She lived in Gmünd, Lower Austria with her husband Arthur Lanc, a medical officer, in 1944.
In the early summer of 1944 a carriage of 1700 Hungarian Jews which were sheltered in a grain silo, arrived in Gmünd.
Arthur and Maria Lanc decided to help the inmates of the camp by all available means to alleviate their suffering.
Arthur Lanc hurried to the camp and decided to rescue three Jewish families - the family Fisch with three children aged five, four and one, the Yugoslavian nurse Piroska Blau and Georg Uhely, a lawyer from Ödenburg.
In the night these three families flew through a small backdoor of the grain silo.