Maria Austria

1915 to 1936

Marie Karoline Oestreicher grew up in what was then the Bohemian monarchy Karlsbad, the daughter of Austrian doctor Karl, who died young (1864 – March 1915) and his wife Clara, née Kisch (1871–1945), sibling of the older Felix (1894–1945) and Lisbeth (1902–1989). The Jewish family was middle-class in an intellectual and artistic environment. She had Austrian citizenship until 1918, and then Czechoslovak citizenship. From 1928 to June 1933, she attended the local girls' high school, from which she graduated with very good grades.

During this time she began taking photographs. From the summer of 1933 she lived in the Rathausstrasse, Vienna. She bought a Leica and a Rolleiflex and began a three-year apprenticeship as a photographer on September 18 the Graphic Teaching and Research Institute Vienna - Department of Photography and Reproduction Processes, including an internship from February 1934 to July 1935 in the Viennese Willinger's photo studio on Kärntnerstrasse. After graduating with "very good" on July 4, 1936, she worked as a freelance photographer. She was interested in culture, attended avant-garde theatre productions and small experimental theatres and found inspiration in the circles of left-wing artists and actors around the Naschmarkt.

1937 to 1945

In the summer of 1937 she left Austria because of the increasing influence of the Nazi Germany and the growing anti-Semitism and moved to the Netherlands to live with her sister Lisbeth, who, after training as a textile designer at the Bauhaus Dessau had settled in Amsterdam. Accustomed to demand for her work in Vienna, Maria first had to develop a reputation in Amsterdam. She learned Dutch, took any small job, and from the beginning of 1938 photographed her sister's designs in their joint studio "Model en Foto Austria" (Fashion and Photo Studio Austria), and carried out advertising and portrait commissions. She developed her negatives herself, produced reportage and slowly established business with magazines. She published in the magazines Libelle and Wij and made contacts with politically and culturally like-minded people in the Nederlandsche Film League.

During this time she met the directors Joris Ivens and John Fernhout and the Hungarian photographer Éva Besnyö. With the move to the Noorder Amstellaan in the Rivierenbuurt district in 1939 she only used nom-de-plume 'Maria Austria.'

After the invasion of the Netherlands on May 10, 1940, and the occupation by the German Wehrmacht, the living conditions for Jewish people became increasingly difficult due to the growing reprisals during the German occupation such as compulsory registration for Jews, exclusion from public life, exclusion from associations, professional and writing bans. As she was affected by the occupational ban for Jewish photographers, Austria had to give up her job in May 1941 and began working as a nurse in the Portuguese-Israelite Hospital on the Rapenburg peninsula in the Jodenbuurt, and as a photography teacher for the Judenrat of Amsterdam. In April 1942 entered a marriage of convenience with the German-Jewish merchant Hans Bial (1911–2000) that ended in divorce in December 1945.

Her sister Lisbeth was interned in Westerbork Camp in 1942, as was her mother and brother and family in 1943, who had fled to the Netherlands in 1938. Maria Austria went into hiding, changing accommodation from mid-1943 and began to work for the Dutch Resistance. During this time, while hiding in the attic of the house at Vondelstraat 110 in Amsterdam, she met her future husband Hendrik (“Henk”) Pieter Jonker, whom she taught to take photographs. Jonker worked as an official for the Amsterdam population register.

Together with him and other Jewish photographers such as Éva Besnyö, they produced false identity cards for the resistance and Maria took on courier services under the pseudonym Elizabeth Huijnen. Her mother was sent in April 1945 to the KZ Bergen-Belsen, her brother Felix and his wife died shortly afterwards as a result of imprisonment in Belsen. Lisbeth survived in Westerbork and took in the three orphaned nieces Beate, Helly and Maria, whom she looked after with Maria Austria.