Antonia Bruha

Antonia "Toni" Bruha (born Antonia Spath; 1 March 1915 – 27 December 2006) was an Austrian resistance activist. After the war she became a translator and author.

Provenance and early years Antonia Spath was born in Vienna shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. Back in Vienna, once the financial situation improved for the girls' parents, she found her mother very strict. who himself worked as a master-brewer at the Ottakringer Brewery, saw to it that she attended a Komenský (i.e. Czech language) school, and she was keen to pursue Slavic studies at a higher level, but this time her mother's uncompromisingly conservative convictions prevailed.

In the end she embarked on an apprenticeship with Joseph Schindler, as a hairdresser and beauty therapist.

Gymnastics, politics and marriage She became a member of a Czech workers' gymnastics club ("Dělnická Tělovýchovná Jednota" / DTJ). The times were becoming increasingly politicised, and membership of the club was restricted to Social Democrats. In 1933 Antonia Spath began writing, under the pseudonym Tanja Spatová, for the Czech language labour movement press, contributing to "Vídeňské dělnické listy" ("Vienna Workers' Pages") and ""Mladý dělnik" ("Young Worker"). Those first two days consisted of an unbroken series of interrogation sessions during which she was beaten "... with sticks. With all means possible". Her period of regular interrogations lasted around three months, during which time she was not permitted to change her clothes or wash herself.

Ravensbrück In September/October 1942 Antonia briefly faced a tribunal before being returned to the jail in Vienna. In October 1942 she was transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in the damp flat countryside to the north of Berlin. She was one of thirteen women from the Czech and Slovak resistance sent together from the Vienna area. One of them was her friend Irma Trksak, sister to Franz Narkowitz who had been a member of the Lobau team (and paid with his life for his involvement). The journey lasted around for weeks. She was accompanied by a "Rückkehr Unerwünscht" ("Do not send back") instruction, which amounted to a death sentence. Through the mediation of Hermi Jursa they remained together on arriving, accommodated in the "Political Block" in which Rosa Jochmann was "Block senior" ("Blockälteste"). Jochmann's leadership went some way to mitigate the horrors of concentration camp life and, above all, to encourage camp inmates to coordinate opposition to the SS personnel running the camp on behalf of the Nazi authorities. Inmates were also encouraged to display practical solidarity with political detainees, the old and the weak.

At the start Toni Bruha was set to work pushing "Lore", heavy little trucks on rails, after which she was sent to join the "tailoring" workshop. The camp medical centre was her third workplace. Her experiences here were the most horrendous she faced in the concentration camp. Nevertheless, thanks to her language skills her secondment here was probably what saved her life. A camp doctor, faced with the challenge of investigating 200 newly arrived prisoners from Poland, asked for a simultaneous translator. Antonia Bruha filled the vacancy. When a camp commandant came to collect her for "liquidation", the doctor exploded, "I can shoot her for myself. [Right now] I still need her!" ("Erschiessen kann ich sie selber. Ich brauche sie noch!"). Bruha lived through numerous brutal crimes by the SS "gynaecologists", Rolf Rosenthal and Percival Treite: agonising pseudo-medical experiments on the legs of Polish women, forced sterilisations, murders of newborns and recruitments for forced sex work. And yet, she was able to risk her life by smuggling drugs to internees in the political block and by carefully switching index cards in the medical centre. As a message-courier for the medical centre Bruha was also able to contribute in other important ways to the forced labour regime operating inside the camp, acting on behalf of the illegal international camp committee. She was, for example, involved in rescuing Toni Lehr, Gerti Schindel and Edith Wexberg. These three Jewish communists activists arrived at Ravensbrück from Auschwitz: they faced death. Death was also a major risk for any inmate caught helping them. Nevertheless, for weeks, while the SS personnel tried to find them among the inmates, they were successfully hidden in ever changing locations, while a Yugoslav inmate who was also a doctor operated on the arms of two of them to remove numbers from Auschwitz. (The third of them was too ill, with Typhus, to face the hazards of an operation at this point.) In the end all three were kept away from the camp authorities until, shortly before the war ended, they were smuggled out in a Swedish Red-Cross transport.

As the Soviet army drew relentlessly closer from the east, a succession of so-called "evacuation marches" from the concentration camp at Ravensbrück set off on 28 April 1945, quickly becoming death marches. Those who could go no further were shot by the SS. Those too ill to march were simply left behind. Bertl Lauscher, Irma Trksak and Toni Bruha agreed that their best chance of survival would be to join one of the last columns to leave the camp, and then take the first opportunity to escape. By this point even the guards were simply running off, and the three succeeded in escaping through Poland and Czechoslovakia back to Vienna. The journey was not without adventure: it took them nearly four weeks to get home. Much of the city had been destroyed by bombs. The Bruhas' house was still standing, but it had no roof. Both with regard to family life and in respect of earning a living, re-establishing a "normal" existence presented huge challenges for the concentration camp survivors.

After Ravensbrück By the time she arrived home Toni Bruha weighed just 20 Kg (44 pounds). The baby snatched from her back in 1941 was a toddler a few weeks short of her fourth birthday. The reunion was a fiasco as the child complained to her carer, "Auntie, this ugly old woman says she is my mother. My mother in the photo is a beautiful blonde lady! Send this one back, that's not my Mum". It would be some time before something approaching a normal mother:daughter relationship could be established. During her first year at home Toni Bruha was permanently ill as a result of her treatment and the conditions at the concentration camp. Nevertheless, once Sonja had started school, in 1946 she took a job with the "Russian Hours" section at "Radio Vienna" service of the national broadcasting company (RAVAG), translating German texts into Russian and Czech. She remained with the radio station for approximately ten years. (The Soviet occupation of eastern Austria ended early in 1955, after which audiences for Russian language radio programmes were no longer present in significant numbers.) She also wrote contemporary history contributions for the book "Österreich April 1945" (produced by Franz Danimann und ) as well as providing contributions to the press, notably for ("Vienna Free Sheets"), the newly established Czech language newspaper in Vienna.

Against amnesia Very soon after the collapse of Nazi Germany, Bruha was demonstrating a determination to ensure that the horrors of those times should not be forgotten. In 1947, as victim groups began to splinter along political lines, women who had survived the cells and concentration camps came together to form the "Austrian Ravensbrück Camp Community" ("Oesterreichische Lagergemeinschaft Ravensbrück"). Toni Bruha was one of the founders. Fifty years later, along with fellow survivors and supporters, she was able to look back on some of the achievements to which she had contributed: an Austrian Memorial space set up at Ravensbrück, a Ravensbrück exhibition during the 1960s which was staged successively in Vienna, Innsbruck, Klagenfurt, Salzburg and other population centres, an accompanying Exhibition Booklet on Ravensbrück, designed principally for young people, which reached 40,000 copies, the organisation in Austria of international Ravensbrück meetings and much more. Antonia Bruha was also engaged over many years as the meticulous treasurer of the "Austrian Ravensbrück Camp Community". Especially remarkable was her volunteer work after 1968 to create and built up the Ravensbrück Archive section in the Documents Centre of the Austrian Resistance. A collection of more than 800 files – documents, written memory pieces, trial documents covering the Ravensbrück and Uckermark concentration camps – provided and will continue to provide scholars and academics an important research resource.

Long before 1978, after which visits by contemporary witnesses to the Nazi horrors were included on school curricula and organised by the Ministry for Education, Antonia Bruha was making her own arrangements to speak to groups of young people about her resistance and concentration camp experiences. She believed these presentations were hugely important. Her lively and direct narrative style penetrated the hearts of many young listeners and inspired the political and personal commitment in new generations, necessary to avoid any tragic repeat of those Nazi years. She also backed up her message with written contributions to magazines and newspapers. Finally, in 1984, her autobiography, "Ich war keine Heldin" ("I was no heroine"), appeared. Its focus was on the period between her arrest and the reunion with her daughter, four years later.

By the time she addressed the annual "Austrian Ravensbrück Camp Community" meeting as a ninety year old Antonia Bruha was suffering badly with Diabetes and undergoing regular hospital stays, though friends insist that her willing assertiveness of an energetic commitment to democracy and freedom remained impressive. She died on 27 December 2006, some weeks short of what would have been her ninety-second birthday. Her body is entered in Vienna's misleadingly named Central Cemetery.