Fasching Maria

Fasching, Maria Maria Fasching (b.1897 in Baden) lived in the city of Baden near Vienna in the 1930s. One of Fasching’s friends was an Austrian woman whose stepson, Walter Posiles, lived in Vienna, where he met and fell in love with Edeltrud Becher (later Posiles*). The two wanted to marry in 1938, but after the Nazi annexation of Austria in March of that year this became impossible because Posiles was considered Jewish under the Nuremberg laws, and marriages between Aryans and Jews were forbidden. Posiles, a Czech citizen, fled Austria, traveling to Prague. During the round up and expulsion of the Jews of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to the camps in 1942, Walter Posiles, together with his two brothers, fled to Vienna, where Edeltrud Becher and her sister, Charlotte (Becher*) took them in. With the help of Charlotte and Edeltrud Becher, the Posiles brothers found refuge in an attic apartment that belonged to Charlotte’s fiancé, Friedrich Kunz, who was in the army. When Kunz came home for vacations the sisters were forced to smuggle the brothers to alternate hiding places. Hans Posiles traveled to Baden and asked for help from his stepmother and her son. They referred him to Fasching, who agreed to hide Hans in her apartment – first for a short time, and afterwards for longer periods. Like his brothers, Hans remained in hiding from June 1942 until the end of the war, at which point he was living in Baden full-time. Baden, unlike Vienna, was hardly suffering from bombardments. However, when the Red Army was already at the gates of Baden, Hans and Fasching were walking in the street when they were hit by a bomb. Posiles was killed immediately. Fasching was brought to a hospital where she died soon afterwards. Fasching endangered herself by sheltering a Jew who was actively working against the German war effort, a crime that would have been punishable by death. She received no payment for hiding Hans Posiles, nor for the grave danger she took uponherself. On October 26, 1978, Yad Vashem recognized Maria Fasching as Righteous Among the Nations. File 1427