Sport Swimming Club Hakoah Vienna | Name Fritzi Lowy | |
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Born 18 November 1910 ( 1910-11-18 ) Vienna, Austria Died 13 March 1994(1994-03-13) (aged 83)
Vienna, Austria | ||
Friederike "Fritzi" Löwy (18 November 1910 – 13 March 1994) was an Austrian swimmer who won a bronze medal in the 400 m freestyle at the 1927 European Aquatics Championships. She competed in the same discipline at the 1928 Summer Olympics, but did not reach the finals.
Until the 2000s, Bienenfeld remained the only Austrian to win a swimming medal, together with Hedy Bienenfeld, who finished third in the 200 breaststroke at the same 1927 European Aquatics Championships.
Biography
Löwy was the youngest of seven children. In the 1920s she started swimming in the Jewish sports club Hakoah Vienna, and for several years since 1925 she was winning the annual five-mile open-water Austrian competition Quer durch Wien (Across Vienna) on Danube that was gathering some 500,000 spectators. During the 1920s–30s she also collected nearly every national title in freestyle. Soon after the Anschluss between Germany and Austria in 1938 she fled from Jewish prosecutions first to Italy, and then to Switzerland and Australia. She returned to Vienna in 1949 and worked as a secretary.
She was a rival of Bienenfeld, but they later became close friends, and Bienenfeld helped her financially around the 1960s when Löwy was fighting breast cancer. Löwy was bisexual and had no children.