Hanna Sturm

Hanna Sturm (28 February 1891 – 9 March 1984) was a labour rights and peace activist who became a resistance activist after Austria was merged into Nazi Germany in 1938. She spent the next few years in German concentration camps, but emerged from Ravensbrück camp on 30 April 1945 having survived. Many did not. She wrote an autobiographical record of her experiences in 1958 but was unable to find a publisher: in 1982, two years before she died, the work was however published.

Life Provenance and early years Johanna Sturm was born at Klingenbach, a small town near Eisenstadt in Burgenland. Burgenland became part of Austria in 1921, but when Hanna Sturm and her siblings were born it was in the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian empire. She was the second of her parents' four children, and the only daughter among them. She attended school for only two winters, between October and March, When she was 14 she took a factory job with "Jute AG" in Neufeld, another small town in the area. With three other similarly aged children she worked on an industrial washing machine used in the processing of the materials. However, following a strike over "wages fraud" she was back on the streets. A few years later, in 1907, she accompanied her elder brother Julius to Vienna in search of factory work.

"In den Betrieben selbst, in der Arbeit mussten wir Wege und Mittel finden, wie wir die Antikriegsarbeit organisierten. Es sind kleine Gruppen gebildet worden oder es gab Einzelmenschen, die Verschiedenes gemacht haben. Zum Beispiel haben wir kleine Flugblätter und kleine Zettelchen gegen den Krieg in Kisten reingegeben, die für den Krieg gedacht waren. Oder wir haben verschiedene Kriegsmaterialien unschädlich gemacht.."

The birth of her daughter, Theresia, on 7 October 1912 exposed Sturm to the discrimination and additional practical difficulties commonly visited on an unmarried mother. During the First World War she was sent to work in a munitions factory at Blumau (Felixdorf), to the south of Vienna. In August 1916 she was arrested for alleged sabotage and spent a time in investigative custody. She was accused of filling explosives shells with sand rather than explosives. Eventually her case came to trial and was dismissed for lack of evidence. She found another job. Sturm had been sending most of her money to her mother, Anna, who was looking after her two daughters. The father of the girls never came back from the war. She was still separated from her daughters in 1919 when the younger of them, Relli, died in a Vienna hospital. Sturm was deeply affected but carried on. Still unable to find work in her home region, where her political activities seem to have become common knowledge among factory owners,

Back in Burgenland a further period of unemployment followed. In 1930 the labour exchange sent Hanna and Theresia Sturm, together with a group of unemployed miners, to Moscow. Half a year later they were both employed, not in Moscow but as instructors at the "Rabotnica" textiles factory in Leningrad, training apprentices and other young recruits over three shifts how to work the spinning machines. At some stage she was excluded from the Austrian Communist Party, though it is not clear whether this was before or after the party was banned. She remained, in any case, a member of the Soviet Communist Party. At Ravensbrück she also continued to operate her "Sturm column" of hands-on fixers and menders. She came to be regarded by the camp authorities as a "reliable prisoner" and was employed in 1941 as a domestic servant by Walter Sonntag, the concentration camp doctor. She would later recall how she had been present while Sonntag beat his wife, too drunk to notice or to care that Sturm was standing by.

The survivor

"Do you know what they said to me? If it was that bad in the concentration camp where reportedly you were, then you should not have stayed there. How come you stayed? And then one of them said I could have married in Germany. They did not want to hear. I still dream of the camp. I curse the camp. I'm back there almost every day. Actually right now this camp is haunting me. I sleep badly, and if I drop off for five minutes, I'm immediately somewhere back in the camp." right|Hanna Sturm and the immediate priority was simple survival. She returned to Burgenland. There was no victims' welfare for concentration camp survivors till 1948, and in the early postwar years she suffered material hardship, while as a member of an inconvenient ethnic minority, the Burgenland Croats, she remained something of an outsider as the new Austria, still under foreign military occupation, struggled to emerge from its painful recent history. The concentration camp existence lived on in her dreams.

But she did not give up. She testified several times at trials of former Ravensbrück camp guards. In Neufeld, her home town, she built a house with her own hands. She had prepared her autobiography by 1958, but it would take another 24 years before she found a publisher for it.

In 1984 Hanna Sturm died at her daughter's family home in Zagreb.