“I’ll do everything to make sure that people aren’t persecuted for their origin or beliefs.”
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Irma Trksáková was born on October 2, 1917, in Vienna. Her parents were Slovak and they moved to Vienna because of work. After her graduation in 1936, she attended a pedagogical school in Prague and afterwards taught at a Czech school in Vienna. She joined the resistance movement even before the outbreak of WWII. Irma Trksáková became a spy and simultaneously cooperated with a group of left-wing Viennese Czechoslovaks who printed anti-war and anti-Hitler leaflets and conducted sabotage. In 1941, the group was betrayed and Irma Trksáková was arrested by the Gestapo. After one year of being investigated in solitary confinement, she was deported to the concentration camp in Ravensbrück. After the war she settled in Karlovy Vary and worked as a teacher. Later she found a job as a secretary of the cultural attaché at the Czechoslovak embassy in Vienna (the embassy was directed by František Bořek-Dohalský at the time). She worked there until 1950. The parents of Irma Trksáková moved to their second daughter who lived in Ostrava but Irma remained in Vienna. In 1951, she gave birth to a son, but due to an unhappy relationship she had to raise her son himself and remained unmarried for the rest of her life. The longest period she worked for an employer was her engagement at Siemens, where she purchased medical equipment. In 1977, she retired and fully devoted herself to public-awareness-raising activities in order to pass her life experience to the younger generations. She used to be a member of the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ), but left it because she disagreed with specific actions of the party.
