Erna Musik
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.
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[4] and meant that by becoming engaged to be married without obtaining special government permission (which was increasingly hard to obtain), and by giving birth to her fiancé's child, she was breaching the government's "race laws".
[2][4] Following the February uprising of 1934 the recently established Austrofascist government had enforced their new ban on the Social Democratic Party with determination.
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.
[4] Sources differ over whether it was by means of an "evacuation transport" or as an involuntary participant in a "Death March" at the end of 1944 that Erna Raus was moved from Auschwitz to the women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück, a short distance to the north of Berlin.
By this time Germany was being heavily bombed, and with the transport links badly degraded it is likely that the 700 km (435 miles) were covered by a combination that included both rail travel and forced marches.
Suffering badly from dysentery, Erna Raus completed the journey only through the support of her sister and friends also involved in the forced transfer to Ravensbrück.
She remained ill, and survived only through the care and nursing of comrade inmates who included, at this stage, Käthe Sasso, a former resistance activist, like her, from Vienna.
[4] According to a newspaper obituary published at the time of her death, while an inmate at Ravensbrück Erna Raus became "Lagerkameradin" (loosely, "camp comrade") of the socialist militant Rosa Jochmann.
[6] 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.
[4] An early priority which Erna Musik actively supported was the rebuilding of the no-longer illegal Young Socialists organisation, and of the local Social Democratic Party in the Vienna-Brigittenau quarter.
Through a restitution programme implemented by the military administrators, she was able to recover and in 1946 re-open her mother's embroidery and household textiles manufactory in the Leystraße which the previous government had "aryanised".
[2][9] 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.
[4] Through the post-war decades Erna Musik was popular as a witness to members of the new generations, always ready to share her experiences of the concentration camps.
She made frequent presentations in schools on the matter and also served as an active member and honorary president of the Association of Socialist Freedom Fighters.
