Antonia Bruha was a survivor of one of the many small groups that made up the Austrian opposition to Hitler. After the war she was indefatigable in her desire to perpetuate the memory of those who suffered like her, and to warn Austrians of the evils of Nazism.

She was born Antonia Spath in Vienna in 1915. Her father came from an old Flemish family, although he was exceptional in his socialist leanings. Her mother was a Czech speaker from southern Bohemia. From an early age she wanted to learn all she could about her mother’s language and culture and hoped that she might be able some day to study Slavic languages at university. Her mother, however, opposed this and pushed her towards a career as a dressmaker. In the end she became a hairdresser.

Her interest in sport and Czech nationalism led her to join the League of Czech Gymnasts at the age of 15. It was through the nationalist gymnastic group that she met her husband, Josef Bruha, an Austrian Czech who worked for Siemens. With his support she finally got the chance to study Czech at Vienna University, but that did not last long: after the Anschluss the Nazis closed the faculty of Slavic languages and, to cap it all, her husband lost his job.

It was not only the Czech cause that fascinated Antonia Bruha: she was also a Communist and wrote for clandestine Communist papers. She began her resistance activities well before the arrival of the Nazis, and against quite another regime: the Austrian corporate state which had taken many of its features from Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. Under the Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, Austrian democracy had been curtailed and the Communist Party driven underground. From 1935 Antonia used to cycle across the Czech border at Bratislava and collect copies of the Communist ArbeiterZeitung, a newspaper then being printed by exiles in Brno, and smuggle them into Austria.

After 1938 and the Anschluss by which the Nazi imposed rule on Austria from Berlin, Bruha and her Czech-Austrian friends found a new enemy. Their resistance cell distributed leaflets, committed acts of sabotage and found means of getting Jews across the border into Switzerland.

Her daughter Sonja was born on July 5, 1942. It was not good timing. Her resistance group had scattered after being infiltrated by the Gestapo and three months later, on October 15, mother and baby were arrested and taken to the Gestapo headquarters in the Hotel Metropol on the Morzinplatz.

She spent eight months in detention in Vienna, in the Morzinplatz and elsewhere, and for three months she was interrogated almost daily and was badly beaten. She was taken to the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück. Her file was marked “RU” — “Rückkehr unerwünscht” (never to be released). She worked as a seamstress for a while then as a nurse, smuggling precious medicine out of the sickbay to treat her fellow prisoners.

On April 28, 1945, she was evacuated from the camp on one of the last of the notorious death marches towards the coast. She was not meant to survive, but she somehow managed to flee and after a month she made it back to Vienna on foot. She was dressed in rags and weighed just 20kg.

“It wasn’t my Vienna anymore,” she wrote in her autobiography Ich bin keine Heldin (I’m no heroine). “It was a heap of rubble.” Her own home, where she was hoping to find her family, had lost its roof. Her four-year-old daughter did not recognise her and ran away, saying she would not go with that “ugly old woman”. She said that her own mother she knew from photographs to be “a pretty blonde woman. Tell her to go away. She is not my mummy”. It was two years before the child’s confidence in her was restored.

After the war Bruha played an important role in keeping the experience of Nazi oppression and resistance to it alive. In 1947 she joined the association for Austrian former internees from Ravensbrück and later she told of her experiences in documentaries and interviews.

In 1968 she became involved with the Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstandes (DÖW — the document centre of the Austrian resistance) which records Austrian acts of defiance to Nazi tyranny. She looked after the section dealing with the women’s camp at Ravensbrück.

While her health allowed, she was keen to visit schools and told children of her personal experiences and the evil that was Nazism. She published her memoirs in 1984.

Antonia Bruha, anti-Nazi activist, was born on March 1, 1915. She died on December 27, 2006, aged 91