Gertrude Pressburger

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Gertrude Pressburger (born July 11, 1927 in Vienna ; † December 31, 2021 ) was an Austrian Holocaust survivor .

Life

Gertrude Pressburger and her two younger brothers grew up in modest circumstances. Her father was a carpenter. The family converted from Judaism to Catholicism in the early 1930s , but even this act of assimilation did not protect the family of five. When Gertrude's mother was hanging up the laundry in the courtyard in 1937, someone threw a cast-iron pan at her from the upper floors.

Immediately after the annexation of Austria , Gertrude and her brother were no longer allowed to attend school and the father lost his job. Without ever being politically active, her father was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo "for working underground as a communist". After his release, the family managed to get a visa for Yugoslavia only by chance . The journey ended in Zagreb in September 1938 and went from there via Italy , from where France was supposed to be headed for, but it failed. Back in Yugoslavia, the family was arrested in 1944 and deported to Auschwitz .

Her mother and both brothers were murdered upon arrival, and her father died on the way to another camp. After the liberation, Gertrude Pressburger came to Sweden via Denmark , where concentration camp survivors were cared for on the initiative of the Swedish King Gustav V. On her 18th birthday, she met Bruno Kreisky , who was chairman of the “Austrian Association in Sweden” at the time. The return to Vienna was not easy for her at first. She never went back to Belghofergasse in Vienna-Meidling , the family's old place of residence.

Video message and autobiography

She became known as Ms. Gertrude , who warned of exclusion and hatred in a five-minute video message a few days before the federal presidential election in Austria in 2016 . The trigger was her annoyance about the statement by the FPÖ boss and former Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache that “a civil war is not unlikely in the medium term”. The video was published on the Facebook page of the presidential candidate Alexander Van der Bellen , was viewed almost three million times and shared many times within four days. Foreign media also reported on this message, which was described as possibly decisive for the election.

In January 2018 Gertrude Pressburger published her autobiography in cooperation with the journalist Marlene Groihofer under the title Lived, Experienced, Survived . The publication triggered a strong media response. Spiegel Online called the book "an oppressive, but also stirring document of contemporary history". The Austrian writer Eva Menasse praised the way Pressburger tells her story "with a gorgeous mixture of delicacy and decisiveness".

Fonts

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Holocaust survivor "Frau Gertrude" Pressburger dies. In: DerStandard.at . January 1, 2022, accessed January 1, 2022 .
  2. ↑ a b c Hasnain Kazim : Quiet, now Mrs. Gertrude is talking. In: Spiegel Online , one day , January 31, 2018.
  3. ^ Johanna Hager: An Auschwitz survivor moves. In: Kurier.at , November 29, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Pressburger, Gertrude
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian Holocaust survivors
BIRTH DATE July 11, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH December 31, 2021