Posch Josefa ; Father: Rupert

Posch, Josefa Posch, Rupert In March 1945, thousands of Hungarian Jews who had been deported to Austria were taken on a death march to Mauthausen. Joseph Schneider was one of the exhausted, starving victims staggering forward step by step, under constant threat of being shot. Realizing the hopelessness of their situation, Schneider and four of his friends, Abe Spiegel, Zalman Glantz, Yanosh Wayda and Martin Lampert, decided to flee the marching column. They managed to slip away and hide in a nearby forest. At a distance they saw a house and decided to seek help. It was in this farm that the five hid until liberation. Years later, in the summer of 2010, Schneider’s rescue story was brought to the attention of Yad Vashem during a visit of his nephew, Dr. Joel Geiderman, Vice-Chair of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council at the time. A search in the Yad Vashem archives yielded a testimony Schneider had given in 1996, as well as other information about him. Schneider’s daughter was contacted and submitted a memoir her father had written, in which he described their arrival on the farm, their hiding in the hayloft, and the dedicated attention they received from the family who owned the farm in a village named ‘Geshmaya’. “All of us were sick from time to time, running fevers”, Schneider wrote in his memoir, “but Mrs. Porsche took care of us. Occasionally we would go into her house in the evenings, one at a time, so we could clean ourselves up a bit. Then we would return to the loft to watch and wait. Our spirits were raised a little when she came up each day to update us about events at the front.” Joseph Schneider ended the account of his wartime experience: “In the beginning of May 1945 Mrs. Porsche came to tell us that we were safe and invited us into their home. On May 5th we were free.” Preliminary attempts to find the rescuing family, including calling all the people in Austria with the last name of Porsche, failed. The Department of theRighteous then turned to the Austrian ambassador to Israel, who asked the local Austrian authorities to check their registries. After several weeks, a response was received that a family with a similar name – Posch, not Porsche – was living in a village with a slightly different name – Gschmaier, not Geshmaya, as Schneider had written. Wanting to make sure that the correct family had been found, Yad Vashem contacted Anton Posch and asked if he had any letters or photographs from the period. Three weeks later, an envelope arrived. It contained a wedding photo of Joseph Schneider sent in 1954, dedicated “with love” to his rescuers, as well as postcards that Martin Lampert, one of the other escapees, had sent to the family from America. Anton, who still lives in the same farmhouse, related that he was nine years old when the men appeared on the farm. ”It was around noon. They came out of the woods and asked if they could stay in the hayloft. My mother was outside, and said she had to ask my grandfather. He told her to help the fugitives because it was their only chance of survival.” It was extremely dangerous, because there were Germans in a castle nearby, and Josefa warned her son not to talk about the men in the hayloft to anyone in the village. Anton also told Yad Vashem that when the Germans retreated and the Red Army approached, the five men they had hidden gave them a letter to present to the Russian soldiers so as to protect them from reprisals. Once the rescuers’ identity had been confirmed and it had been verified that Josefa Posch and her father were indeed the persons who saved Schneider and his four friends, the file was submitted to the Commission for the Designation of the Righteous. On May 17, 2011, Yad Vashem recognized Josefa Posch and her father Rupert as Righteous Among the Nations.