Franziska Bednar (geb. Rezucha)

Franziska Rezucha is born as the legitimate child of Franz and Margarethe Rezucha in Cermakowitz in Moravia [today Čermákovice in the Czech Republic]. Both parents are conductors. She attended the Czech elementary school in Cermakowitz for eight years and subsequently worked in agriculture.

In 1906, she married Josef Karner and worked in the household. The marriage remained childless and they divorced in 1921. In 1922, she married the Viennese police officer Johann Bednar, moved to Vienna and also ran a department store in Waidhofen an der Thaya. This marriage also remained childless. When her second husband died in 1937, she subsequently sold the department store and moved to Moravian Krumlov [today Moravský Krumlov in the Czech Republic].

There she experienced the occupation of Austria by the Third Reich on March 12, 1938 and the invasion of the so-called 'Sudetenland' on October 1, 1938. With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Franziska Bednar began listening to the radio stations London, Beromünster, Moscow, Ljubljana and the Austrian Freedom Radio, so-called 'enemy stations', and telling friends what she had heard.

She was betrayed to the Gestapo, arrested on July 3, 1941 and taken to the Vienna Regional Court. There, on March 13, 1942, the special court sentenced her to two years in prison for listening to and disseminating foreign radio news, taking into account her pre-trial detention. She remained imprisoned in Aichach prison until February 8, 1943. During her imprisonment, she was severely abused.

After her release, Fanziska Bednar returned to Cermakowitz [today: Cermakovice in the Czech Republic]. In 1948, she moved to Vienna and joined the ÖVP-Kameradschaft der politisch Verfolgten und Bekenner für Österreich [Austrian People's Party Comradeship of the Politically Persecuted and Confessors for Austria].