Horrak Johann & Franziska (Kollar)

Horrak, Johann Horrak, Franziska Gertrude (Trude) and Ernestine (Erna) Wolf lived in Vienna with their parents. Their brother managed to flee to Switzerland in 1938. Two years later, their father, who had been forced to stand in the snow for lengthy periods of time as part of the terror campaign against the Jews, became sick with pneumonia and died. Thirty-year-old Trude was sent to Berlin for forced labor, leaving her mother and sister behind. In May 1942, the two women received an order to report for deportation. Trude rushed back to Vienna, but by the time she arrived, the transport had already left – her mother and sister were sent to Maly Trostinets, a village east of Minsk, which later became the killing site of some 65,000 Jews from the Minsk area, Germany, Austria, Poland, the Netherlands and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Trude was now left alone in Vienna, with no family and no home. Knowing that it was only a matter of time until she too would be deported, she decided to go into hiding. She turned her friends, Johann and Franziska Horrak, whom she had met in a hiking club before the war, and pleaded with them to help her. For the next three years, until the end of the war, the Horraks hid Trude in their home and shared their food rations with her. She was introduced to the neighbors as a sickly cousin from the provinces. The bonds forged between Trude and her rescuers during the dangerous years of the Nazi regime grew so strong that after the war Trude remained with the Horraks until she married Viktor Kellermann in1959. Her relatives later recounted the strong and warm relationship Trude maintained with her rescuers: during their visits to Vienna, Trude would take them to meet the Horraks. Ester Freisler, Trude's niece, told Yad Vashem that the Horraks were "like family," that her parents were in contact with them until their deaths, and that they continuously expressed their gratitude to the Horraks "in words and with gifts"for having rescued Trude. On May 28, 2013, Yad Vashem recognized Johann and Franziska Horrak as Righteous Among the Nations.