Penina Gottfried

Penina GOTTFRIED, born on August 15th, 1897 in Buczacz, Galicia/Austro-Hungarian Empire [later: Poland, today: Butschatsch|Бучач/Ukraine] (citizenship 1938: Poland), attended the k.k. Gymnasium in Buczacz, Galicia, as a private student for 5 years and completed the last three classes from 1914 as a private student in Vienna and passed a corresponding examination every year before the State Examination Commission at the Vienna Regional School Board in Vienna's 8th district, where she also passed her school-leaving examination (Matura) on October 7th, 1917 and then the Abiturkurs at the New Vienna Commercial Academy in 1917/18. From the fall term of 1918/19 she enrolled for one year at the Philosophical School, and from the fall term of 1919/20 she began studying law at the School of Law and Political Science at the University of Vienna. She lived in Vienna's 2nd district, Taborstrasse 38/27 and transferred back to the Philosophical School in the fall term of 1926/27 and studied history as a major subject and classical studies as a minor subject until the spring term of 1930. She had been in the final examinations stage since 1937.

She had registered for the final examinations ("viva voce") in history on July 23rd, 1937 , and submitted her dissertation "The last years of the reign of Maria Theresia. Conflicts between the Empress Maria Theresa and the Emperor Joseph II in the last years of her co-regency" (supervisors: Wolfgang Bauer (1877–1953) and Otto Brunner (1898–1982)), which had been approved on September 27th, 1937. She had passed the first viva ("Philosophicum") on December 15th, 1937, After the Anschluss and the seizure of power by National Socialism, she was still able to sit for the second viva on July 1st, 1938, as a foreigner, but had to rehearse with one of the three examiners, Prof. Otto Brunner, and was only able to sit for the repetition on October 26th, 1938, which she then passed. Thus, after a long period of uncertainty, she was able to complete her studies and obtain her doctorate on October 31st, 1938, but only under numerous symbolic discriminations in the context of a "non-Aryan graduation", and at the same time she was banned from working in the entire German Reich.

She lived with Dr. phil. Abraham Gottfried (1883-1938), insurance agent, and Rebekka Henia Gottfried (1885-1942) in Vienna's 2nd district, Taborstrasse 38/2/3/27.

Abraham Gottfried was arrested after the November pogroms on November 12th, 1938, and was sent with over 2,000 other Jews to the Notarrest in Vienna's 7th district, Kenyongasse 4 (dissolved monastery school). According to a report by the Vienna police chief Karl Vitzthum to Gauleiter Josef Buerckel, one of the SS men on guard there, Otto Seethaler of the SS-Standarte "Der Fuehrer", shot him in the head, allegedly in response to an attempt to grab his bayonet.

Penina and Rebeka Gottfried continued to live in their old apartment until November 1940, then until the end of May 1942 in Vienna's 8th district, Schloesselgasse 26/3/18. Although the National Council of Jewish Women in Baltimore, MD/USA had already made a deposit for both of them to enable them to emigrate to the USA, both were arrested and imprisoned in Vienna's 2nd district, Kleine Sperlgasse 2a and deported on June 16th, 1942 - not to Izbica as originally planned, but directly from the Vienna Aspang train station to the German extermination camp Sobibór in occupied Poland.

Dr. Penina Gottfried and Rebekka Gottfried did not survive.

She is commemorated at the University of Vienna since 2009 here in the "Memorial Book for the Victims of National Socialism at the University of Vienna in 1938" and since 2022 at the "Memorial to the History Students and Teachers of the University of Vienna Expelled under National Socialism | When Names Shine".