Lisa Gavrić (born Elisabeth Bechmann; 31 July 1907 – 22 June 1974) was an Austrian-born communist who became an Internationalist participant in the Spanish Civil War. Subsequently, she worked on behalf of the German resistance movement with the French Résistance. After several unsuccessful attempts to return to Vienna, she finally managed to make the journey, using a false identity, during 1943. In July 1944 she was arrested by the security services and deported to the women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück. However, after acquiring a false identity and thereby identified as a foreign detainee, she was deported to Sweden during the final months of the war. She moved in 1948 Yugoslavia where she lived out her final decades, undertaking political work in Belgrade.
Life Provenance and early years Elisabeth "Lisa" Bechmann was born into a lower-middle-class family in Vienna. Her father was a railway worker. She and her siblings were strictly brought up. She trained and qualified for work as a hat-maker. Through her older sister Trude (who had attended university, but had been relegated from it on account of her "political activities"), Lisa became involved with a Vienna Young Communists group. In 1927, no longer able to bear the "mendacious atmosphere" in her parents' house, she secretly "escaped" and made her way to Paris. Paris, according to sources, was a "random" choice. There she took lodgings in a room at the back of a house, living unregistered and working in a small manufactory. The wages were miserable, but she was able to meet a wide range of people, including expatriates such as herself.
Milan Gavrić One of her new friends was Milan Gavrić, a communist from the recently renamed and relaunched Kingdom of Jugoslavia. He, too, had come to Paris in a spirit of deep hostility towards his own family. His father was a smallholder from Bosnian peasant stock who had grown prosperous as a businessman and money lender. In Paris Milan Gavrić had ended up at the heart of a circle of friends whose principal topics of conversation were Marxism and Communism. Lisa Bechmann was drawn into this circle: in 1929 Milan Gavrić and Lisa Bechmann were married. Their daughter Inga was born later that year. The family apartment became a conspiratorial meeting point for exiled Jugoslav communists who had fled their newly fascist homeland. Nevertheless, in 1930 Milan and Lisa Gavrić moved together in the opposite direction to Jugoslavia, driven to make the move by unemployment, poverty, hunger, concern for their daughter and the lure of the illegal but nevertheless highly active Jugoslav Communist Party.
Expulsion from Bosnia Then new constitution issued by decree in Jugoslavia during the second half of 1931 crystallised the installation of a fascist military dictatorship which in effect had, by that stage, already been in place for more than a year. "Progressive" (antifascist) political movements were suppressed. Communists suffered persecution. Milan and Lisa Gavrić made their home in Bosnia, settling with their daughter in Tuzla, which was the city in which Milan had grown up. Communist organisations were being set up in opposition to the new régime across the country. Milan Gavrić became secretary of the Tuzla region party leadership team. Lisa backed her husband and worked for the party. According to one source she also acted as a point of contact between the communists in Jugoslavia and the Young Communists in Vienna. In January 1933 the Communist groups in Tuzla and a number of other Bosnian cities and towns were betrayed to the authorities by a spy. Members were arrested and charged with high treason. Milan Gavrić was among those arrested and sentenced to several years of imprisonment. He managed to escape and subsequently fought with Tito's partisans against the German occupation. Lisa Gavrić was convicted of "communist activities" and received a ten month prison sentence. She was later expelled from Jugoslavia and at the start of 1934 fled north with her daughter to Vienna.
Return to Vienna Austria was also in a state of turmoil at the time. The "Austrofascist" government had recently outlawed the Communist Party which nevertheless continued to operate. Gavrić arrived in time for the February uprising which had its focus in the larger cities, especially Vienna. Although the event itself lasted less than a week, it consisted of a brutal and consequential confrontation between the forces of the fascist state - the police and the army - and antifascist street protestors and paramilitary groups representing in varying proportions the forces of democracy, socialism and communism. The February insurrection is even sometimes identified, rather grandly, in English-language sources as "the Austrian Civil War". During 1934 Lisa Gavrić worked for the (now illegal) Communist Party, taking her orders from both the Austrian party and its sister party in Jugoslavia. She also helped to sustain contacts between the party and its activist youth wing.
Paris In 1936 she was sent by the party to Paris where, following the general election in May of that year, Léon Blum's Popular Front government was installed in power. In Paris Gavrić undertook political work for the French Communist Party (which, unlike Communist Parties elsewhere in Europe, had not been outlawed and was indeed, by some criteria, part of the political mainstream). Later that year, beyond the Pyrenees, General Franco took charge of a military coup which marked the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Spain very quickly became the fulcrum of an international left-right military conflict. Lisa Gavrić spent the next six months undergoing a hasty programme of training in order to become a nurse-paramedic in order to be able to help in the struggle to defeat fascism in Spain. Six months later she was almost ready to go. First she handed over her daughter to French comrades in order that Inga might be well looked after. Through the mediation of the Soviet sponsored Red Aid (socialist welfare) organisation the little girl was transferred to the Soviet Union where, from 1937, Inga grew up in the Interdom / Интердом (international children's home) set up under the auspices of Red Aid in 1933 at Ivanovo, a manufacturing city to the north-east of Moscow.
Spanish Civil War She arrived by ship at Albacete as one of a group of women destined for war-related medical work in the area. They were distributed among a number of improvised military hospitals in the region administered, for medical purposes, from Murcia. At one point Gavrić was assigned to work at the Hospital Casa Roja in the city. At another time she worked at the University Clinic in the city. The life and the work were hard, not helped by a shortage of almost every category of medical equipment and essential supplies. Fully trained specialist physicians and nurses were also in desperately short supply.
During the first part of 1939 it became apparent that the republican government and their "Internationalist" allies had been defeated by the "nationalist" insurgents. Slightly under four decades of what many, especially on the political left, characterised as fascist dictatorship began. During February 1939 large numbers of wounded international figures were brought to the French frontier, accompanied by the medical personnel who had been caring for them. At the same time thousands of civilian refugees and defeated government soldiers were making the same journey. From the Communist perspective the French government had already abandoned the democratic Spanish government through its failure to intervene in the civil war, and the French authorities now did what they could to intercept the Spanish refugees at the frontier and turn them back. The status of non-Spaniards crossing into France and self-defining as antifascists was less clear-cut. The French "Popular Front" government had collapsed progressively during 1937/38. The new Daladier government was desperately keen to avoid another European war, and for that reason determined not to upset the German dictator and his Spanish ally. Lisa Gavrić made her way back to Paris where she stayed for a few weeks. However, the city authorities were no longer prepared to extend her residence permit ("carte de séjour"), and she was sent back to the south.
France and Résistance In the south she was taken by bus with other women to the recently constructed Gurs internment camp, where she spent the next four months. Security at this time depended largely on the camp's extremely remote location, far along up a mountain valley, and the fact that most of the internees were foreign, with little ability to speak local dialects or even French. (Inside the camp the predominant language was Spanish.) Many internees did in fact manage to escape with very little difficulty during these early months, and to find their way down from the mountains: Lisa Gavrić was one. Meanwhile, war had broken out in September 1939, and arrived in France in May 1940. Following French surrender on 22 June. the northern half of the country fell under German military occupation while the south was administered from Vichy by an ultra-conservative puppet government which, at least till 1942, enjoyed a considerable measure of autonomy in respect of domestic policy. Gavrić presumably lived hidden from the authorities and unregistered in the south after leaving Gurs. By February 1941 she had been living for some time in Arles, having established links both with the French Résistance and with residual underground elements of the Austrian Communist Party. Austria had been integrated into an expanding version of Germany since 1938, and it was while she was in Arles that she received instructions from the Austrian party to make her way back to Vienna and undertake party work there. She applied for the appropriate paperwork to the Paris office of the German Armistice Commission, but was refused the necessary permissions.