Petrykiewicz Maria ; Daughter: Bottesi Wanda (Petrykiewicz)

Neuschmid, Wolfgang Dickbauer, Karl Lutz, Erwin Moser, Rudolf Dietz, Anton Stocker, Maria Petrykiewicz, Maria Petrykiewicz, Wanda Wolfgang Neuschmid (born 1901 in Söll, in the province of Tirol) was the commander of a local police prison in the city of Innsbruck. On several occasions he used his influence to help Jews escape from the Nazis. He also permitted political prisoners and Russian prisoners of war who were incarcerated in the prison better jail conditions than were allowed by the regulations. On March 13, 1944, a new prisoner arrived at the Innsbruck facility: Leokadia Justman (later Lorraine Justman-Wisnicki), a Jewish woman born in Lodz in 1922 that came to Austria as a manual laborer. Later she hid under an assumed name, was discovered by the Gestapo and sent to prison in preparation for her eventual deportation to Auschwitz. Other Jewish women and girls were already being held in the prison. Among these, three women and one girl, as well as Justman, were helped by Neuschmid: Miriam Fuks (later Wartski-Fuks) was born in Zychlin, near Lodz, Poland in 1921 (In the prison records, Fuks was listed under what was apparently an assumed name, Miriam Rozen); Ruth (Ruchla) Litman (later Eisenberg) from Lodz, born in 1918, and her sister Regina Litman (later Rundbaken); and Pauline Janaszewicz, age 12. Neuschmid took pity on these inmates, and delayed their deportation to the camps, telling his superiors that he needed extra hands for work in the prison kitchen. Once they began work, Neuschmid and the kitchen manager – a policeman named Erwin Lutz – made sure that the girls’ conditions were improved. In fact, they had better conditions than the other Austrian prisoners. Lutz also provided the girls with extra food to be given to other prisoners. Despite Neuschmid’s protection, the threat of deportation still hung over the girls. At one point, the names of all the girls appeared on a Gestapo list received by the policeman Karl Dickbauer. Neuschmid andLutz contacted Dickbauer, and convinced him to delay their deportation yet again, purely for humanitarian reasons. By the summer of 1944, the prison guards knew that the girls’ luck couldn’t hold out much longer. They tried to convince them to escape from jail and go underground. Lutz gave the girls his address, and declared that he would risk his own freedom in order to save them. The protective circle around the girls expanded to include Rudolf Moser, a prison kitchen employee who gave them the address of a woman named Maria Stocker, who was willing to hide the girls. Another offer of help came from Innsbruck police superintendent Anton Dietz. In the beginning of 1945, the Gestapo discovered that the five Jewish prisoners had still not been deported, and on January 18, 1945, ordered them sent, along with 80 others, to Bergen-Belsen. That very evening, Justman and Fuks escaped from the prison. They walked directly to the home of Maria Stocker in Sacken, a suburb of Innsbruck. Stocker hid them in her apartment for a few days, and then transferred them to the home of her friends Maria Petrykiewicz and her daughter Wanda Petrykiewicz (later Botessi). According to one of the escaped girls, the Petrykiewiczes “pampered us as if we were their own daughters,” and shared their food rations with them. When the city came under bombardment, the Petrykiewiczes endangered themselves by staying with the girls in their fourth- floor apartment, rather than going down to the shelters. Wanda Petrykiewicz, a hairdresser, colored Justman and Fuks’s hair blonde. She also served as a messenger, collecting a falsified document prepared by police superintendent Dietz, declaring that the girls were Polish Catholics named Christina Chruscik and Wanda Stolarczyk who had lost their suitcases and identification papers on the way from Poland to Germany. This document had Dietz’s personal signature and the stamp of the local police. Using this document, Petrykiewicz was able to approach afriend of hers who worked at the municipal employment bureau, and to receive two work permits for the girls for the area of Salzburg. Thus, after two weeks in the Petrykiewiczes’ apartment, Justman and Fuks put on clothes provided by Maria Petrykiewicz and Maria Stocker, and emerged from hiding, traveling to Salzburg where they found work in the village of St. Martin. They stayed there until the end of the war. The three other Jewish girls were afraid to escape and remained in the Innsbruck prison. Regina Litman and Pauline Janaszewicz were sent to Bergen-Belsen. Ruth Litman, who was sick with pneumonia, stayed in prison after Neuschmid refused to send her out on the transport because of her condition. On March 1, 1945, she was transferred to a small internment camp for foreign nationals in Jenbach, near Innsbruck. Her assignment to this camp was made possible because Neuschmid wrote in her documents that Litman was only half-Jewish according to the Nuremberg laws. He warned the girl not to tell anyone that she was really Jewish. All three girls managed to survive until the end of the war. All the Austrians who helped the five Jewish girls put themselves into great danger. They helped Jews avoid deportation, or helped some of them to escape from jail, or hid them in their apartments, or falsified lists or forged documents in order to allow the Jews to survive. The Austrian women who hid Justman and Fuks even shared their food and clothing, during a period when such things were in extremely short supply. Under Nazi law, all of these activities were crimes that could have led to deportation to a concentration camp, and eventually to death. None of these people received any material compensation for the risks they took upon themselves. After the war, Janaszewicz returned to Poland. Justman and Fuks moved to the United States. Regina Litman moved to Canada. Ruth Litman went to live in Sweden. On May 6, 1980, Yad Vashem recognized Wolfgang Neuschmid, KarlDickbauer, Erwin Lutz, Rudolf Moser, Anton Dietz, Maria Stocker, Maria Petrykiewicz and Wanda Petrykiewicz as Righteous Among the Nations.