In summer 1944, Antonia Lehr and two of her friends were deported from Vienna to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Posing as a foreign worker recently married to an Austrian, Lehr was in reality a Viennese Jew and a seasoned Communist militant, specializing in exceptionally dangerous propaganda work among German soldiers in Paris. Her two companions were also Communist underground activists. They had collectively received the death sentence for organizing Austrian antifascists and, as national traitors, they considered themselves finished.

But when the trio was later moved to Ravensbrück — a women’s camp with a high proportion of condemned political inmates — communication from the Auschwitz resistance organization informed the local cell of their special status as seditious Jewish Communists. False identities were created for them and they were successfully “vanished” from the camp.

Antonia Lehr and her comrades were saved not by chance but as a result of the highly organized underground resistance developed from the camp’s beginning. This experience, unusual within a general context of the Holocaust, was not so within the history of the antifascist movement operating behind electrical wire.