Mara Kraus

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Mara Kraus (née Goldstein , later Ginić ; born 1925 in Zagreb ) is a survivor of the Holocaust and was the life companion of Joe Heydecker , whose estate she edited and published.

life and work

Her mother, Johanna, was an Austrian of Czech origin and a Catholic. Her father, Alexander Goldstein, was a hardware dealer of Jewish origin. He was an optant and chose Croatia . The parents married in Graz and then went to Zagreb, where Mara was born. When she was five years old, her parents separated. She stayed with her father. She completed her first class in Osijek and the second in Belgrade . As a child she learned three languages, Serbo-Croatian, German and French, as she attended the French school.

In 1933 her father changed his family name from Goldstein to Ginić and converted to the Old Catholic Church . He married a second time, an Argentine woman who, however, wanted to return to her homeland after the outbreak of war and left. Her mother then moved in again to live with her divorced husband and daughter. In April 1941, at the age of 16, Mara fled with her parents first to Hvar in Dalmatia, where a wealthy aunt on her father's side owned a villa, later to Split , then occupied by the Italians. A jealousy developed between the divorced spouses, even though the father's second wife was stuck in Portugal . Her mother denounced her father to the authorities for having obtained fake baptismal certificates for the family. The father was imprisoned for 40 days, the mother went to Belgrade, where she worked as a secretary for the Germans and became the lover of a German general.

At their own request, father and daughter went on free internment in Italy. “We had heard that the refugees were being treated well there.” They were taken to an internment camp in Piedmont . With the help of the Olivetti family, the two could be accommodated in a rural recreation camp north of Turin. After the National Socialists came to power in Italy, her mother also went there, following the general's entourage. She was in Salò . Mother and daughter corresponded, but a scheduled meeting did not materialize. Contact broke off and her mother disappeared without a trace. She must have died in the turmoil of the last years of the war.

In September 1943, father and daughter decided to dare to flee to Switzerland . Without equipment and in street shoes, the two of them, together with a dentist friend and two women, led by a grandson of the famous mountain guide Jean-Antoine Carrel on an adventurous escape across the Alps. When the five refugees arrived at the border, they heard from a Swiss border policeman: “You can't stay here, you have to go back.” Only after the two women accompanying them were desperate and had a phone call with their superiors, they were allowed through and were able to march on to Zermatt .

After the war, the father married a third time, this time a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp . Mara got married too, and went to Argentina with her husband Ivo Kraus in 1948 . Her father emigrated to Venezuela , where he made a substantial fortune selling curtains. Mara and Ivo Kraus had two children. They finally moved to Italy, France, Venezuela to Mara's father, and finally to São Paulo . “It's a life in motion,” it said in the Ö1 portrait of Menschenbilder .

In Brazil she met the German photographer and journalist Joe Heydecker , who had secretly taken photos in the Warsaw ghetto and reported on the Nuremberg trial . She became his partner and supported him in setting up the Atlantis Livros publishing house . Both marriages failed. With financial support from her father and other wealthy Jews from South America, a number of Heydecker's books could be published during the Nazi era.

In 1986 the two decided to move to Vienna . A friend from her time in Milan, Michael Freund , helped with the move. Joe Heydecker died unexpectedly in 1997. Since then, Mara Kraus has looked after, archived and published his estate. She volunteers three times a week in the picture archive of the Austrian National Library , and once a week in the documentation archive of the Austrian resistance . In the picture archive she supports the archiving of Heydecker's photographs. At 75, she started learning Arabic and Russian.

At 92 she published her first book, the life story of her father. A second book - Joe Heydecker as I saw him - has been completed and is waiting for a publisher.

Her son lives in California and her daughter lives near Chicago . She has several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Quote

“My ancestor came from the poorest corner of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. With a knapsack he went in search of a better existence. His descendants rose to the bourgeoisie, became prosperous, they overcame economic and marital crises and started over and over again until they ran for their life with only a satchel. "

- Mara Kraus : Brief description of her book on the publisher's website

Books

Portraits

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h People : Life means learning - Mara Kraus, a remarkable personality, by Heinz Janisch . First broadcast: May 17, 2015 on Ö1 , repetition on November 5, 2017.
  2. ^ Austrian National Library: Annual Report 1998 , ed. from the ÖNB, Vienna 1999, p. 28
personal data
SURNAME Kraus, Mara
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Goldstein, Mara (maiden name); Ginić, Mara
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Emigrant fleeing the Nazi regime and a writer
DATE OF BIRTH 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Zagreb