Orli Wald

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.

[1] Her father, a skilled worker, found work in France as a locomotive mechanic,[2] but World War I broke out weeks after Wald's birth and the family was interned.

[5] In 1940, despite having served her full sentence, Wald, then known as Orli Reichert, was not released, but was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she was held in "protective custody"[6] as a danger to the Third Reich.

[9] 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.

[10] 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.

Both she and her husband, who later became a politician and trade unionist, had fought the stalinization of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany and joined the Social Democrats.

[2] Wald wrote short biographical stories in an attempt to overcome the traumatic experiences of the concentration camps, and until her death suffered both physically and mentally from the effects of her imprisonment.

Along with the memories she could not forget, she could no longer bear to hear music, which reminded her of the Auschwitz orchestra,[11] which had played for incoming transports of prisoners.

[1] After being scheduled to testify in the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, which she wanted to do, her memories became so overpowering to her, she suffered a complete mental breakdown and died in a psychiatric clinic in Ilten, near Hanover at the age of 48.