On the Heels of Rosa Jochmann:

To Forgive? "Possibly." To Forget? "Never!"

Name : Irma Trksak

Date of birth : 2 October 1917

Place of birth : Vienna

Employment : Teacher, Secretary

Irma Trksak: "I was born on 2 October 1917 in Vienna. Before the first World War,

Information on her life before, during and after the Second World War:

In spring 1939 Irma Trksak took part in an arson attempt and in October on the Lobau in another. In September 1941, she was caught by the Gestapo. For one year she was held in the notorious Viennese police jail Roßauer Lände, which was also used by the Gestapo. At the end of September 1942, she was sent to Ravesbrücke in a transport. There, she met Rosa Jochmann, a social democrat who became a well-known symbol outside of Austria for her untiring fight against Fascism and oppression. In the Ravensbrück concentration camp, Irma Trsksak worked for Siemens, was made prisoner-in-charge and, after being betrayed, was sent to a nearby extermination camp in Uckermark.

On 28 April 1945 the SS sent her and her fellow-sufferers on a "death march" towards the West, in order to avoid the Russians. She managed to escape. One month later, after walking through Poland and Czechoslovakia, she was able to took her parents in her arms and learn of the deaths of her friends and two brothers.

In 1946 she was a witness in the Hamburg trials, which was an English military trial for people responsible for the concentration camp in Ravensbrück.

Irma Trksak: "After the war, I was a employed by the Czechoslovakian delegation and worked there for a year producing a Czech weekly newspaper and following that stayed at home. Later, I did different things in the private sector. Since retiring I’ve been the Secretary of the Austrian Camp Society Ravensbrück and worked for the Concentration Camp Association in Vienna.

Irma Trksak is unmarried, she has one son.

When I remember the weekly newsreels, showing scenes of all the people cheering on Heldenplatz not all were Viennese, many had been brought in from outside on trucks, and the children had to form rows and wave their flags. So, it was voluntary but also partially orchestrated, and I always feel compelled to say that "the people who stayed inside their flats, those who were apprehensive and afraid, who were concerned about the future, these people were never shown."

They only showed those who cheered. The people who knew what was to come, who knew already that they were going to resist, who condemned the measures carried out after the invasion, the arrests, the violence against the Jews, with the officials of the parties who were legal - or even illegal - then. They never - or hardly ever - showed these people.

If one followed everything that happened after the invasion, one knew, "Now something has to be done, now we must fight, now we have to do something." It didn’t happen from one day to the next, we weren’t ready. We thought and then formed small groups and planned the next step. When I look back now on those days I am amazed at how many people had the same thoughts we did.

We united out of the spontaneous desire to defend ourselves, to take a stand against it. And nobody thought about the danger, nobody thought - at first - about being arrested. We had no experience in conspiring and maybe that’s why no one thought about the possibility of arrest, at least in the beginning we didn’t. But later, having learned that people were being deported to the camps, we did try to be a little bit more cautious. But caution is futile when moles infiltrate a group, work together with us, watch us and then inform on us. The entire conspiracy was rendered useless by these people.

The Nazis regarded women as "breeding machines", capable of producing many, many children, so that the "thousand-year empire" could be founded, so that they would have enough cannon fodder. They didn't take us very seriously, probably because we’d never been members of any political parties. Perhaps it was because of this that they misjudged the importance of our work.

We were doing almost the same work as the men - not alone, but together with the men. As young women, we didn’t have any experience. And the attitude of the Nazis, who didn't consider women capable of resistance work, might just have saved our lives.

They never hit me, for example. They put me in chains, made me stand facing the wall, insulted me, and so on, but they never hit me, never, I have to say that.

One of my first acts of resistance was as follows: I taught Czech and Slovak to many Jewish people. Thus I taught quite a lot of Jewish friends, for they had become friends by then. And when I was walking home from the 4th district where I had a student, I saw a shop with the Star of David painted on it. "Jew - Aryans do not buy from Jews" was written on the front of every Jewish shop with the Star of David on it, and I thought by myself, "I'll show them that an Aryan does in fact buy from Jews." I entered the store and purchased 100 grams of pork rinds, a detail which I shall never forget. And a mob, which was on the lookout for Aryans entering the shop, began to fight. They hung a board around my neck that read, "This Aryan pig buys from a Jew" and argued , "She's a Jew", "She isn't a Jew", "Yes, she is a Jew". In the meantime I had thrown away the board and walked off -- even that was a punishable offense. But, I wasn't arrested then.

I always say that, according to the Nazi’s, I have three crimes to my name. First, there were leaflets we designed before the war, in which we tried to explain to people what it actually meant that Hitler was here, that there was more to it than just the work he provided us with. Why did he give us work in the first place? He gave the people work because all the factories were converted to ammunition factories, where arms and ammunition were produced. The streets he built enabled his tanks to advance more quickly to other countries which he wanted to conquer and to subdue, to plunder – countries in which he murdered groups of people. All this was before the outbreak of the war. These pamphlets constituted "plotting high treason", for example.

Second, we wrote chain letters to the soldiers, tracking them by their field posting numbers. It would take too long to explain how we got them, but every soldier had one. Our friends who had also been in the army told us the numbers and so we tried to enlighten them by asking for example, "What does Hitler want with this war? It is not your war. You are citizens of another state. We are Austrians and not Germans. You were forced into the army!" But not everyone is a hero - desertion was punishable by death – so we encouraged them to try not to be violent, not to open fire, if possible not to fight at all or to go over to the enemy. That was about the gist of it. We tried to explain Hitler's true intentions to the soldiers, that his was solely a war of conquest in order to found the "thousand-year empire that he planned." Luckily, in Austria the thousand years were to last only seven. This constituted "demoralisation of the troops".

Third, we tried to throw a sand in the war machinery. We tried to establish contact with trainmen, and if they turned out to be reliable, we encouraged them to try not to keep their timetable so that war materials would not arrive at the front on time and the prisoners would not arrive too quickly at the concentration camps. We asked them to cause some chaos, although that came later by itself anyway. In order to slow things down a bit we even committed small acts of sabotage. If somebody who really was involved in sabotage was told of our activities, he would probably laugh out loud, but our acts were also minor acts of sabotage.

For example, we set fires to depots containing war material, such as uniforms or bikes that had been commandeered. They took away everything from the people, skis or bikes, you weren’t allowed to keep skis or bikes, and everything that was seized was stored in depots. So we tried to damage the depots, and even if we failed to burn them down completely we burned part of them at least.

In order to draw public attention to the fact that there were people who resisted, we set boxes of straw, or hay in the Lobau on fire. People then talked about it and wrote about it in the newspaper. We tried to make people aware of the fact that things were not running as smoothly as the Germans. The Germans were always victorious -- shooting down enemy planes, sinking ships -- successful and never unsuccessful. But there were failures. So we tried to make people think, to read between the lines, to see the true situation. That was our aim and I believe through our actions we realized it, at least in part.

When it was necessary we met in our flats as well. Since it was impossible to type and draw from the master-copy outside, we did all this in my friend's flat. Unfortunately, they found the copier in the end. My friend had buried it in his garden-house near Steinhof , but the earth was still fresh from digging. So they found the machine, which was evidence in itself.

It was impossible for one to claim: "I didn’t do anything", because the leaflets were there, they had been distributed and handed out to the workers. We distributed them wherever possible , so how was one say: "I didn’t do anything", when the device had been discovered? Well, there was no denying it was there?

As I mentioned before I was a student apprenticed to the Tagblatt . When I returned home one night the Gestapo was there waiting for me and said, "We want to ask you a few questions". This asking of questions was to last for four years. I was taken away right then. It was over.

At first I wasn't allowed any contact with my parents, later, much later, they were allowed to bring me my toothbrush and some clothing, so I could change. I spent nearly a whole year in solitary confinement, upstairs, where the men were confined too. Of my group there were three women and the rest were men, and each of us was alone in a cell. Almost all my fellow prisoners at that time belonged to my group and were held prisoner in Roßauer Lände.

Of course, when I look back on these days now it seems to me even more impossible than at the time I was actually inside. One thought about what had happened all the time. It was a horrible time, since we were not allowed to leave our cell. All one could do was pace the cell, three steps forward, three steps back again. They gave us a bowl of water, since we were not even allowed to go to the wash-room because we were with the men. We were not allowed to leave the cell for an entire year. I did not take a bath for a year, it was shortly before we were brought to Ravensbrück that I showered for the first time. Imagine, I did not wash my hair for a year. No reading, nothing to do, nothing, nothing, nothing to do in the cell. No newspaper, no books, nothing to do the whole day but pace.

But we became ingenious through our loneliness. Our prison mates soon began to establish contact with us. One of them knocked with a screw, which held together his bed and mine, but I had no idea at first that they communicated like this until I found out that the knockings stood for letters of the alphabet. So I learned it by heart. One knock meant "A", two meant "B", three "C", and so on. He knocked and I knocked back, and we communicated. We knew each other, he was from the 21st district of Vienna. He was executed. He did not survive, this young man, he was even younger than I was then.

Thus a bit of distraction was possible. We used our brain’s and exchanged thoughts with somebody else. We didn’t spend the whole time thinking about ourselves, about what had happened or what was to come, the uncertain future, and so on. We didn’t know anything. We didn’t know that we were destined to go the concentration camps. Not even a notion. We were only brought out to be interrogated, this amounted to all the activity outside our cells. And no one gave us any information. And unfortunately he did not survive, my prison mate, the one I was knocking together with.

Of course we desired to get in touch with other human-beings, aside from the one who peered inside the cell every thirty minutes. When it was not the warder, then it was the Gestapo officer, both of them taking turns. We were also guarded by the Gestapo, since we were on their floor. Many prisoners were interrogated by the Gestapo.

One could not possibly imagine what it is like to enter a cell for the first time and have to use the toilet. He doesn’t know you are using the toilet and you do not know he’s peering inside. But since it was approximately every thirty minutes one was able to calculate the time when he would peer inside again, "Wastl", was the name we gave to both the officer and the warder.

At first I jumped up and covered myself, but then I thought to myself, go on and take a look inside, I don't give a damn. After all, is it my fault I am here? This was the most humiliating experience on earth, to be caught in the most intimate condition a person could possibly be found in, especially for a woman to be watched by a man. This was incredibly humiliating, but one kept telling oneself:

"Let them see it, you couldn’t care less, they are your enemies" (laughs). Thus you tried to encourage yourself. And to prove that I didn't care about the situation - although I really did - I would sing, which was forbidden too.

It was all very hard. After a year we were transferred. I remember it was in September I was arrested and in September of the following year the men were taken to Mauthausen and the eleven women in our group to Ravensbrück. The women did not belong to our small group, but to the main group of resisters.

After a long ride on the train we stopped off at several infamous prisons - in Prague at Pangrac, in Leipzig, and in Berlin (Alexanderplatz) at "Alex", the prison there doesn't exist anymore - before we arrived at Ravensbrück.

I will remember this sight as long as I live. I can still hear the shouts and curses of the SS, the crying of the women and, once again, worst of all, the humiliation.

All the women, the children as well as the old ladies, had to strip naked and leave them in the washroom. The men of the SS idly walked around among us with their rifles and kept laughing about how the women looked and making remarks about the older women. This was extremely humiliating. Some of the women got their heads shaved and in those days hair was considered a woman's greatest pride. So when they found lice on a woman - off with her hair. The women having affairs with Poles or Ukrainians got their heads shaved, too. If the affair produced any results, they got twenty-five blows with a stick.

What I will never forget either is the view to the camp's main road. There were all these women who had already given up - which we did not know about then. They were starved almost to a skeleton-like state, filthy and with skin sores, and without any hope left in their eyes, almost crazy and looked at us so frighteningly, that my first thought was: I wonder whether they will be able to reduce me to this? These women did not work, of course, and the SS nicknamed them "our precious treasures". Not us, the SS had man different names for us, but those women were "their precious treasures".

But I was lucky, after quarantine I was transferred to the cell block where Rosa Jochmann was. She was from Vienna, a former social democrat and a resistance fighter. She was already imprisoned for a long time and because she knew that we were Czechs from Vienna and political prisoners she had us transferred to her block, where many political prisoners from different countries were held. All nationalities were there. Those who worked in the sick-bay were living there, and many nationalities were represented: French, Czechs, Poles, Germans, Austrians, many different nationalities.

There is no doubting the fact that we were very lucky indeed to be on a block, where the oldest prisoner was a political prisoner, who looked after law and order and encouraged voluntary discipline. Rosa Jochmann never stole a piece of bread from her prison-mates, although this did happen. On other blocks the oldest prisoner would give you a smaller piece of bread and save the larger one for herself or her friends, which occurred, too.

A prisoner is only human, and the will to survive and hunger pangs were so terrible that theft did occur, but never by Rosa Jochmann. She would cut the bread in front of everybody and each would be given a ration and also a ration of turnips; we would be eating the same as cows and pigs, we would have turnips in a soup, for example. But we got some food, so that our stomachs were filled at least. There were hardly any quarrels or fights and there was no envy at all. Rosa Jochmann was quite a personality, she was like a mother to us and we compiled with this huge family and I believe this was the first step towards survival.

Second, I was lucky because I was working for Siemens. We used to work inside, so we were sheltered against the weather, against the rain, the snow and the frost. On the other hand, I was laboring for the war since Siemens was producing spare parts for submarines, aeroplanes and wonder weapons So one kept saying over and over again, "On the one hand you save your life, since you are not slaving outside where you can catch cold or lose your hands and feet from frostbite. On the other hand you are supporting the war." So there was always a conflict.

As Siemens expanded, employing 3000 women, they wanted to save the on commuting time and built a separate camp just for us. I applied for the position of prisoner-in-charge, not because of my age, but because it was a position.

So I distributed the food, cut the bread, modeled myself on Rosa Jochmann (laughs) and tried to maintain law and order, so that the floors would be swept, the toilets be cleaned, and so on.

At first we had no toilets at all, but merely a latrine, which was covered by four bars, and once again the SS were watching us when we used them. It is just indescribable. The way the kept wearing us down and humiliating us was scientifically planned down to the smallest detail. It was all part of the system, standing at attention, being counted-off, never-ending roll calls, in the morning, in the evening. At work, the marching in rows of five, in addition the German speakers were forced to sing marching songs. This was all planned out, methods like this existed in almost every camp, but each camp had its own specialty, for example, "annihilation by labour" was one of them.

We also had to perform utterly meaningless tasks like shoveling sand from a heap into a dumpster, moving it someplace else, then dumping it there, moving it back again and starting all over, all day long. We had blisters on our hands from the shoveling, and the dumpster couldn’t be moved by a woman but needed up to ten women to move it and then to smooth it with a roller, for no reason at all. The roller still exists, it is shown in Ravensbrück.

And when I was the prisoner–in-charge, well, I always say, "I did not merely live on bread and turnips, but also on the hope that we will get out and be free, that we would live in freedom and democracy!"

So we made plans and kept asking ourselves, "What will it be like to be free again?" And we also tried to have some culture as well. So we would sing and the actresses would recite poems. We tried not only to do something for our stomachs (laughs) in order to stay alive, but also to stay human as well. That was always my goal, whether I’m free now or then, to not allow them to reduce me to an animal, as they intended. In their eyes we were lower than their dogs, which they took better care of than us. They did not take care of us at all, but tormented, hit, and kicked us, and God only knows what else.

Since I kept turning a blind eye to all that was forbidden, I was relieved of my function as a punishment. I had been betrayed again, because everything in the camps and prisons only became known by betrayal. I was transferred to an extermination camp, the abandoned Uckermark-youth camp It became an extermination camp for old, sick, disabled or fragile women.

In this camp selections were made daily and in the evening those selected were led away. They were then suffocated in a improvised gas chamber. We had no idea then of where they were taken, but the men told us afterwards what had happened and how. So there was a improvised gas chamber in Ravensbrück, too, were they were suffocating women who were useless mouths to feed.

Some women were also poisoned. They were forced to swallow medicine and were told, "This is a cure against your diarrhea and colic." Those women did not merely die, they died a wretched death. One cannot imagine the way they were writhing in pain, with cramps and colic. They did not resemble human beings any longer. They also got lethal injections in the heart in Uckermark.

So there I was, and since I was neither old nor sick, but the prisoner-in-charge, my duty was to help these women get up, because they had to stand in line, although they were obviously destined to be gassed. They were counted daily and after being counted they were selected and taken away. We could hear them in the evenings, when they were herded together with blows and dragged away, when the screamed, when they resisted, but we did not see them since we were not allowed outside. We heard all that.

In the "Hamburg trial" I was also a witness against the people who did these things. And nearly all of them were sentenced to death, in this trial held against these people by the English.

When people ask me why I keep telling this story, I always answer, "I tell it all in order to prevent such things from happening again." As long as I am able to think and talk, for as long as I live, this will be a matter of concern to me.

On 28 April 1945, Irma Trksak is herded along in one the Death Marches headed west. She manages to flee. A month later, she can embrace her family in Vienna after an adventurous march through Poland and Czechoslovakia. She also hears that her boyfriend and two brothers have died.

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Copyright © 2001 by Ruth Deutschmann, Wien