Orli Wald

Orli Reichert-Wald (July 1, 1914 – January 1, 1962) was a member of the German Resistance in Nazi Germany. She was arrested in 1936 and charged with high treason, whereupon she served four and a half years in a women's prison, followed by "protective custody" in Nazi concentration camps until 1945, when she escaped.

She was a prisoner functionary in the infirmary at Auschwitz-Birkenau and because of her helpfulness to Jewish and other prisoners, was called the "Angel of Auschwitz". After the war, Wald was often ill with physical problems stemming from illness during her confinement. She was also plagued by depression, unable to cope with her memories of the concentration camps, and she made numerous suicide attempts. She wrote stories about her experiences in an attempt to overcome the past, but she died at the age of 48 in a psychiatric hospital.

Early years Wald was born Aurelia Torgau in Bourell, near Maubeuge, France, the sixth child of a German couple, Maria and August Torgau. Her father, a skilled worker, found work in France as a locomotive mechanic, but World War I broke out weeks after Wald's birth and the family was interned.

Although her father was kept in detention until 1919, but the marriage lasted only six months. Reichert, who turned his support toward the Nazis and became a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA), filed for separation in 1936. In June 1936, her resistance cell was arrested and charged with high treason, a charge punishable by execution. presumably because of incriminating statements made by her husband, who denounced her.

On December 21, 1936, aged 22, she was sentenced to four and a half years at hard labor and was taken the same day to the Ziegenhain women's prison. She served four years at Ziegenhain, three of them in solitary confinement. as a danger to the Third Reich. She was made to wear the "red triangle", designating her as a political prisoner although she was able to save many others.

Wald continued to work in the German resistance, even while imprisoned. She survived the January 1945 death march from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück and Malchow concentration camp, which she was able to escape with a group of women in April 1945. She was found by Soviet soldiers, who then raped her.

She met Eduard Wald after the war in the Carl von Ossietzky Sanatorium, then run by the Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime in Sülzhayn, in the Harz mountains. which had played for incoming transports of prisoners. Succumbing often to depression, she attempted suicide numerous times, and ended up addicted to the drugs given to her for the depression.

As a result, in 2007, the city of Hannover renamed a street near the Engesohde cemetery, where she is buried, after Orli Wald. On February 23, 2007, a stolperstein in the name Orli Torgau-Wald was laid in Trier, where she had previously lived.