Rosa Jochmann
Rosa Jochmann (19 July 1901 – 28 January 1994) was an Austrian resistance activist and Ravensbrück concentration camp survivor who became a politician (SPÖ).
While she was still very young the family moved to the 11th district (Simmering Viertel), in the southeast of the city, where they lived in a succession of rented rooms until 1912 when they moved into an apartment in one of the new so-called "Krankenkassenhäusern" (social housing – literally: "sickness insurance houses") which had been built at the instigation of the socialist politician Laurenz Widholz, alongside the "Braunhubergasse" (street).
[2] In his later years her father had a large red scar on his shoulder which had been inflicted with a sabre by a government official on a horse who had been policing a street protest.
[2] When she was eleven, as a top student at her school, she was able to complete a typing and stenography course, which under other circumstances might have opened the way to a teaching career, but her domestic situation closed off that option.
Here, during a night shift, she dozed off and crushed a finger on the flywheel of a winding-drum She transferred to the Apollo candle factory (today part of Unilever), after which she ended up at the Auer gas mantle plant.
Topics included Applied Economics ("Nationalökonomie"), Public and Civil Law ("Staats- und Sozialrecht") and Rhetoric.
Her teachers included future leaders of the Social Democratic movement in Austria, such as Otto Bauer and Karl Renner.
[6] During the four day February Uprising in 1934 Rosa Jochmann was installed inside the Republican Protection League headquarters at George Washington Court.
From there she stenographed radio messages, updating the outside world about the progress of the fighting, and then delivering texts to Otto Bauer and Julius Deutsch in the next door room.
On the night of 12 February 1934 Jochmann was one of those who persuaded the leader of the party, Otto Bauer, that for him to remain in Austria would be personally fatal.
All the individuals who had been members of the party national executive faced charges of high treason: most were arrested in the days following the armed altercation.
[9] Directly after the February events the SDAP was expressly outlawed, in the context of a more far reaching programme of destruction by the Dollfuss government, aimed at Austria's democratic political structure.
Jochmann managed to evade immediate capture and continued with – now illegal – party work while using a forged identity card as "Josefine Drechsler"[10] (which was her younger sister's name).
On 26 February 1934 five political comrades who had not been arrested met in a private apartment in Vienna 9:[5] Manfred Ackermann, Roman Felleis, Karl Holoubek, Rosa Jochmann und Ludwig Kostroun initially described themselves as the "national group of five" ("zentralen Fünfergruppe"), but were very soon identifying themselves as the "Central Committee of the Revolutionary Socialists" ("Zentralkomitee der Revolutionären Sozialisten").
[9] Armed with her sister's identity card, she made repeated visits to the Czechoslovak frontier near Brno, from where she smuggled leaflets and bundles of the illegal "Arbeiterzeitung" ("Workers' Newspaper") into Austria.
[5] On 21 March 1940 she was delivered to the concentration camp at Ravensbrück,[2] roughly an hour to the north of Berlin for those able to make the journey by car.
[11] Ravensbrück concentration camp held approximately 132,000 women and children, 20,000 men and 1,000 "female young people", who came, according to registration data, from more than forty nations.
[11] In the camp developed a close practical comradeship and personal friendship with her political soul-mate, the resistance activist (who faced additional dangers because the authorities had classified her as a half-Jew) Erna Raus (later.
It could provide opportunities to mediate between inmates and the camp authorities, and Jochmann was sometimes able to get together with others in order to arrange extra food rations or medication in cases of exceptional need.
[11] After the camp was liberated by Soviet forces in April 1945 Rosa Jochmann was one of many who stayed on for several weeks to help care for survivors.
From Austria there came no evidence of any official offer to return the Austrian Ravensbrück survivors across the mountains back to their home country.
Jochmann therefore traveled to Vienna with the communist Friederike "Friedl" Sinclair and negotiated the provision of transport with the Soviet military commander there.
Austria's first postwar general election was conducted on 25 November 1945 across Vienna and four military occupation zones into which the rest of the country had been divided.
When the new parliamentarians took their seats on 19 December 1945 Rosa Jochmann was among them, a member of the National Council (lower house of the Austrian parliament).
She presented countless lectures and communicated her own contemporary experiences and insights, addressing schools and as a conference speaker, both in Austria and abroad.
[15] Her final high-profile attendance was at the 1993 Lichtermeer mass-event, still (in 2018) the largest demonstration in postwar Austria, held in opposition to anti-foreigner "Austrian First" populism of the Freedom Party.
[17] Rosa Jochmann was one of the prominent Ravensbrück concentration camp inmates who was publicly commemorated during the liberation celebrations at the Ravensbrück National Memorial of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), like Martha Desrumaux, Yevgenia Klemm, Antonina Nikiforova, Mela Ernst, Katja Niederkirchner, Rosa Thälmann, Olga Benário Prestes, Olga Körner, Minna Villain, and Maria Grollmuß.
