (ed.): Austrians in exile. Belgium 1938 - 1945. A documentation. Vienna 1987
  • Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance (ed.): Jüdische Schicksale. Reports from the persecuted . Vienna 1992
  • Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance: Narrated story: Resistance 1934-1938.
  • Winfried R. Garscha , Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider , Heinz Arnberger : The Jewish Communist Ester Tencer: A biographical sketch. DÖW yearbook 2012 (with a portrait photo of Ester Tencer)
  • Zanger, Jakob: Armed Struggle in Belgium: Soldier Work. In: Communications from the Alfred Klahr Society . Vienna 1995

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Austrian Women in Resistance : Short biography Ester Tencer , written by Karin Nusko, accessed on May 23, 2015
  2. ↑ Ester Tencer: Nothing more to lose , Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance, accessed on May 23, 2015
personal data
SURNAME Tencer, Ester
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Grain flour, ester
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian resistance fighter against National Socialism and survivor of the Holocaust
DATE OF BIRTH April 1, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Ryglice
DATE OF DEATH 1990
Place of death Vienna