• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Living with the Enemy My Secret Life on the Run from the Nazis by Freddie Knoller Broadcast: Events. A powerful documentary on young Jewish womens experiences during World War II and the Holocaust in different parts of Europe, this film reflects upon the courage of those who attempted to resist against the Nazi persecution. 5.00 pm Panel discussion, followed by a question and answer session. with Dr Shirli Gilbert (University of Southampton), Dr Leshu Torchin (University of St Andrews) and Paul Salmons (University of London) chaired by Professor Christian Wiese (University of Sussex) Organised by the Centre for German-Jewish Studies. Sponsored by the Association of Jewish Refugees. By: Diana Franklin Further information: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cgjs/documents/091216_hmdprogramme.pdf Last updated: Thursday, 17 December 2009. University of Sussex Sussex House, Falmer Brighton, BN1 9RH United Kingdom. Blog at Bardies. Last week I drove almost a hundred miles to see someone special at the Chalke Valley History Festival. His name is Freddie Knoller and he is a spritely ninety-three year old Auschwitz survivor. He was born on 17 April 1921 in Vienna, the youngest of three sons born to Marja and David Knoller. His parents were born in Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary but part of what became Poland after the First World War. The three brothers were musicians, the eldest brother, Otto, a pianist and the middle one, Erich, a violinist. Fredl, Freddie, was a cellist. After the Anschluss and Kristallnacht , David Knoller was determined that his three sons had to leave Nazi controlled Austria, by whatever means. Freddie left for Belgium via Cologne and Aachen at the end of November 1938, entered the country illegally and made his way first to Antwerp, then Eskaarde, near Ghent. When l'exode began, with the German invasion of Belgium on 10 May 1940, Freddie found himself walking to France on roads crammed with refugees. In Lille, he came upon a solid blue cordon of French police. He was taken to a police station, forced to show his penis to prove he was a Jew, and put in a cattle wagon to the internment camp of St Cyprien, near Perpignan. He remains angry with the French for their treatment of foreign Jews fleeing Hitler. Three months later he escaped under the barbed wire and made his way to Gaillac, in the Tarn, deep in Vichy France. There, he purchased false papers and returned to Brussels to rescue his cello and take the bus to Antwerp to find out what had happened to his friends. When he could find neither his cello nor his friends, he decided to head for Occupied Paris where he lived amongst the Paris demi-monde under the false identity of Robert Metzner, born in Metz in Alsace. In July 1943 he was picked up by the Gestapo for procuring girls for German soldiers. He blagged his way out of Gestapo HQ and hightailed it from the Gare d'Austerlitz to the village of Cardaillac, in the Lot, not far from Figeac. Freddie was arrested by the French Milice on a train en route from Figeac to Bergerac on 5 August 1943. He was probably denounced by his angry, jilted ex-girlfriend, Jacqueline, to whom he had confided both his Resistance activities and his false, non-Jewish identity. He was an agent de liaison , a courrier who ran messages from one Resistance cell to another. 'I am not a terrorist!' he shouted under interrogation. 'I am an Austrian Jew from Vienna called Alfred Knoller. I am hiding from the Germans and have nothing to do with any Resistance group.' His decision to betray his origins rather than his colleagues resulted in him being taken to Gestapo headquarters, put under armed guard and taken by train back to Paris. From there, he was taken by the French Garde Mobile to Drancy, in the quiet suburb of Bobigny, the assembly camp for deportation to the East. On 6 October he was put in a cattle wagon to Auschwitz. There, he was reduced to a mere number, 157103. Aided by his friend Professor Waitz who managed to get him extra food, he avoided the selections. In January 1945, as Russian artillery approached, he survived the death marches in temperatures of -20 degrees. He was liberated at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, weighing just forty-one kilograms. 'Every event in my story leads up to Auschwitz and no subsequent thought or action in my life is untouched by the memory of Auschwitz. The person who stumbled into the cattle truck at Drancy lost once and for all his youthfulness, if not all his naivety.' The man on the stage, charming, amusing, witty and self-deprecating, was a careful observer filled with the will to live. His book, Living With the Enemy: My Secret Life on the Run from the Nazis details his story with no hint of self-pity, just an effusive love of life born of tremendous optimism. With each year that passes, there are fewer survivors like him to tell the story of what happens when a society loses its moral compass. Freddie's story is one of many which concern the role of the French police and SNCF, France's railway provider. As Leo Bretholz, Freddie's friend and fellow raconteur , says, 'Wartime France was the most important and very venal cog in the wheel of Hitler's co-conspirators.' Undoubtedly, France is coming to terms with Vichy's complicity in the deportation of its own Jews. This process has been slow and painful. Where I live in Ariege, many local people are still unaware of the existence of the Le Vernet camp, the Drancy of the south , as well as the many other camps. Perhaps they do not wish to remember. Many deportees were not Jewish and they struggled to be remembered too. One of them was Charlotte Delbo, in whose memory a conference which I attended was held at the Institut Francais on 18 March, the centenary of her birth. Charlotte's story, and that of the 229 other women of Le Convoi des 31000 , is told by Caroline Moorehead in her book, A Train in Winter . I drove back to the Chalke Valley History Festival two days later to hear Caroline recount their tale, as well as the story of the villages around Chambon-sur- Lignon in the Auvergne which hid thousands of Jews. That story, however, is another blog. "A SIGHT THAT CHILLED OUR BLOOD" In March 1938, Germany occupied Austria in an event known as the Anschluss (‘union’) after the Austrian government had called a plebiscite (referendum) on whether Austria should stay an independent country. The occupation was followed by immediate attacks on Austrian Jews, especially, as shown in the photograph, in Vienna. Many ordinary Austrians actively participated in these attacks. Freddie Knoller was a Jewish teenager at the time. We decided to stock up on food, not knowing what the next few days would bring. I went with Mother to the shops. I think she wanted me, the youngest, at her side. On the staircase we encountered Herr Hagmann, now wearing a Nazi armband. This decent man greeted us with a guilty expression and a sheepish “Good morning”… Out in the streets my mother and I saw swastika flags hanging from the windows of almost every home. Brown-shirted Nazis of the Sturmabteilung , or SA, roamed the streets. We saw them stopping conspicuously Jewish-looking men and forcing them to clean away the plebiscite slogans. Further along the street was a sight that chilled our blood. SA men continuously kicked an old bearded Jew in the backside as he tried to scrape a slogan from the pavement. All around gentile Austrians, some of them women with infants, laughed uproariously. Severely shaken, we returned home as quickly as possible. Freddie later fled to Belgium and then France, from where he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Freddie survived the camp, but his parents, who were transported to Auschwitz from Vienna, did not. Photo: Hitler Youth forcing Jews to scrub a street, Vienna, March 1938; Yad Vashem. Testimony: Freddie Knoller, Living with the Enemy: My Secret Life on the Run from the Nazis (Metro Publishing, 2005) Living with the Enemy: My Secret Life on the Run from the Nazis by Freddie Knoller. This collection contains the personal papers of Freddie Knoller, an Auschwitz concentration camp survivor from Vienna. His parents, David and Marja Knoller, insisted that he and his two brothers, Erich and Otto, emigrated to avoid increasing anti-Semitism and Nazi persecutions after the annexation of Austria. Freddie's parents were murdered at Auschwitz concentration camp whilst his two brothers survived in England and the United States respectively. Included are letters (with translations) from Freddie Knoller's parents, mainly addressed to his brother Erich, giving an insight into their fear for their future and worries about their children. Also included are some photocopies of papers regarding David Knoller's employment and assets, the emigration of the children and the deportation of David and Marja Knoller; papers, correspondence and press cuttings relating to research and arrangements for the publication of Freddie Knoller's autobiography 'Desperate journey'; arrangements for his talks and lectures; details of forced labour during the Nazi regime as well as his application for compensation to the Claims Conference Programme for Former Slave and Forced Labourers and other litigation claims. In addition, there are letters from readers of Freddie Knoller's memoirs and from school children attending his talks. Administrative / Biographical History. Freddie Knoller was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna in 1921.

Load more

  4

Copy Link