“Dear Mother, it’s now already Christmas—and the second year I am away from you. The time has passed quickly and I often can’t even imagine that soon two years will have passed. How are you doing? You’re probably terribly starving.”

These are the first lines of this letter Berta Grubhofer wrote at Ravensbrück Concentration Camp to her mother and mother-in-law. The letter was not sent by regular mail—it was a so-called “Kassiber”—a letter smuggled out past the prison’s censors. Berta Grubhofer’s brother travelled to Ravensbrück in the North-East of Germany to see about his sister. She was imprisoned for her activities in the Communist resistance to the Nazi regime.

Through the fence at the camp, he asked about his sister. The woman he spoke to was a prisoner herself, and told him to come back the next day—and he was actually able to meet his sister. She managed to pass the letter to her brother without being detected.

The letter expresses Berta Grubhofer’s concern for her mother as well as for her father and her fiancé, who were also both in concentration camps. She does not openly talk about her own circumstances, and was likely also sending encoded messages to the Communist resistance. The letter could have easily fallen into the wrong hands, so clear statements would have put her or her brother in great danger. Among other things, she wrote, “Life is so expensive (or cheap?)” Early on, Berta Grubhofer became active in Communist youth groups and then in the Communist Party. During the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg dictatorship, when she was still a minor, she had already been put in prison for her political activities.

When the Nazis seized power in 1938, she was put in prison again for planning the escape for members of the Communist Party. That didn’t stop her from continuing to work for the Communist resistance. She distributed flyers, collected money for people in prison and their loved ones, and attempted to set up a radio transmission station in Upper Austria. She was arrested in 1943 and taken to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.

Her fiancé and later husband, Josef Lauscher, was sent to concentration camps in Dachau, Flossenbürg and Mauthausen.

When you continue to the next station, you’ll find yourself very close to a portrait – it’s in the installation on the wall to the right. This is a portrait of Josef Lauscher, made in a concentration camp.

Berta Grubhofer’s father died at the concentration camp in Dachau; both she and Josef Lauscher survived the concentration camps. They later married. Berta Lauscher stayed politically active. She was an active member of a group of women in Austria who survived Ravensbrück and who aimed to educate people about Nazi crimes and the persecution of women. She passed away in 1984.