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.

When she was ten her father paid one florin to a notary to confirm that she was twelve: that enabled her to get work at the sugar factory in nearby Schattendorf.

[3] After a year she gained a promotion which triggered jealousy on the part of other children working in the factory who filled her empty coffee flask with sugar syrop at the end of the day.

The father of the family was a union man: he was able to get her a job at the "Jute AG" factory in Floridsdorf, a growing industrial quarter across the river to the north of the main part of the city.

On 15 March 1908 Hanna Sturm joined the Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs" / SPÖ).

Hanna Sturm took part in a large demonstration along the "Ringstraße" (Ring Boulevard) around the city centre.

Because she was distributing leaflets, Sturm received a powerful blow to her face, leaving her eyes bloodshot.

[3] As Hanna Sturm recalled many decades later in an interview, working in the munitions factory provided practical opportunities to oppose the war: 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.

[3] She took part in preparations for the "January strike" of 1918, called to press for improved conditions for the women workers and an end to the war.

[2] The rapid collapse of the empire in October/November 1918 left Hungary separated from Austria, with present-day Burgenland on the Hungarian side of the impromptu frontier.

Identified in her papers as a Burgenland Croat, Sturm now found herself classified as an alien in Vienna: she had to return to the region of her birth.

She worked as a courier, delivering to pre-assigned locations significant consignments of cash that had been collected for the Hungarian Red Army.

[3] The Hungarian Soviet collapsed in the face of foreign military interventions at the beginning of August 1919 and Sturm turned to organising illegal border crossing for the leaders as they fled.

[3] In August the region comprising modern Burgenland was removed from Hungary and transferred to Austria, both countries being by this point internationally recognised as separate independent states.

As one source expresses it, Hanna Sturm succeeded in bringing the women workers involved round to solidarity based on a class-conscious way of thinking.

The party chairman, Otto Bauer, went on record with the punning observation "Wir lassen uns die Sturm nicht über den Kopf wachsen" (loosely "We should not let this storm overwhelm us.").

In 1930 the labour exchange sent Hanna und 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.

[8] Theresia spent more than twenty years in internal exile in the Ukhta area the Komi People's Republic.

[8] A Fascist government took power in Austria in 1934 and, encouraged by developments in Germany the previous year, rapidly transformed the country into a post-democratic dictatorship.

She fell ill but recovered, setting up a small team of "fixers" – the so-called "Sturm column", who made themselves useful by mending broken fixtures in the camp, thereby winning a level of respect from the para-military guards who would let the "Sturm column" into their own parts of the camp in order to effect repairs and, at the same time, steal food.

There is a reference to her as "the Austrian communist and jack-of-all-trades [who would] teach "students": how to put up fences, bang in nails, and break up locks", and later, slightly unexpectedly, of how she would "hold discussions on Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace...in the back of block 13.

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.

Und dann hat mir einer gesagt, du kannst ja auch in Deutschland verheiratet gewesen sein.

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.