Roman Erich Petsche

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Roman Erich Petsche (born February 3, 1907 in Gottschee , Austria-Hungary , † 1993 in Ried im Innkreis , Upper Austria ) was an Austrian teacher, school supervisor and painter. He was named Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem Memorial .

The son of a German-speaking teacher and a mother from the old Galician nobility, whom he later referred to as a “nationally conscious Pole”, grew up in Gottschee , a German -speaking island in Slovenia. The family moved to Salzburg in 1919 , where his father, after fleeing from Gottschee, which now belongs to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, found work in teacher training. After graduating from high school in 1925, Petsche studied in Vienna . From 1929 he worked as a teacher, first in Salzburg, then from 1931–1933 in Ried im Innkreis and from 1933 in Sankt Pölten .

In 1944, Petsche was billeted as an officer in the Wehrmacht in the city of Novi Sad with the Jewish Csarneyi family. The Jewish lawyer Dr. Tibor with his wife Vera and his five-year-old twin daughters.

On March 25, 1944, 4,000 Jews were to be deported to the concentration camp in Auschwitz . Roman Erich Petsche decided to have the two underage daughters of Dr. To save Tibor, he traveled with the children and a cleaning lady to Budapest to see one of the children's aunties. He passed the cleaning lady off as his wife and the children as his own. That same night Roman Erich Petsche returned to Novi Sad and helped Dr. Tibor and other members of his family for a train ticket so that they could leave Novi Sad. The Tibors' sick grandmother, who stayed in town, took Petsche to a hospital and looked after her until her death. Vera Tibor, her daughters and the Tibor's aunt were arrested anyway and deported to Auschwitz. The aunt and children survived and settled in Israel after the end of the war.

After the Second World War, Petsche initially worked as a teacher trainer in Linz from 1945 to 1950, then from 1950 in the school inspectorate, including as a specialist inspector for art education for several federal states. In 1972 he retired and moved to Ried im Innkreis. In addition to his career, he always worked as a painter, but did not offer his works on the art market. He preferred figurative motifs, which in his old age he produced almost exclusively in an idiosyncratic collage technique , which he called Lumigraphy , from colored chalk drawings and collotype prints. Museums in Ried and Graz show his works.

In 1983, Petsche, who had meanwhile been appointed councilor, was honored as Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli Yad Vashem memorial for his act of rescue in World War II . At the time, he cited “the natural human commandment to help others in need” as the reasons for his act. He was also aware of the fate of his mother's family, who had lost several members in the concentration camp.

In 2002 his pictures were exhibited at the 11th Braunau Contemporary History Days on the subject of civil courage and resistance in dictatorships in the culture in the Gugg .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Roman Erich Petsche on the website of Yad Vashem (English)
personal data
SURNAME Petsche, Roman Erich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian teacher, school supervisor and painter
DATE OF BIRTH February 3, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Gottschee , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH 1993
Place of death Ried im Innkreis , Upper Austria