Maria Potesil

Maria Potesil ( 1894 in Vienna - 1984 ibid) was an Austrian foster mother . She was named Righteous Among the Nations in 1978 .

Life

Potesil had lost her husband in World War I and lived in Vienna with their two children, Anna and Adolf. In 1927 the social welfare office entrusted her with the two and a half year old Kurt Martinetz, born in 1924, as a foster child. His mother, a Christian, died a month after he was born, and his father Berko Berkowitz was Jewish. The city of Vienna remained the boy's legal guardian. Kurt was sickly and needed special care and attention.

After the annexation of Austria in 1938, the Nuremberg Race Laws also came into force in Austria, and the City of Vienna stopped paying the care allowance. Maria Potesil did not want to give up the child, renounced her Czechoslovak citizenship and instead took on German citizenship in order to get guardianship for Kurt. She succeeded in doing this in 1939.

She also made every possible effort to get Kurt classified as a first degree mixed breed . But the Nazi authorities rejected their applications. Potesil often came into conflict with the Gestapo , was insulted as an “Aryan pig” and once even physically attacked by an SS man. She made requests to the authorities to prevent the deportation of her former foster child.

In 1942 Kurt had to move to a Jewish house in Leopoldstadt in Vienna . Potesil also moved to the second district to be close to her foster son. Kurt had to wear the yellow star, and Potesil, too, was only allowed to shop in stores that were intended for Jews. She was harassed by passers-by who assumed that an “ Aryan woman ” with a Jewish child could only be a “ racial molester ”. During the air raids on Vienna, Potesil was forbidden to enter the air raid shelter with her foster son.

In September 1944 Kurt was transferred to a collection camp in Kleine Sperlgasse 2a (a former school that first became a Jewish school after the annexation and finally a collection camp) and was to be deported to Theresienstadt . Maria ran from authority to authority for six weeks, did not shy away from bribery and was able to achieve her goal. Her foster son was released. Then she immediately hid him in the apartments of friends. She also found a doctor who looked after him in the respective hiding place. Kurt Martinetz was able to stay hidden until the end of the Nazi regime and survived.

After the war, Maria Potesil lost her entitlement to a widow's pension because she renounced her Czech citizenship. When she demanded the care allowance to which she was entitled to care for Kurt from 1938 to 1945, the City of Vienna refused to pay.

She died in 1984; her grave is in the Vienna Central Cemetery (group 89, row 30, no. 7).

recognition

Maria Potesil was named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem . The award ceremony took place on November 30, 1978 in the Israeli embassy in Vienna.

On February 28, 2012, the Vienna City Council Committee for Culture and Science decided to name an alley in the Seestadt Aspern after Maria Potesil.

literature

• Ilse Korotin (Ed.): BiografıA. Lexicon of Austrian Women. Volume 3: P-Z. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2016, ISBN 978-3-205-79590-2 , p. 2587.
• Peter Autengruber : Lexicon of Viennese street names. Meaning, origin, earlier names. 9th, revised edition. Pichler, Vienna 2014, ISBN 978-3-85431-687-9 , p. 197.
• Potesil, Maria. In: Israel Gutman , Daniel Fraenkel, Jacob Borut (Ed.): Lexicon of the Righteous Among the Nations. Germans and Austrians. Wallstein, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89244-900-7 , p. 350 f., ( Google digitized version ).
• Mosche Meisels: The Righteous Austria, a documentation of humanity. Austrian Embassy, ​​Tel Aviv 1996, p. 69.
• Mordecai Paldiel : The righteous among the nations. Yad Vashem et al., Jerusalem 2007, ISBN 978-0-06-115112-5 , pp. 343-345, ( Google snippet ).
• Gustav Trampe (ed.): Humanity in inhuman times. Avenue of the Righteous. Ullstein, Berlin et al. 1995, ISBN 3-550-07073-X , pp. 68 f., ( Google Books snippets ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Mordecai Paldiel: The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust, New Jersey, 1993 (Google Teildigitalisat) (accessed on 24 March 2018)
2. ↑ ^{a b} Yad Vashem : Potesil Maria (1894 -?) , Accessed on March 24, 2018 (biography with a portrait of Maria Potesil and two photographs from the award ceremony)
3. ↑ ^{a b} Potesil, Maria. In: Israel Gutman , Daniel Fraenkel, Jacob Borut (Ed.): Lexicon of the Righteous Among the Nations. Germans and Austrians. Wallstein, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-89244-900-7 , p. 350 f., ( Google digitized version )
4. ↑ Seestadt Aspern : '' Who was Maria Potesil actually? '', accessed March 23, 2018
5. ↑ A Letter To The Stars : '' MARIA POTESIL: The Viennese woman who saved her foster child ( memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. '', accessed March 23, 2018 
6. ^ Maria Potesil in the Vienna History Wiki of the City of Vienna
7. ^ Maria-Potesil-Gasse in the Vienna History Wiki of the City of Vienna
8. ↑ Seestadt is feminine - biographies of the namesake: Maria Potesil - foster mother, Righteous Among the Nations, p. 20, 2016