Lisa Gavrič

Lisa Gavrić (born Elisabeth Bechmann; 31 July 1907 – 22 June 1974) was an Austrian-born communist who became an Internationalist participant in the Spanish Civil War. Subsequently, she worked on behalf of the German resistance movement with the French Résistance. After several unsuccessful attempts to return to Vienna, she finally managed to make the journey, using a false identity, during 1943. In July 1944 she was arrested by the security services and deported to the women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück. However, after acquiring a false identity and thereby identified as a foreign detainee, she was deported to Sweden during the final months of the war. She moved in 1948 Yugoslavia where she lived out her final decades, undertaking political work in Belgrade.

Life Provenance and early years Elisabeth "Lisa" Bechmann was born into a lower-middle-class family in Vienna. Her father was a railway worker. She was later expelled from Jugoslavia and at the start of 1934 fled north with her daughter to Vienna. At another time she worked at the University Clinic in the city. The life and the work were hard, not helped by a shortage of almost every category of medical equipment and essential supplies. Fully trained specialist physicians and nurses were also in desperately short supply. There were also opportunities to prepare and distribute German language anti-war newspapers and leaflets. The work was dangerous and exhausting. Misjudging a situation could lead to betrayal followed by deportation to the east and/or an early death. One source implies that Lisa Gavrić was recruited for "Mädelarbeit" while working as a languages teacher at a Berlitz language college which also afforded opportunities for identifying and recruiting more women suitable for the work. In the end, under the cover-name "Maria", Lisa Gavrić became the Paris-based head of a principal "Mädelarbeit" women's group in succession to Gerty Schindel.

Second return to Vienna At the end of 1943 Lisa Gavrić was one of a group of women who ordered back to Vienna by the party. This time, through careful planning and implementation of a subterfuge, they succeeded in making the transfer. Using French names and false papers the women presented themselves as French foreign workers to the authorities in Vienna, where by this time the human wastage of war had created a desperate labour shortage. For a time they were able to undertake resistance operations in the Austrian capital. Then some of the "German work" group were arrested and one of them, probably under severe torture, disclosed the truth about the contingent of "French" foreign workers who had arrived in the city at the end of 1943. "German work" group members still in Paris were able to go into hiding, but all those who had returned to Austria were arrested by the security services including, probably in June or July 1944 , "Marie-Louise Béranger" (as Lisa Gavrić was named in her forged francophone identity papers). Using false papers that identified her, once again, as a French woman, and employing, this time, the French-sounding name "Louise Desmeth", on 25 April 1945 she was a passenger in one of a long convoy of buses leaving Ravensbrück on the road north towards Sweden as part of the Red Cross "White Buses" scheme.

Return to peace Travelling via Denmark, the convoy arrived in Sweden on 26 April 1945, a couple of weeks before the war in Europe ended. As part of the rescue operation, the Swedish government provided for each former concentration inmate to be permitted to remain in Sweden for a six month recovery period, and then decide whether s/he wished to settle in Sweden permanently or "return home". Gavrić was accommodated in a large villa near Stockholm with fourteen French women and five other Austrian women. ) she was briefly reunited with her daughter Inga, but Inga had grown up in the Soviet Union and now decided to make her life there. Meanwhile, Gavrić took a job as a party official in the "department for women's work" ("Abteilung für Frauenarbeit"). The party also employed her in Vienna as General Secretary for the Society of Austrian-Jugoslav friendship. At the end of 1948, almost certainly in response to the serious diplomatic and political breach between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union earlier that year, as the leading figure in the "Society of Austrian-Jugoslav friendship", that Lisa Gavrić, relocated to the Belgrade. According to one source she teamed up with her husband in Belgrade, but other sources are conspicuously silent over whether or not the two of them were ever reunited after Lisa's expulsion from Jugoslavia in 1933/34. There are, however, references in other sources to Gavrić and her daughter having remained in touch with one another, and "visited each other frequently" .

In Belgrade she worked as an instructor for members of the German specialist department at the Trades Unions National Council. Laster she took over as editor in chief at the journal "Schaffende", also working as a commentator with the Germany section at Radio Jugoslavia (as the country's international radio broadcaster was known at that time). During the final years before she retired Lisa Gavrić worked at the Jugoslav "Institute for International Economic and Political Problems".

During the mid-1950s Lisa Gavrić suffered a long serious illness, from which she recovered. Twenty years later, however, while visiting her daughter in Dubna (just outside and to the north of Moscow) she suffered a heart attack from which on, 22 June 1974, she died a few weeks short of what would have been her 67th birthday.