Ossi was the youngest of six children born to Roma ("Gypsies") who traveled in a family wagon. His family was Roman Catholic. Their caravan spent winters in Vienna, Austria's capital, and summers in the Austrian countryside. The Stojkas belonged to a tribe called the Lowara Roma, who made their living as itinerant horse traders. Ossi's ancestors had lived in Austria for more than 200 years.
1933-39: Ossi was 2 years old when Germany annexed Austria in March 1938. The Stojka family wagon was parked for the winter in a Vienna campground when the Germans marched in. They ordered the Gypsies to stay put. The Stojkas had to convert their wagon into a wooden house and had to adjust to staying in one place.
1940-44: Roma were forced to register as members of a different "race." When Ossi was 5, the Germans took away his father. Next, they took his sister, Kathi. Finally, Ossi and the rest of his family were deported to a Nazi camp in Birkenau for Roma. There was very little to eat, mostly turnips. Little Ossi fell ill with typhus, and was taken to the barracks for sick prisoners. The infirmary was often referred to by prisoners as the "antechamber of the crematoria."
Ossi was given no medical treatment in the infirmary, and died of typhus and malnutrition. He was 7 years old.
Item ViewFranz and his family were Jehovah's Witnesses. Germany annexed Austria in 1938. After World War II began, Franz's father was executed because, as a Witness, he opposed war. In 1940, Franz refused to participate in military training and would not salute the Nazi flag. He was imprisoned, interrogated by the Gestapo (German Secret State Police) in Graz, and sentenced to five years of hard labor in a camp in Germany. Franz was liberated by US forces in 1945.
Item ViewFranz and his family were Jehovah's Witnesses. Germany annexed Austria in 1938. After World War II began, Franz's father was executed because, as a Witness, he opposed war. In 1940, Franz refused to participate in military training and would not salute the Nazi flag. He was imprisoned, interrogated by the Gestapo (German Secret State Police) in Graz, and sentenced to five years of hard labor in a camp in Germany. Franz was liberated by US forces in 1945.
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Smiljka was one of three daughters born to Serbian Orthodox parents in the town of Mostar in the central Yugoslav region of Herzegovina. Smiljka's mother died when Smiljka was 3, and the three girls were raised by their father. A tomboy in her youth, at 17 Smiljka won the Miss Makarska Riviera beauty pageant and left for Germany to become a fashion model.
1933-39: Smiljka had a successful modeling career in Berlin. With her tall, slim figure, high cheekbones, and almond-shaped, grey-blue eyes, she was noted for her resemblance to Greta Garbo. Smiljka was anti-fascist and left Germany after Hitler came to power. When war broke out in Europe in September 1939, Smiljka was living in the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade with her husband, Tihomir Visnjevac, and their young son.
1940-41: Like many in Belgrade, Smiljka was openly anti-fascist. On March 27, 1941, a new anti-fascist government took power in Yugoslavia. In reaction, Germany launched a surprise bombing attack on Belgrade on Palm Sunday, April 6, 1941. Six days later, German troops occupied the city. Together with her husband, Smiljka, who was known to the Germans for her anti-fascist views during her days in Weimar Germany, was rounded up by the Gestapo. For more than two weeks, Smiljka and her husband were beaten and tortured.
Smiljka was shot by a German firing squad in the Banjica concentration camp in early May 1941. She was 35 years old.
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Rémy was born in a small French town to Catholic parents. In 1913, after studying law at the University of Paris, he joined the Tallandier publishing house in Paris. During World War I he served in the French army and was wounded five times. He returned to work at Tallandier after the war, and in 1919 he married Germaine Tallandier, the daughter of the owner. They had five children whom they raised as devout Catholics.
1933-39: In 1935 Rémy became the mayor of Avon, a small town about 35 miles southeast of Paris. Rémy was proud of his town, which was famous for a nearby royal palace and its proximity to the forest of Fontainebleau. A strongly patriotic Frenchman, he distrusted Germany after Hitler came to power there in 1933.
1940-44: In June 1940 the Germans defeated France and occupied Avon on the 16th. Rémy resolved to remain mayor and became active in a resistance group called "Velite Thermopyles." He gave financial support to Jewish and other writers whose works could no longer be published. He sheltered some Alsatian Jews in the Dordogne, where he owned a home. Using his office as mayor to protect Jews and other fugitives, he provided them with false papers, and helped them flee south to the unoccupied part of France, or to safe houses.
On May 4, 1944, Rémy was arrested in Avon by the Gestapo upon returning from a business trip to Paris. He died in the Neuengamme concentration camp on March 15, 1945.
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In 1919 Robert and his brother Karl founded the Nerother Bund youth group in the Cologne region. Like other German youth groups, it aimed to bring youth closer to nature through camping and hiking. Homosexual relationships sometimes developed from the intense adolescent male camaraderie, and the Nerother Bund accepted these friendships, as did a number of German youth groups at the time.
1933-39: Soon after the Nazis took power in 1933, they dissolved all independent youth groups and urged the members to join the Hitler Youth movement. Robert refused and secretly continued his connection with the Nerother Bund. In 1936 he was convicted under the Nazi-revised criminal code's paragraph 175 which outlawed homosexuality. Robert was imprisoned with 13 other members of the Nerother Bund.
1940-41: Robert was one of more than 50,000 men sentenced under paragraph 175 during the Nazi regime. By 1941 he had been transferred to the Dachau concentration camp. Like many "175ers" in the camps, Robert was required to wear an identifying pink triangle. The "175ers" were commonly segregated in separate barracks, subjected to particularly harsh treatment, and often ostracized by other prisoner groups.
Forty-four-year-old Robert died at Dachau in 1941. Details of his death are unknown.
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The elder of two daughters born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Helene was raised as a Catholic in Vienna. Her father died in action during World War I when Helene was just 5 years old, and her mother remarried when Helene was 15. Known affectionately as Helly, Helene loved to swim and go to the opera. After finishing her secondary education she entered law school.
1933-39: At 19 Helene first showed signs of mental illness. Her condition worsened during 1934, and by 1935 she had to give up her law studies and her job as a legal secretary. After losing her trusted fox terrier, Lydi, she suffered a major breakdown. She was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and was placed in Vienna's Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital. Two years later, in March 1938, the Germans annexed Austria to Germany.
1940: Helene was confined in Steinhof and was not allowed home even though her condition had improved. Her parents were led to believe that she would soon be released. Instead, Helene's mother was informed in August that Helene had been transferred to a hospital in Niedernhart, just across the border in Bavaria. In fact, Helene was transferred to a converted prison in Brandenburg, Germany, where she was undressed, subjected to a physical examination, and then led into a shower room.
Helene was one of 9,772 persons gassed that year in the Brandenburg "euthanasia" center. She was officially listed as dying in her room of "acute schizophrenic excitement."
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Gregor was born in a village in the part of Austria known as Carinthia. During World War I, he served in the Austro-Hungarian army and was wounded. Raised a Catholic, Gregor and his wife became Jehovah's Witnesses during the late 1920s. Gregor supported his wife and six children by working as a farmer and quarryman.
1933-39: The Austrian government banned Jehovah's Witness missionary work in 1936. Gregor was accused of peddling without a license and briefly jailed. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Gregor led his congregation in a boycott of the plebiscite ratifying Austria's union with Germany. Because of Gregor's anti-Nazi stand, the mayor of his town had Gregor arrested on September 1, 1939. Gregor was sent to Berlin to be tried by a military court for opposing military service. He was sentenced to death. On December 7, 1939, Gregor was executed by guillotine in Berlin's Ploetzensee Prison.
1940-45: During the war, Gregor's entire family was arrested for refusing to cooperate with the Nazis. Two of Gregor's sons were killed: one son was beheaded in the Ploetzensee Prison, where Gregor had been beheaded in 1939; another son was shot. Gregor's oldest son, Franz, refused to participate in military training, would not salute the Nazi flag, and was sentenced to five years of hard labor in a camp in Germany.
In addition to Gregor and two of his sons, other members of Gregor's Jehovah's Witness congregation were persecuted by the Nazis.
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Marian was raised by Catholic parents in Niewodowo, a town in Poland's Bialystok Province near Lomza. His family lived there under Tsarist rule until 1918, when Poland regained its independence. Following high school, Marian joined the Capuchin Franciscan Order of Friars. After eight years of study in France and Italy, he returned to Poland to teach philosophy to students of his order.
1933-39: When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Marian was at his monastery near Grodno. They evacuated the monastery three weeks later when Soviet troops, invading from the east, reached Grodno. Marian returned to Lomza. Their new Soviet rulers rejected religion, claiming it exploited the working people. He challenged this in his sermons. When he learned that the Soviets were about to arrest him, Marian escaped to German-occupied Poland.
1940-45: In 1941 the Nazis arrested Marian in Warsaw. He was told that there was no real reason for his arrest, but that as an educated Pole, he couldn't be trusted to cooperate. He was held in Pawiak Prison and then deported to Auschwitz. There, the commandant lectured them about working hard. An interpreter was translating his ranting into Polish, but Marian understood German. He yelled that they'd only be freed through the crematorium chimney. Instead of translating those words, the interpreter said, "You will overcome everything."
Rev. Dabrowski was deported to Dachau where he was subjected to malaria experiments. He was liberated on April 29, 1945, by American troops and immigrated to the United States in 1949.
Item ViewRobert and his family were Jehovah's Witnesses. The Nazis regarded Jehovah's Witnesses as enemies of the state for their refusal to take an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, or to serve in the German army. Robert's family continued its religious activities despite Nazi persecution. Shortly before Robert's birth, his mother was imprisoned briefly for distributing religious materials. Robert's hip was injured during delivery, leaving him with a disability. When Robert was five years, he was ordered to report for a physical in Schlierheim. His mother overheard staff comments about putting Robert "to sleep." Fearing they intended to kill him, Robert's mother grabbed him and ran from the clinic. Nazi physicians had begun systematic killing of those they deemed physically and mentally disabled in the fall of 1939.
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