Erna Musik

Erna Musik (born Erna Raus: 17 April 1921 – 8 March 2009) was an Austrian Social Democratic Party member and resistance activist. She was a Holocaust survivor who later, as a businesswoman and local politician in Vienna, came to wider attention through tirelessly relating her experiences of Austrofascism and the concentration camps to younger generations, in order to try to avoid a revival of Nazism.

Life Provenance and early years Erna Raus was born in Vienna, the youngest of her parents' seven recorded children. In terms of the race-based classifications that became important to governments after 1934, and more particularly, in the context of intensifying state-mandated antisemitism, after 1938, her father was considered "Christian" and her mother was considered "Jewish". Her father died when she was three, leaving her mother to bring the children up as a single working mother. Sources provide very few details of her resistance activity. One act of defiance involved simply giving birth. Two of her four grandparents were classified by the authorities as "Jewish", which meant Erna Raus suddenly found that she was deemed a "Grade I Mischling", which ruled out any possibility of attending a girls' secondary school

Following the February uprising of 1934 the recently established Austrofascist government had enforced their new ban on the Social Democratic Party with determination. This had triggered the emergence of the Revolutionary Socialists, an antifascist socialist resistance movement, made up of activists from the crushed former party. Karl Musik had set up what sources identify as a Revolutionary Socialist cell in Vienna during this period. Erna and Karl were clearly aware of the personal danger in which their resistance involvement placed them both. Sources insist Erna's involvement in her lover's / fiancé's political activities was not great, but she did attend at least one Revolutionary Socialist meeting: her presence was reported, presumably by a fellow participant working as a government informant, to the security services.

Malchow A few weeks later Erna Raus was transferred again, this time to the satellite camp that had been set up at nearby Malchow a couple of years earlier in order to provide the adjacent Munitions Plant with forced labourers, mostly of foreign provenance. By 1945 more than 5,000 were employed. Early that year Erna Raus became one of them. Erna Raus finally became Erna Musik. The couple's son was born in 1947 and a second daughter in 1957.

Vienna business community Erna Musik joined the Freie Wirtschaftsverband (small businesses association), newly relaunched and renamed in order to emphasize its break with ten years during which it had effectively been taken over by the National Socialist government. The small businesses sector in Vienna was still heavily male-dominated, but Musik was able to use her membership of the association to build up its women's section. Musik was also a member of the Ravensbrück Camp Association, serving as its chairwoman between 2000 and 2005.

With the Austrian Ministry for Social Affairs Erna Musik served as a member of the Victims' Welfare Commission, representing the interests of various concentration camp victims' associations.

Death

During her final years she was constrained by illness and left her apartment only very rarely. Erna Musik died in Vienna a few weeks short of what would have been her eighty-eighth birthday.

Her body was buried in the Stammersdorf main cemetery.

Recognition and celebration