Ernst, her second son, was born in 1949. In 1950 Maria Kreith relocated with her sons from Judenburg to the regional capital Graz where as an unmarried mother she now lived with her sons in basic accommodation in the city's quarter . The entire southern portion of what before 1938 had been Austria, had been administered, more recently, as the British occupation zone since 1945. In the 1945 general election the Communist Party had secured more than 5% of the national vote, and it was as a communist than Maria Kreith now re-engaged politically. It was also through the party that she met the man who subsequently became her second husband. She worked with the Austrian Red Aid (a [communist backed] welfare organisation) and was actively engaged with the , an Austrian Concentration Camp Survivors' Association, and, later, in the emerging women's movement. Even while Soviet-style Communism became increasingly identified, in central Europe, as a proxy for old-fashioned Russian expansionism, she remained an unapologetic backer of communist politics.