Freissmuth Rosa (Schreiber)

Schreiber-Freissmuth, Rosa Rosa Freissmuth (later Schreiber) was born in Graz, Austria in 1913. Freissmuth was the proprietress of a shop in the village Neuhaus am Klausenbach, located near Kalch in the Burgenland area of southeastern Austria. During the war, Freissmuth was able to provide life-saving help to a number of Jews who were being held in the nearby Neuhaus forced-labor camp. One of the Jews Freissmuth helped was Andor Braun (later known as Alan Andrew Brown), born in Miskolc, Hungary. During the war, Braun’s father was drafted into a military labor-service company while the rest of his family was sent to the ghetto in the city, and later deported to Auschwitz. In May 1944, Braun too was drafted into the labor-service company, although he was only 16 years old. In the first of six labor camps in Hungary and then in Austria, Braun reconnected with his father, and in December 1944, they were sent to Austria as part of a “donation” of Jewish workers from the Hungarian government to the German Reich. The battalion was sent to the Neuhaus labor camp where they were put to work building fortifications and digging anti-tank trenches. In February 1945 Braun's father came down with typhus. His condition was so serious that he was unable to eat the moldy bread distributed to prisoners, and Braun knew that he would die without decent food and medical treatment. One night, Braun sneaked out of the camp to the neighboring village, Neuhaus am Klausenbach, where he rang the nightbell of the shop owned by Freissmuth, who coincidentally, was also a licensed pharmacist. When Braun arrived at the shop, there was an SS guard in another room and Freissmuth, who immediately identified Braun as an escaped Jewish prisoner, drew Braun inside and hid him in another room until the guard left. After it was safe, she came back to Braun, and upon hearing about his father’s condition, gave him white bread and a supply of medicine to reduce the fever. From that point, until the endof the war, Freissmuth continued to give Braun food and medicine, which she hid in the snow near the shop, which the prisoners of the camp passed daily on their way to work. Freissmuth had also helped other Jewish prisoners. Freissmuth endangered herself by helping Jews, a crime that could have led to deportation to a concentration camp, and eventually to death. She did not receive any payment for her activities, and paid considerable sums out of her own pocket for the food and medicines she gave to the prisoners. Braun’s father died of his illness one day after the liberation by the Russian army. Braun himself immigrated to the U.S., where he married and raised a family, and later became a professor of economics. 16 years after the war he was able to reconnect with Freissmuth. On March 13, 1997, Yad Vashem recognized Rosa Schreiber-Freissmuth as Righteous Among the Nations.