Muriel Gardiner (1901–1985)

Muriel Gardiner, née Helen Muriel Morris, was born to a wealthy family in Chicago, Illinois. She made her first trip to Europe with her family at age nine, traveling in luxury. She was concerned about injustice and inequality from childhood. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1922 and went to Europe again, arriving in Italy to witness the Fascist March on Rome. She did graduate work at Oxford University on English literature from 1923 to 1925. In 1926, she visited Vienna, hoping to study psychoanalysis and be analyzed by Sigmund Freud, but was turned down. She returned to Vienna later that year and in 1930, married Julian Gardiner, a British artist, with whom she had a daughter. The marriage failed and Muriel decided to become a doctor, enrolling in medical school at the University of Vienna.

After the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany and its spread to Austria, she became deeply involved in resistance activities. For four years, she smuggled dissidents, money, and documents such as false passports across borders and within the country, and hid refugees in her home, activities she later described in her memoir, Code Name "Mary": Memoirs of an American Woman in the Austrian Underground (1983). She received her medical degree and married Joseph Buttinger, a leader of the Socialist underground; they fled to Paris at the Nazi Anschluss (annexation) of Austria in March 1938. After World War II began the following year, they moved to the USA.
The couple worked tirelessly to bring as many German and Austrian refugees to the USA as possible.

After the war, they continued to be active in many causes. Muriel practiced as a psychoanalyst, taught at various universities, and wrote several acclaimed books. She edited The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man, by Sigmund Freud, the case history of one of his most famous patients. Decades after her work of the 1930s, Muriel was awarded the Cross of Honor First Class by the Austrian government.