Volksschuldirektorin Augusta Barbara Anna Raffel (geb. Fiala)

Augusta Barbara Anna Fiala was born in Groß Lukau [today: Lokov in the Czech Republic] as the daughter of Count Seiler's physician Gustav Fiala and Antonia, née Grohsschmiedt. After elementary and secondary school in Brünn [today: Brno in the Czech Republic], she attended a one-year advanced course at the school for higher daughters and then attended the teacher training college in the same city. She graduated in 1917 and began working as a provisional primary school teacher in Mödritz [today: Modřice in the Czech Republic]. Just one year later, with the defeat of Austria-Hungary, the break-up of Austria and the expulsion of the Habsburg dynasty, she stopped teaching and attended commercial school in Brno, from which she graduated in 1921.

In the same year, Augusta Fiala moved to Vienna to train as a singer and began working as a provisional teacher at the elementary school for girls in Leibnitzgasse in Vienna's 10th district. This was a Czech-language school for the Czech minority in Vienna. In 1924, she passed the teaching qualification examination. In 1932, she married the elementary school teacher Karl Raffel and joined the Vaterländische Front in 1934.

The staunch Austrian witnessed the demise of a free and independent Austria on March 12, 1938, when the German Wehrmacht invaded. The Czech-language school was immediately closed by the National Socialists and Augusta Raffel was assigned to the girls' elementary school at Alxingergasse 82, also in Vienna's 10th district. At the beginning of 1940, her colleague Margarete Skroch, who knew that Augusta Raffel was critical of the National Socialist regime, approached her and told her about the existence of the resistance group 'Austrian Freedom Movement' led by the former official of the Procurator Fiscal's Office Karl Lederer. Augusta Raffel joins, pays her membership fees and recruits further members. In 1940, they managed to make contact with the 'Austrian Freedom Movement' around Augustinian canon Roman Karl Scholz and the 'Großösterreichische Freiheitsbewegung' around the lawyer Jakob Kastelic.

From July 1940, a good 300 people from these resistance groups were betrayed by the castle actor Otto Hartmann (Otto Hartmann was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment in 1947 and pardoned in 1957) and Augusta Raffel was arrested by the Gestapo on September 6, 1940. She was immediately suspended from her teaching duties. Due to the catastrophic prison conditions, she fell ill with severe joint inflammation, which is why she was released from custody on September 14, 1941 on the grounds of incapacity.

In November 1943, Augusta Raffel was conscripted to work as an unskilled worker in the company 'Dr. A. Kutiak - Erzeugung chemisch-pharmazeutischer Präparate und Petrus Apotheke'. In a trial before the People's Court on October 31, 1944, she was sentenced to one year and six months in prison for "preparation for high treason". She was officially released as a teacher on January 1, 1945.

In April and May 1945, Augusta Raffel witnessed the liberation of Austria and the re-establishment of the Republic. She immediately volunteers to help rebuild the destroyed girls' elementary school at Hebbelpatz 1 in Vienna's 10th district. At the beginning of 1946, she was reinstated and appointed provisional headmistress of the elementary school she had rebuilt. She was later appointed headmistress.