First Person with Gideon Frieder
Download Full Program »
View Transcript »
Listen to Podcast »
Learn more about Gideon Frieder »
Learn more about Czechoslovakia »
Learn more about Hidden Children: Hardships »
Photo of house where Gideon was hidden »
BILL BENSON:
Good Afternoon and welcome to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. My name is Bill Benson. I am the host of the museum’s public program, First Person. Thank you for joining us today. This is our tenth year of the First Person program. Our First Person today is Dr. Gideon Frieder, whom we shall meet shortly.
This 2009 season of First Person is made possible through the generosity of the Louis and Dora Smith Foundation to whom we are grateful for again sponsoring First Person. First Person is a series of weekly conversations with survivors of the Holocaust who share with us their firsthand accounts of their experience during the Holocaust. Each First Person guest serves as a volunteer with the museum. With few exceptions we will have a First Person program each Wednesday until August 26th. We also have First Person programs on Tuesdays from April through July. The museum’s website at www.ushmm.org provides a list of the upcoming First Person guests. This year we are offering a new feature associated with First Person. Excerpts from our conversations with survivors are available as podcasts on the museum’s website. Several are already posted on the website. Gideon’s will be posted within the next several weeks. The First Person podcasts join two other Museum podcast series: Voices on Antisemitism and Voices on Genocide Prevention. The podcasts are also available through iTunes.
Dr. Gideon Frieder will share with us his First Person account of his experience during the Holocaust and as a survivor for about 40 minutes. We will follow that, if time allows, with an opportunity for you to ask a few questions of Gideon. Before you are introduced to him I have several announcements and requests of you. First, we ask that if it is at all possible please stay seated with us throughout the one hour program that way we minimize any disruptions for Gideon as he speaks. Second, if we do have our question and answer period and you have a question, please make your question as brief as you can. I will repeat the question so everyone in the room including Gideon hears the question and then he’ll respond to your question. If you have a cell phone or a pager that has not yet been turned off we ask that you do that at this time. If you have passes to the permanent exhibition today, please know that they are good for the entire afternoon so you can stay with us until 2 o’clock and then go to the permanent exhibition.
The Holocaust was the state sponsored systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and it’s collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Jews were the primary victims, six million were murdered. Roma and Sinti, or Gypsies, people with mental and physical disabilities and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic or national reasons. Millions more including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war and political dissidents also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi tyranny.
More than 60 years after the Holocaust, hatred, antisemitism, and genocide still threaten our world. The life stories of Holocaust survivors transcend the decades and remind us of the constant need to be vigilant citizens and to stop injustice, prejudice, and hatred wherever and whenever they occur.
What you are about to hear from Gideon Frieder is one individual’s account of the Holocaust. We have prepared a brief slide presentation to help with Gideon’s introduction.
And we begin with this childhood photograph of Gideon Frieder who was born September 30, 1937. Gideon was born in Zvolen, Slovakia. On this map of Europe, our arrow points to Slovakia. Here we see Gideon’s father, Armin Frieder. Gideon’s family moved to Nove Mesto, Slovakia at the beginning of the war because his father, a rabbi, was offered a position there. Gideon’s father was part of the underground “Working Group” of the Slovak Jewry and was responsible for communications with Slovak authorities.
Here on the left, we see Gideon with his sister Gita. And on the right we see Gideon’s parents. This photo was taken in the Slovak mountains. In 1944 during the Slovak uprising against the Nazis, Gideon, his mother, and his sister fled from Nove Mesto. In October they made their way to Banska Bystrica, which served as the center of the uprising. Realizing he would endanger anyone close to him, Gideon’s father fled separately. This map shows the partition of Czechoslovakia in 1938 to 1939 and the arrow points to the location of Banska Bystrica. As the Nazis were nearing Banska Bystrica, the family fled to the mountains where they were caught in a massacre at Stare Hory. Gideon’s mother and sister were killed.
Gideon was taken from the site by Henry Herzog, who eventually took him to the village of Bully where he was placed with Paulina and Jozef Strycharszyk. This is a contemporary photograph of the home where Gideon was hidden.
Gideon remained in Bully until 1945. He was later found by his father who survived the war. After the war, Gideon went to Israel and then later immigrated to the United States. We close our slide presentation with this contemporary photograph of Dr. Gideon Frieder.
Gideon lives today in the Washington, D.C. area with his wife Dhalia, having emigrated from Israel to Buffalo, New York in 1975, then moving to the Washington area in 1992. They have three children: a son Ofir, and two daughters Tali and Goni, and four grandchildren, including twins who are one month old. Their granddaughter Gita is named for Gideon’s sister whom we shall hear more about a little bit later.
Gideon is a physicist and a computer scientist. He earned his doctorate in quantum physics in Israel. He presently is the A. James Clark Professor at the School of Engineering and Applied Science at George Washington University and previously served as the school’s Dean. He has also taught and held Dean positions at Syracuse University, the University of Michigan, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. Gideon served in the Israeli Ministry of Defense in research and development and also served in the Israeli Air Force. In addition to teaching, Gideon is a consultant with government agencies and private companies, serves as an expert witness in patent and copyright litigation, and he himself holds several patents. Gideon is a part of a team of computer experts who on a voluntary basis provide technical support to the museum’s archives and the International Tracing Service to aid them in their work to identify Holocaust survivors and their families; to help them learn what happened to their loved ones during the Holocaust. In fact, just before we came in here, Gideon was showing us new software that he and a team have developed that makes it possible to retrieve and read very hard to read, faded, destroyed, damaged documents, and I must tell you it is just rather remarkable. And with that I’d like to ask you to help me in welcoming our First Person, Dr. Gideon Frieder.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
I always wonder why people applause when you come on this stage. You don’t know what you are going to hear. How do you know that you should applause?
BILL BENSON:
Gideon, thank you so much for joining us, for your willingness to be our First Person today. We have so much to cover so we should start. Although Germany overran Poland in September 1939, and soon dominated Europe, your home country of Slovakia was allied with the Germans and therefore not occupied by them until much later. Before we talk about the start of the war and the events leading up to and following the German occupation of Slovakia, why don’t we start with you Gideon, telling us about
your early life and that of your parents, your family, your community, what life was like before the war began?
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Well, before the war began I was very, very young. So the war began when I was two years old. I don’t remember a lot. But I do remember the later years. Slovakia was allied with Germany. And in some sense the students, the Slovaks, surpassed their professors, the Germans, in enacting legislation which was harsher in some sense than the Germans’ anti-Jewish laws. So there was an effect on the Jewish community, on me as a child, even before the Germans actually occupied Slovakia in 1944. I knew as a child that there are certain streets that I shouldn’t go through. Because I’ll go through the streets, people with throw, children will throw stones at me, hit me, and beat me up. And there are certain areas of town which I never visited.
BILL BENSON:
You just knew what was safe and what wasn’t safe.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
I just knew where to go and where not to go. And the places not to go are far bigger than the places to go. But all in all I was reasonably sheltered as a child, until 1944 when the Germans actually invaded because the Slovaks tried to overthrow the German allied fascist government. And obviously the Germans could not let it happen.
BILL BENSON:
And we’ll certainly talk more about that. Gideon, tell us about your father who was, by any definition, a remarkable man.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Well, I’m a bit biased about my father for obvious reasons.
BILL BENSON:
Just a bit, and rightfully so.
GIDEON FRIEDER
But he was a remarkable man. Maybe, one way to impress upon you how remarkable he was - he died when he was less than thirty-six years old. He left behind a diary written in six languages, all of which he mastered, describing the Holocaust and containing many original documents. One of the reasons that endeared him on the Slovak functionaries; on the Secretary of Interior and so on, was that he wrote a doctoral dissertation for one of the ministers in the government.
BILL BENSON:
Wrote the dissertation for him?
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Dissertation for him. Right. Which the guy published under his own name, obviously. And being able to do it as a matter of fact shows a certain capability to put it this way. He also authored a couple of books. Regretfully I don’t have copies of them. He spoke, as I said, multiple languages, but what was remarkable – he was accepted both by the Orthodox Jewish community and by the upper Catholic clergy of Slovakia, which was very unusual for a rabbi.
BILL BENSON:
He was also involved in trying to build a Zionist community in Slovakia. Tell us what he did and the kind of work he was trying to attempt to do during that time.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Well, he was very active in the Zionist movement, especially in creating youth groups in the Zionist movement. He advocated self sufficiency, he advocated something which was very unusual again for a rabbi, which is, I wouldn’t call it secular Judaism, but non-strict religious Orthodox Judaism. Which again, for an Orthodox rabbi, was very unusual. He was active in the political movement of the Jews which was mainly Zionistic and he gave numerous lectures on the subject to the community and through his sermons.
BILL BENSON:
Your immediate family consisted of you, your mother and your sister and your father. How large was your extended family?
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Well, my mother had many siblings. Most of them left Slovakia before the war; they immigrated to mostly to Argentina and to Panama and thus, were saved. One of them immigrated to Israel (at the time it was not Israel yet). Very funny, she’s the youngest daughter. She joined the British Army. For a woman to join the British Army in the 30s was kind of very unusual.
She’s an unusual woman. When she was 72 years old she decided that she never had an opportunity to go to university. So at 72 years old she enrolled in a university. And she actually graduated with a bachelor’s degree.
BILL BENSON:
No kidding? She sounds remarkable all the way around.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
She is a remarkable woman. I’m going to see her in four weeks. When I ask her what she is going to take, she said “Akkadic and Sumeric languages.” I said “What?” She said, “Akkadic and Sumeric languages.” I said “Why?” She said “Why not?” She’s a remarkable woman. She was retired at the time obviously.
BILL BENSON:
Gideon, you were not yet seven years old when the German Army occupied Slovakia in August of 1944. Tell us about those years between the start of the war in Europe in 1939; what life was like in Slovakia while the war was going on, but yet the Germans had not come to Slovakia. Because life would change very dramatically once they arrived in ’44.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Yes, obviously, most of what I remember is not really actual memories. I draw very heavily on the diaries of my father which . . . I’m lucky that I was able to read most of the languages there, so, essentially almost all of the languages there.
Life was relatively quiet. With the exception that people were killed. People were deported to Auschwitz. Rules against religion were very strong. Ritual slaughter was not allowed for example. Jews were expelled from all positions. Children were expelled from schools, and so on.
BILL BENSON:
So you were not in school at that time?
GIDEON FRIEDER:
I was in a Jewish school. What the Jews did, they created their own schools. Essentially the Jews created their own schools, even in the labor camps, which was set up to intern Jews. One of the things that my father did, he was very active in creating these schools in the intern, in the labor camps, internment camps. So the Jews educated themselves, but they were expelled from public life essentially, which by the way, had quite a negative effect on the Slovak economy, because a large part of the educated populace was Jewish. The free professions, especially medicine, were mostly Jews. It was a very large effect. But the Slovaks didn’t care obviously.
For a child, apart from what I told you that you cannot walk in certain places, I was in the school in the morning. I went through the proper streets home. In the afternoon I never left home after that. It was a relatively calm life. For the adults who were deported and killed and so on it was not.
BILL BENSON:
You said for you, you told me that relatively sheltered in some ways.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Yes, because my father; because of his position and his interfaces with the government. He was kind of a interface between the government and the Jews. It was not in the sense it was in Poland with the Judenrats. It was very different. But he was still valuable in a sense. He was put in jail many times, but each time through his influence he was released.
BILL BENSON:
You told us earlier about his having written that dissertation for the government Slovakian official. That actually benefitted him later in the sense that this man was somewhat indebted to your dad.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Yes. First of all it creates psychological dependence instilled in a professor. It’s natural that you defer to him. But there was more to it. Because he had to write the dissertation, he had to meet with him many times in his office. And many times he was left alone in the office when the minister had to get out and do something. So he was able to go through documents and destroy some. And that is well documented in the diaries, and this way the most extreme things disappeared. He also, through him, was able to influence the way this minister would write about the “Jewish Question.”
BILL BENSON:
And helped actually save lives.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Helped to save life. Helped to save his life, obviously. But helped to save lives, helped to defer certain things, essentially helped to stop the deportation of 1942. They were resumed later, but 1942 the deportations stopped.
BILL BENSON:
They stopped in ‘42 and prior to that, I think the way you put it to me is that the Slovaks were so willing to get rid of Jews essentially, that they were basically paying to do that.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Yes. This is a very interesting part of the history of collaboration with the Nazis. Slovakia paid to the Germans, for every Jew the Germans took away. I was not aware of it until a
couple of years ago when there was a German scientist, German historian working in the Center for Holocaust Studies here and he was interested in financing the war; the general question how the Germans financed the war. And he told me, he told the archivist, there is a document, there’s something about it. Now I speak and read Slovak, so I went through the Slovak archives and actually found the document and I have it. I mean I have the copy of it, I don’t have the image of it, the actual document in which the treasury department is asked by the foreign office, by the department of state, to
transfer monies to this particular account as payment for the deportation of the Jews, you have to pay to the Germans.
Now where did the Slovaks get the money to pay the Germans to get the Jews? Very simply, they confiscated Jewish property. So essentially the Jews paid for their own death. Deportation is a very nice word. They essentially paid for their own extermination and annihilation. It’s a unique document that we now have copied. It’s a bit faded. It’s not total, there are certain words missing but.
BILL BENSON:
We’d actually talked about maybe at some point showing a piece of that on the slide presentation.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
I have it. I have those documents.
BILL BENSON:
Gideon, during that – in a short while you’re going to tell us a terrible story about the loss of your mother. During that time prior to the Germans coming in, what do you recall about your mother? What can you share with us about her knowing how young you were?
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Well, again, looking back, and this time not from the diary, just looking back on my life,I
didn’t realize it at the time but she was a very exceptional woman. Just the pictures that you have seen. For a woman which is the wife of a rabbi, at that time to be that free, the way she was dressed, the way the hair was done, she was educated, she was a very exceptional woman. She came from a large family of educated people. All her siblings were educated; it was a very unusual family in that sense. She was very active in the community, being young and pretty and fluent in multiple languages, she was fluent in three languages. She performed duties that the regular wife of a rabbi, at that time, would not perform. She was active in the women’s Zionist movement in Hadassah. Obviously she didn’t work. At that time women didn’t work.
BILL BENSON:
Thanks for telling us that. You mentioned a short while ago Gideon, that the deportations stopped in 1942, but then they resumed again.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
At the end of 1942, yeah ’43.
BILL BENSON:
Tell us more about the deportations and what the Slovak government did when they resumed them.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Again, we have ample documentation of it in the diaries. There are clandestine pictures which are taken of the deportation. The diaries by the way, were first publicly used in the Eichmann trials. I don’t know how much you know about it. Eichmann was a German SS officer responsible for the extermination of Jews. He was abducted by the Israeli Secret Service in South America, brought to Israel, brought to trial, and the diaries were used as part of the documentary evidence because there were pictures and names and dates, and lists of names and so on.
BILL BENSON:
When we think of “diary” we often think of just somebody writing, but your father actually collected documents and photographs that became evidence.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Correct. The diaries collect documents, photographs, graphs, monetary statements, various procedures, original documents written by the officials of the Slovak government to the Jewish community, correspondence by various other dignitaries including his letter to the representative of the Vatican and so on. These diaries are the basis of assessing what happened for that period.
BILL BENSON:
Right. Tell us about the Slovak government and the leader of the Slovak government.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
That’s another interesting part of the history of Slovakia. The president of the fascist government was a guy called Jozef Tiso. And if he would be called just Jozef Tiso it would be not that interesting, but he was Father Tiso. He was a Catholic priest who headed a secular government, right? He was very instrumental in enacting these anti-human laws. And he’d never seen a clash between being a “Man of God” so to speak, and killing Jews. And he was asked about it once openly. And he said he doesn’t see anything bad in killing Jews. That was in a public statement.
BILL BENSON:
No contradiction with his religious values.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
No contradiction whatsoever with his conscience. It was in a public lecture which was quoted and we have, in the diaries again, the quote and the place where it was done. After the war he was tried as a war criminal and hanged. When the communist government in Czechoslovakia disintegrated there was a period of unrest in Czechoslovakia, which changed its name a couple of times. It was first called Czechoslovkia, then it was called the Czech and Slovak Republic, and eventually split to the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. And the Slovak became independent again adapting almost the same flag that they had when they were fascist. The only difference is the emblem, which was in the middle through the Nazi era is now…
BILL BENSON:
And this is the flag they have today?
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Yes. It was just moved to the side a bit. Same flag, interesting observation. Not a pleasant one, but interesting one.
When they became independent in the 90s there was a movement in Slovakia to canonize Tiso because they said he was the one who created an independent Slovakia. There was a large . . .
BILL BENSON:
The one who was hung as a war criminal?
GIDEON FRIEDER:
The one which was hung as war criminal. They wanted to beatify and canonize him and turn him into a saint. Again, a sad observation. Luckily, sanity prevailed. Now, I could be kind and say sanity prevailed, or I could be cynical and say that the Slovaks wanted to join the European Union and that would not be the right thing to do. And you will decide which one of the interpretations in correct. I am not a judge of history. I am not a historian. I barely can do my science. It’s a sad observation on what is happening today.
BILL BENSON:
It is. Gideon, in 1944 there was an uprising against the Slovak government. That uprising would have an immediate and profound effect on your family and on you. Will you tell us about the uprising, what that was about, and then what it meant for you almost immediately after it began?
GIDEON FRIEDER:
In 1944 the Russians were already in Poland. The Slovaks obviously realized that they are on the losing side. There was a strong movement of communist partisans in the mountains supposedly by Russia. And as a counter or a counter balance to it there was also a strong movement of western allied partisans supported by the Allies; Great Britain, United States. In somehow unusual historic moment these two groups of partisans allied with each other.
BILL BENSON:
So the U.S. and British-backed and the Russian-backed partisans . . .
GIDEON FRIEDER
And the Russian backed partisans allied with each other, which enabled also some Jewish partisans to join. Because, you know the Jewish partisans didn’t fare very well with the Russian and Polish type of partisans. They were lucky to stay alive. But in this alliance they found a way. And it was essentially a Jewish partisan group fighting in that uprising. The person who saved my life essentially was part of that group. So they allied and created an uprising and essentially took large parts of Slovakia.
Now if you look at the map, you realize that Slovakia is between the south and the Germans. The Germans had to crush it, they had no choice. Strategically, anybody who understands military knew that it has to fail. For the Germans to survive, it has to fail. The partisans, now the allied partisans of both the Russian and the western persuasion, so to speak, relied on the fact the behind the Carpathian Mountains to the north of Slovakia in Poland, there was already a contingent of the Soviet Army. And they relied on the Soviet Army to come to their help. But again my cynical side shows the Soviets were ready to fight to the last Slovak. They didn’t care that the Slovak would bleed to death. They would establish themselves more easier and the Russians sat behind the mountains and did not come over.
The Germans deployed an armored brigade of the Waffen SS. Again, I don’t know how much you know about it. The SS had a contingent, which was fighting as a a fighting army, not as part of the Wehrmacht, but on side of the Wehrmacht, called Waffen SS. They deployed the Waffen SS including, I don’t know how strong a battalion or brigade, of Ukrainians, which were fighting on side of Germans. And they crushed, essentially crushed the uprising. It is celebrated today as the SNP they call it, SNP in Slovak, Slovak National Uprising, Slovenské Národné Poustanie, these letters SNP. It is celebrated today as a big, big achievement. But essentially it failed. What happened is that the Germans started to move from south to north and the partisans retreated all the time. Eventually the Germans took over all the towns and all the centers of population and the only part which was under control of the partisans during the night were the mountains.
BILL BENSON:
And the center for them was Banska Bystrica.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Banska Bystrica was the center. So we fled from Nove Mesto to Banska Bystrica. My father separated from us because if we would be caught with him we’ll be shot. There were no Miranda rights at the time. So we separated; he fled and we fled. Interestingly enough, when I was already older, I traced the route. When I was eventually, I’m jumping ahead of time, but when I was liberated I related to my father the whole story how we fled and I mentioned villages and places. So now I have it on record and I was able to trace how we fled.
We fled from Nove Mesto not to the north toward the partisans, but to the south towards the Germans. So when you moved toward the Germans nobody checked who was fleeing, right. What Jew in their right mind would go to the Germans, right? And after we left the city we turned and went to the north. And I have all the route.
BILL BENSON:
How did you go? How did you actually travel? It was you, your mother and your sister, and whom else?
GIDEON FRIEDER:
It’s called bus number 11, two legs. We fled on foot. We fled out of the city by an ambulance. The ambulance was not searched because it went toward the German lines. So nobody searched it. Then we turned around, the ambulance broke down, so they hitched him, or it, right, ambulance is an “it”, so they hitched it to a horse. So we had a horse driven ambulance. And then we fled to the mountain and walked and took a train and walked again. Slovakia is not a very big country.
BILL BENSON:
But mountainous for sure.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Mountainous; it was long.
BILL BENSON:
And for you, at that point you described it, and of course you were seven years old. It was somewhat of an adventure for you as a seven year old boy.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Oh yes. Until we came to, until the massacre, it was an adventure. We went in an ambulance, with a horse, we went through the mountains, there were berries and fruits.
BILL BENSON:
Sleeping out in the open probably.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
And the water was clean, and we drank from the water and we slept in these hunting huts. And we were going with shepherds. It was . . .
BILL BENSON:
Exciting.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
For me, yes. Not for my mother I’m sure. And for my sister it was difficult because she was very young. And she was carried on her hands most of the time.
BILL BENSON:
By your Mom?
GIDEON FRIEDER:
By my mom and by people who helped us. Peasants who helped us.
BILL BENSON:
When you got to Banska Bystrica, this, I assume was a besieged town now or city.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Not at the time. When we came it was not yet besieged. The reason we came there because that was the center of the uprising. When we came there we had it reasonably easy because my mother was recognized as the wife of Rabbi Frieder who was very well known. He was the chief rabbi of Slovakia. So the Jewish community welcomed us and gave us shelter and food I assume. And until the Germans advanced to the vicinity of the town we were safe there, but then we had to flee. And in there she met, my mother met, this partisan. And when we had to flee she kind of asked him to take us with him. He was not very enthusiastic, being saddled with a young woman with two young children, but eventually.
BILL BENSON:
Because this is a fighting group?
GIDEON FRIEDER:
This is a fighting group. She just wanted to join them as they were retreating. Eventually
she and hundreds of other refugees went up to the north through this mountain pass.
BILL BENSON:
How did the SS attack Banska Bystrica?
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Banska Bystrica is on the foot of the mountains. The Waffen SS was a mobile brigade. They had personal carriers, armored personal carriers and they attacked the way the Germans attacked in Blitzkrieg. They just moved with their tanks and carriers and destroyed everything on the way. They couldn’t do it in the mountains. They were constrained to the mountain passages, so it was more difficult. But until Banska Bystrica they had it made because it is a plain and very easy to move around. On the plain it was still September-October and so it was already snowing, but it was not soaked and the roads were passable. They moved so very quickly that the roads were not destroyed.
BILL BENSON:
Thus you had very little time to flee and get out of there.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
We had very little time to flee.
BILL BENSON:
Tell us about your flight from Banska Bystrica.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
We left with everybody else. Huge convoy of horses and cars and people and every means of transportation, hand-carried, little carts and so on. And we moved to the mountain. The mountains have very few passages. You cannot go through the mountain except through the passages. The mountains are steep. The mountains are heavily forested. There’s just no way to go. So everybody went through this little passage. And Stare Hory is a village in the opening of the passage and we were caught there. And the Germans just mowed everybody. Machine guns.
BILL BENSON:
Using Stuka dive-bombers?
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Yeah. They had a standard procedure which was then copied by many other armies. They would see a convoy. They would bomb the head of the convoy and the tail catching everybody in an unpassable way and people started to disperse. People started to disperse through the mountains, but the Stuka divers usually first threw bombs and then strafed everybody. The Germans had a very ingenious thing to using the Stuka. They mounted between the wheels, they mounted a siren. And as the Stuka was going down there’s this huge shrieking noise of the sirens. Psychologically unbelievable, I can hear it now. And that was a couple of years ago. And it terrified everybody. And they strafed. And when they ran out of ammunition – there were many, many dead including my mother and sister. I was shot and wounded by two bullets. And that was the end of the pleasant journey through the mountains for me. I would say, kind of rather abrupt end.
Henry, the partisan, found me standing next to my mother and sister, crying. I didn’t know I was wounded. When you are wounded, there is a flesh wound. You don’t feel it until later. And I was also in shock. My sister was lying on her face, but my mother was lying on her back. And her eyes were open and I didn’t know why she’s not standing up. Eyes were open.
So he took me from there, told me that she would come later. She didn’t.
BILL BENSON:
And this was Henry Herzog, the partisan?
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Henry Herzog the partisan. He took me to the mountains. That night they came back from the mountains and buried everybody. And took whatever equipment and everything they could take. They buried everybody and marked the graves. That’s the reason after the war, we were able to exhume the body of my mother and sister and bury them. Long story for that as well, but not for this occasion. For another time.
After a while, all this time he didn’t know that I was wounded. How I survived the wound is another story again. We cannot . . .
BILL BENSON:
Do tell us a little bit about that. About the kind of the, almost a pressure band-aid that
was . . .
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Well what happened is the following. In Europe at the time, long pants were a sign of maturity. Little boys didn’t wear long pants. They wore short pants. But it’s cold, very cold in Europe, Central Europe. So boys, girls, doesn’t matter, until a certain age, wore very thick wool stockings held up by garters. There were no tights at the time. And I had garters and these huge wool stockings on this leg. On both legs, but especially this one.
My granddaughter wears, when she was young, different socks on two legs saying it’s more interesting. But I wore the same socks all the time. So what happened is when I was wounded, it was machine gun wound. So first, the type of machine guns used in Stuka, the high-speed machine guns, create very high-speed, very hot bullets. Nothing from the ground so they were sterile in a sense. They didn’t hit a bone, they didn’t sever any major artery. It didn’t sever any major nerve. It was a flesh wound. Two flesh wounds, two bullets. And what happened is the blood rushed out and saturated the wool stocking, very thick wool stocking, saturated it. It was cold, it was very cold outside. So the blood coagulated. The blood coagulated and created a bandage, a pressure bandage, which stopped the bleeding. And the reason I didn’t bleed to death. I survived. But obviously nobody tried to clean up. Everybody was full of blood and dirt. Excuse me.
The partisans, Henry, never realized I was wounded. But he realized that a child cannot survive in the mountains. The partisans were moving all the time, they were a fighting unit. Being saddled with a seven year old child is not something a fighting unit want to do so they brought me to this village.
At night. And they selected the first house. They didn’t dare to go into the village. They surveyed the village for a long time, there was no movement. The village was so small, that there was no German garrison there. It’s a dirt road with some houses on the side. The word village is exaggerated; it’s a mini hamlet rather than a village. There were no Germans there. They knocked on the first house and this was the house of Paulina and Jozef Strycharszyk. And they placed me there.
BILL BENSON:
So it wasn’t like a safe house that they knew? It was just the first house they got to and said, “Take this boy.”
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Yes. And there are two versions of it, in a sense. Henry, in his memoirs, which I used, which I was instrumental in publishing, I did all the computer work and set up to publish and so on, wrote that he came there. And these partisans were reasonably fearsome-looking, you know. They were not shaven really. They had all these grenades hanging on them. They have sub-machine guns taken from the Germans. And told them to keep this child safe, and if not, they will come next night and kill all of you. Which is kind of a persuasive argument I would say. That is his story.
My father’s story was that they were promised, a nice reward. Everybody knew that the war is over and it’s just a matter of time. And they were told that I’m a son of a very important man and that if I survived they would be rewarded. I don’t know. I assume that both stories are correct. There was a carrot and stick approach by the partisans.
I have to say that while I was there, everything they did was not a product of fear. I felt wanted. I felt, within certain limits, while I was in the house, safe. I never left more than fifty meters perimeter from the house. So all my stay there I never left the vicinity of the house. So I wouldn’t say that I was very assured about my safety. But . . .
BILL BENSON:
And you were there for quite awhile?
GIDEON FRIEDER:
I was there from October ’44 till April ’45. I never left the vicinity of the house. Except once, when in December we walked to the real village next to it. I would asses it’s about five kilometers, three and a half miles, three miles, three and a half miles. We walked there for the midnight mass in Christmas, in December, through the snow. But I don’t remember any other time that I left the vicinity of the house.
BILL BENSON:
And speaking of going to the mass, the family gave you an identity.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Oh, yes. Obviously when I came. One of the reasons I believe they did everything . . . let me step back. That village of possibly fifty houses, if that much, maybe twenty-five, saved ten families of Jews.
BILL BENSON:
Wow. In that one village?
GIDEON FRIEDER:
That one little village of extremely religious Catholics, in the hut I was in, in this house. By the way, the picture of the house is a modern picture. At the time there was not the concrete side of the house was not there. And there were no real glass windows beautifully painted white. This is a new picture.
Every wall in these two big rooms which the house consisted of, had a large picture of the heart of Jesus. These were very deeply believing Catholics. They saved many people. So when I came there, it was very obvious that if I were called Gideon Frieder, my chances of survival are rather minimal. So they gave me a Slovak name, a very Slovak-sounding name. I was called Jan Suchý. Jan is the Slavic version of John.
BILL BENSON:
So Jan, okay.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
And the endearment is Janko, so they called me Janko. Suchý is a very typical, Slovak-sounding name. It’s very funny in a sense because suchý means in Slovak “dry.” And when I was brought there I was anything but dry. I was dripping wet. I was a mess.
And they taught me . . . first of all they established another identity. I was the son of the brother of the woman. And the brother of the woman, look how clever – these were totally uneducated people. They were so intelligent. You do know that intelligence and education are two different things. They were so intelligent; they understood what has to be done. They understood they have to establish an identity for me, which will be impeccable. My pedigree should be impeccable. So my pedigree was: I was the son of the brother of the woman, and the brother was killed by the partisans. So for the Germans I was really somebody of value. I mean, obviously I don’t like the partisans; my father was killed by them.
And they taught me. They taught me a sentence. They said if somebody will ask you this, you tell them that. And for the life of me I couldn’t understand what they taught me. I couldn’t care less. I memorized it and I used it.
BILL BENSON:
Because German patrols would come through . . .
GIDEON FRIEDER:
There were German patrols, there were Slovak fascist patrols, there were Ukrainians. The Ukrainians were murderers. These, they were the worst. They would come during the day. They would come and steal the food during the day and the partisans would come and steal the food during the night. It was really a very nice, a very nice life there. And the poor peasants have to live between the scourge of the Germans, and maybe the Ukrainians and the Slovak fascists during the day. They would come and they would pick on children. And ask him to say that and if he said it fine, if not they would shoot him. Everybody knew it, including me. It was a sentence in Slovak, but the words were slurred into each other.
BILL BENSON:
This is what they taught you to say?
GIDEON FRIEDER:
What they taught me to say. I could not parse the sentence. Indeed at the time I didn’t even know what the word parse means obviously. It was just a blur. Later I discovered what the sentence means. But that’s another story.
BILL BENSON:
You have to say it now. You can’t do that.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
I have to tell you? Does he really mean it? Who am I to say no to such a nice audience? I owe it to you. You applaused when I came, right.
I discovered it only later on. What they taught me was the Lord’s Prayer. Sorry. Obviously, no Jewish boy will know the Lord’s Prayer. But you have to go back to the 1940s. These were Catholics. The Catholic Church used the Latin mass. All the liturgy was in Latin, with three exceptions, which were always in the language of the country. And one of the exceptions was the Lord’s Prayer. But these were not essentially university graduates; they were not even graduates of a primary school. They were taught this by their parents, which were taught by their parents over generations. The words in Slovak will be: otec náš ktorý si na nebesiach; “Our Father in heaven . . . .” This [is] called Otčenáš; “Our Father.” All the words were slurred to each other. But this is the way the Slovaks knew it anyway right? It doesn’t matter that you slurred it on because on the kids would slur it on. They didn’t understand the Latin mass, they didn’t understand what they are saying here either until they became older and they could parse the sentence. So this established my identity as a good Catholic boy by the name of Jan Suchý.I have blue eyes, they are still blue. I had, now it’s white again, I mean, I had fair hair, now it’s fair again, but for a different reason. I have a straight nose. I don’t look Jewish, whatever that means.
So I passed. But think about the intelligence of these people. The understanding they have. What it takes to survive. I was possibly the first Jew they had seen in their life, but they understood what’s important to survive, how children survive, and they did everything to survive. I’ve many proofs, which happened many years later, that what they did they didn’t do because they were threatened. But that is really for another time.
BILL BENSON:
Gideon, we are almost at the end of the program. Would you tell us, before we go, tell us how you were liberated and the reunification with your father? If you wouldn’t mind, just a word about that fact that you were able to have a connection with that family later.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
Okay. By the way, I can stay after the lecture.
BILL BENSON:
Yes, in fact, if any of you want to chat and meet Gideon or ask him some questions, because we won’t have questions and answers now, he will be available after the program.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
My next commitment is at 7:30 in the evening. There’s really no problem.
When Henry Herzog, the partisan, put me in this village of Bully, he spread the word. Every Jew he met, every partisan he met, every resistance person he met, Jewish or not, but many Jewish, he spread the word that the wife of Rabbi Frieder and his daughter were killed and his son was saved and he’s in the village of Bully with this particular family.
The rumor came to my father even before the war. He was caught, not recognized, and put in jail. And in jail another Jew told him, not knowing who he is, “You heard what happened to the family of Rabbi Frieder?” So he knew about it even before the liberation.
BILL BENSON:
That’s how he learned about what happened to your mother?
GIDEON FRIEDER:
How he learned what happened to my mother, were is she, and what happened to me.
After the war he was able to flee from the prison. He found refuge in a Franciscan monastery. The Franciscans knew him. The war was essentially over. They gave him shelter because they knew the war is over. And he was able to send emissaries to find me and to take me back.
I was reasonably traumatized when I was taken back. Indeed, this is a diversion maybe but, I use it today heavily when a student comes to me with this despair, saying I’m in this trouble and that trouble. I cannot continue and life is terrible and what should I do. So I told him “What would you think would happen with a seven and a half year old child who has lice in his head, is undernourished, has one torn shirt, and one pair of pants without underwear. What will happen with him? Can he make it?” Yes he can. It’s amazing what people can do.
Essentially, I was taken back. My father see to it that I am debriefed, that I tell that story immediately. That’s how the whole story was preserved in the diaries of my father. So that was April 1945. In December 1945 he told me, “You have to write something to the people who saved you.” So, on a torn piece of paper out of a writing block I wrote to the uncle and aunt. I wished them Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. And I signed Gidko, which is the endearment name from Gideon in the Slavic languages.
My father died the year after that, complications from the war. And before he died, he swore my stepmother – he married immediately after the war because he needed somebody to take care of me. The woman he married also lost her husband. After the Second World War there was a flood of marriages. People clung to life. Before he died, he swore my mother to take me away from the bloody continent and bring me to Palestine, which she did.
So in 1947, I came to a place which three months later had a war. Coming from one war to another was an interesting experience for a little child. I grew up and sometime between being a traumatized child – I woke up every night crying until I was sixteen. For six years after I came there I was crying every night. Eventually something happened on the way to sixteen and I stopped crying.
But I had this almost stubborn urge to do everything so it would not happen again. So I joined the Israeli Ministry of Defense Research and Development, which at the time was not even known that it exists. And for many years I had this life in an organization that does not exist, doing my best for the preservation of my people. I could not contact the people who saved my life because I was part of the Ministry of Defense and Slovakia was communist. And the communists was on side of our enemies, the Arabs. And for me to contact them, not only that I was not allowed, would endanger them. Because it would create a pressure point on them through me and I didn’t want to do that. By the time the communist regime disintegrated and I was able to go there, they were dead. I met their daughter. But we are out of time. Come next time. I’ll tell you about the daughter.
BILL BENSON:
You gotta say just a bit . . . will you hang in there with us? Yes, I think so.
GIDEON FRIEDER:
I met the daughter.
BILL BENSON:
Who was born right after you left, right?
GIDEON FRIEDER:
She was born – I left in April. She was born in May. And all the time I was there, the image of the woman was as a short, fat woman. She was skinny like this, but for me she was . . . she was pregnant, right. I didn’t know what pregnancy is. And believe me, she was not clad in a Dior garment. She was wearing a sack really, a piece of cloth covering all of her. And for me she looked fat, but she was expecting. The daughter was born in April 1945. I met her. And she told me, “Yes, I know very much about you. My parents always talked about you. They said that if your father would not retrieve you, they would raise you as their child and you would be my brother.”
Now, I am an old, cynical, dot dot dot. You go through hell and come back you become a bit cynical about the goodness of the human heart. Especially when this Holocaust happened by one of the most enlightened nations in the world at that time. But, she told be before they died, they gave me what they considered the . . . It’s interesting I can speak for thousands of people and never lose my voice, but this is kind of difficult, kind of. She said “They gave me what they considered their most important heirloom and told me to preserve it.” That was the letter, that piece of paper that she kept all these years. They died in 1975. I’d seen her in the 90s. She kept that letter all that time and she wanted to give it to me. I told her “No way in heaven am I going to take it.” I made a copy. I have the copy in my house. I should have brought it with me. Next time I will. That’s a proof that they really meant what they said, they would keep me.
In three weeks I’m going to see her. I’m going to record her life story. And once I retire a year from now, I’m going to transcribe it. I’ll interview her in Slovak obviously because she doesn’t speak any other language. I’ll let her speak on camera and then I’ll transcribe it into English and see what I can do with it.
BILL BENSON:
Gideon, I wish we did have till 7:30 because there’s so much more that you could tell us, but I want to thank you for your willingness to do this and thank all of you for sticking with us and listening to Gideon today.
I’d like to remind you that we will have a First Person program each Wednesday till the end of August, as I mentioned earlier, plus Tuesdays through July. So our next First Person program will be next Tuesday, May 19th when our First Person will be Mrs. Charlene Schiff, who is from Poland. Mrs. Schiff, after being forced into a ghetto with her mother, crossed a river next to the ghetto and escaped into the forest as a young teenager. She remained hidden in the forest for the next two years before her liberation.
I’d like to remind you that you can hear excerpts from our First Person programs, including Gideon’s in a few weeks, on the museum’s website, as well as at iTunes.
Museum
