Vilma Neuwirth

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Vilma Neuwirth (born August 25, 1928 in Vienna ; died December 7, 2016 as Vilma Kühnberg ) was an Austrian survivor of the Nazi regime , hairdresser , photographer and author .

Life

Neuwirth was born in Leopoldstadt as the youngest of eight children, grew up there and spent her entire life in this district. Her father Josef Kühnberg was a hairdresser (of Jewish descent), her mother a housewife and mother (Christian denomination). “[She] never wanted to leave Leopoldstadt. In spite of everything."

"Why? Then they would have won. Why should I emigrate? The Nazis stay and the Jews leave ?! Well listen, I'm not going to flee from them. "

- Vilma Neuwirth : Alone among the Nazis. Interview with the Wiener Zeitung , 2014

In the petty-bourgeois-proleatric milieu of her birthplace at Glockengasse 29, when Austria was annexed on March 11, 1938, she painfully learned how solidarity and peaceful coexistence suddenly turned into hatred and brutal anti-Semitism : “From every non-Jewish apartment suddenly came only uniformed people. All wore SA uniforms and boots overnight. We often wondered later how they got these uniforms so quickly. Before the invasion they were nice, inconspicuous roommates. "

Although they were not brought up religiously and with one Christian parent, Neuwirth and her siblings were declared valid Jews and suffered the consequences of the National Socialist persecution of Jews in full severity. She has to leave school, two brothers flee, her father falls ill and finally dies of natural causes in 1942. The rest of the family owes its survival to the courageous demeanor of the mother. Since she is the main tenant of the modest apartment, it will not be Aryanized . When Gestapo men penetrate in the middle of the night and want to arrest their father, she faces them with a swastika on and calls out to them: "What do you actually want from us, I am Aryan and have also chosen the Führer!"

Vilma and her siblings are exposed to a variety of humiliations and acts of violence, have to wear the yellow star from September 1, 1941 , and often barely escape arrest and deportation to a concentration camp . “Our friends, whom we knew as small children [...], abused us in the meanest. The mildest thing was when they shouted: 'Sneak it, es Judengfraster!' […] They spat at us and tried to hit us. […] My sister and I were devastated. As strange as it sounds now, I had no idea about my Jewish ancestry until then. "

After the liberation of Vienna, Neuwirth did an apprenticeship as a hairdresser, later became a consultant at the United Edelstahlwerke , trained as a photographer with Franz Hubmann and worked in the documentation archive of the Austrian resistance from 1993 . In 2008 she published her memoirs in book form, describing the life of a Jewish working class family in Vienna-Leopoldstadt and the everyday face of National Socialism - "differentiated and realistic, she illuminates the interplay of state-decreed and individual, voluntary anti-Semitism":

“I read this book like a thriller. Because it is. […] Nothing more and nothing less than the report about normal people who have become criminals, and that every day anew, and about equally normal people who have become heroes in a struggle for survival that was hard to win. The main prize was the simple, bare life. No more, but less is not possible either, because there is no less. "

- Elfriede Jelinek : Foreword to Vilma Neuwirth's book Glockengasse 29

In her book, Neuwirth tells of her own fate and that of her family members, including those who were murdered in the Nazi extermination camps and those who were able to survive in Vienna in an adventurous way.

“With“ Glockengasse 29 ”Vilma Neuwirth has written a people's book - one that would be accessible to young and old and even to inexperienced readers, entertaining and instructive, a book about fear and how to cope with it, also one that we are familiar with and yet presents a strange Vienna. "

- Erich Hackl : Hitler in the Oarsch. Criticism of Vilma Neuwirth's book in the press

In the 2013/14 season she was involved in the contemporary witness production The Last Witnesses by Doron Rabinovici and Matthias Hartmann at the Burgtheater in Vienna - together with Marko Feingold , Rudolf Gelbard , Lucia Heilman , Schoschana Rabinovici and Ari Rath . The production related to the November pogroms in 1938 , was highly valued by the public and the press and was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen and the Staatsschauspiel Dresden .

plant

Reviews of the book

Web links

proof

  1. ^ "Last witness" Vilma Neuwirth died
  2. ↑ a b Solmaz Khorsand: Alone among the Nazis . Conversation with Vilma Neuwirth. Wiener Zeitung , January 8, 2014.
  3. ↑ Text book The Last Witnesses , Burgtheater Vienna 2013, 9
  4. ↑ a b c program book The Last Witnesses. Burgtheater Vienna 2013, p. 9 f.
  5. ^ Text book The Last Witnesses. Burgtheater Vienna 2013, p. 11.
  6. ↑ Erich Hackl: Hitler in Oarsch , Die Presse , October 4, 2008.
personal data
SURNAME Neuwirth, Vilma
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kühnberg, Vilma
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian survivor of the Nazi regime and author
DATE OF BIRTH August 25, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH December 7, 2016