Neustadtl Friedrich

Neustadtl, Friedrich Friedrich Raab was born in Vienna in 1912. Her father was taken prisoner during World War I and was unable to rehabilitate his life after his return home from captivity; the family lived in poverty. Friederike’s elder brother immigrated to Argentina and had his parents join him there. Friederike found work as a seamstress in a workshop owned by a woman and her invalid son. On November 28, 1941, the workshop owner informed Friederike that a man had arrived at the workshop asking for her. “I am sorry, but they have come to take you away,” she said. Determined not to be taken, Friederike slowly put on her coat, frantically looking around for a way to escape. She slipped her scissors into her pocket and told the official that she would get her work certificate from the adjacent room, which was where the workshop owner’s son was resting. The official followed her, but when he saw the invalid lying in bed, he stopped at the doorway. Seizing the moment, Friederike crossed the room and left through a second door that led out of the workshop. Friederike spent the next five days hiding with friends, until her friend Friedrich Neustadtl found her. “We cannot have your friends risk themselves,” he said, and moved her to his dental practice on the third floor of a building at Rudolfplatz 4. Here, Friederike spent more than three years, never daring to leave the clinic. The danger was enormous because one of the building’s tenants was a Nazi who was constantly on the outlook for any suspicious movement. During the daytime, Friederike hid in the room where false teeth were repaired. At night she could move quietly around the clinic, but silence had to be maintained at all times. Neustadtl brought her food and books. He spent as much time with her as he could, but he had to return home in the evening to take care of his 90-year-old mother. Toward the end of the war, as the bombing of Vienna became more intense, Neustadtl took Friederike to his apartment, introducing her to his mother as his assistant. In 1946, after the war ended, Friedrich Neustadtl and Friederike Raab were married, and a year later they had a daughter. Friederike was forever marked by the traumas of the war. She converted to Christianity and educated her daughter to try to blend in, not to draw attention to herself, and to hide her emotions. “Even though we seemed to lead a normal, positive life, it was not always what our daughter expected from us. Thus for example, during Christmas time we were always dominated by sadness,” she wrote in her testimony. On February 19, 2013, Yad Vashem recognized Friedrich Neustadtl as Righteous Among the Nations.