JHC acknowledges Baroness von Neurath’s selfless acts of courage

Holocaust survivor, Mr Moshe Fiszman, who has served as a volunteer guide at our Centre and Holocaust Museum for several years. The brave, selfless and defiant actions of your mother ameliorated, in large measure, the pain, degradation, humiliation and suffering experienced by Mr Fiszman and many others at the hands of vindictive and merciless jailors.

While the memories of starvation, brutality, ruthlessness, disease and the deaths of scores of people on a daily basis remain with Mr Fiszman, his indebtedness to your mother, which he shares with many others who may not have survived but for her, has endured, despite the passage of time …’

In acknowledgement of Baroness Irmgard von Neurath’s selfless acts of courage, the Centre presented a Certificate of Appreciation to Mrs von Staden. The text of the Certificate acknowledged Baroness von Neurath’s selfless acts of courage in protecting Jewish prisoners in the Vaihingen am Enz (Wiesengrund) concentration camp, thereby endangering her own safety.

While the Jerusalem-based Yad Vashem applies specific criteria to accord the titular honour of Chassidei Umot Ha’olam (Righteous Among the Nations) to Gentiles who risked their lives to saves Jews during the Holocaust, there were countless other non-Jews, as many Holocaust survivors will affirm, whose acts of self-sacrifice were responsible for saving Jewish lives.

Moshe Fiszman, a survivor guide at the Jewish Holocaust Centre, attributes his survival, and that of many other inmates of the Vaihingen am Enz (Wiesengrund) concentration camp in Germany, to a young woman, Baroness Irmgard von Neurath. Of the four camps in which he was incarcerated during the Shoah, including Auschwitz, where he spent a brief period, Mr Fiszman deems Vaihingen to have been indisputably the most brutal.

Baroness von Neurath died in 1965, aged 67, her courage never having been formally acknowledged. However, given Moshe Fiszman’s close association with the Jewish Holocaust Centre, the Centre decided to do so posthumously, and wrote to her daughter, Mrs Wendelgard von Staden, who still lives in Vaihingen.

The letter read:

‘The Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne, Australia wishes to place on record its gratitude and indebtedness to your late mother, Baroness Irmgard von Neurath, whose courage and compassion proved instrumental in saving lives of Jews incarcerated in the Vaihingen am Enz (Wiesengrund) concentration camp during the Naziperpetrated Holocaust.

We have been told of the care and humanity which your mother showed during that dark period of history by a

In her response, Mrs von Staden wrote: ‘It is with great emotion that I read your letter … and opened the envelope with the framed Certificate of Recognition dedicated to my late mother. I wish I could tell her about the Jewish Holocaust Centre at the other end of the world – and of Mr Fiszman who, after so many years, still remembers her ... ’ It was gratifying to hear from Mrs von Staden that the grounds of the Vaihingen am Enz concentration camp have been turned into a memorial with documents carefully preserved in the archives. Students and other visitors are shown where the barracks once stood and are informed about what happened at the camp.

There is a rabbinical concept of mesirat nefesh, loosely translated as the mitzvah of self-sacrifice. Baroness Irmgard von Neurath was living proof of one who fulfilled that mitzvah.