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P.II.e.(C.S.R.) No. 1068
Prague, 5. XII. 1945
Statement
recorded with Frau Dr. Cäcilie Friedmann, b. 2.IV.1914, former prisoner in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, Zwodau concentration camps. Resident Prague I., Kralodvorska 15, Czech nationality. Doctor.
In a book dealing with the parts of China occupied by the Japanese, one section indicates the different motives which caused people under Fascist terror regimes to persist in their positions of leadership, or only then to place themselves at the head. The majority were cowardly opportunists, willing enforcers for their oppressors, whereas the few and best of them did their utmost to salvage what could still be rescued, in order not to deliver their people entirely into the hands of the foreign and their own oppressors.
I have had the good fortune to know three of these exceptions. Foremost among them is Chief Rabbi Dr. Leo Baeck, then Jakob Edelstein and Richard Friedmann.
What these men have in common above all is that they remained in post voluntarily - despite the fact that their loved ones and everything that mattered in their personal lives were already beyond the German border, or had opportunities to leave - initially out of solidarity with the community and later from conviction that they could help their people in need, even if to a limited extent, thanks to their personal engagement and their skills.
It is known that Dr. Leo Baeck would have been able to go to England immediately after Hitler assumed power. He accepted the invitation for his children, but he himself remained in post, where he intended to stay for as long as there were Jews living in Germany.
When the Germans occupied Prague Jakob Edelstein was in possession of documents which would have allowed him and his family to emigrate to Palestine. He too considered that to leave at that moment would have been desertion.
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I knew Richard Friedmann from 1.IX.1939 until his death in Auschwitz on 22.V.1944. I intend to write in detail about his life. Jakob Edelstein, his friend and comrade through thick and thin in these five years, wrote to Richard Friedmann on a significant occasion in his life: “You were the most courageous and the strongest of all of us. The strength and daring you brought us I supplemented with runic reflection.”
I believe that too, and so do all the friends who were close to his life and work. For the world at large was to see only the smallest part of this work and life in those times.
Brief biography
Richard Friedmann is the grandson of the Jewish scholar Meir Friedmann, famous as Meir Ischalom, whose family comes from Kaschau [Košice]. Richard Friedmann’s father suffered from meningitis as a child and was an invalid throughout his life. He was appointed a civil servant to the Jewish religious community in Vienna, and in his spare time also concerned himself with academic and primarily with social matters. His mother, Elsa Engel, comes from an old Viennese Jewish family. She was the sister of Emil Engel, later director of the Jewish community in Vienna, in whose house Richard Friedmann, orphaned young, subsequently found a home. Richard Friedmann lost his father when he was 11, and at the age of 16 he also lost his mother.
Although he was unusually gifted, he decided to abandon his Mittelschulstudium [secondary school studies] and to attend a Handelsschule [commercial college], in order to be able to provide independently for himself and his sister, five years younger, as quickly as possible. After completing his commercial studies he worked in several private businesses as an official, and then at the age of 21 was also appointed as a tenured civil servant in the Jewish community in Vienna. Here in accordance with the regulations of the religious community he worked in the most diverse departments, social medicine etc.
In his free time he acquired deep and extensive knowledge, mainly of historical issues
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and economics. Yet there were no areas within the field of human knowledge which were entirely foreign to him, so that his proved to be the most incisive personality in every circle; his versatility was legendary within the circle of his friends and acquaintances, and in the years in which I knew him, between the ages of 31 and 35, he naturally and without question represented an authority for his circle, but because of his naturalness, his warm temperament and his sense of humour, it was never perceived as inimical.
In the tradition of his social position he was a conscientious Jew, proud of his affiliation, and in his youth was a member of Zionist organisations. In accordance with his personal lifestyle he was cosmopolitan, and until 1938 he did not assume any political stance.
On the day that Austria was occupied by the Nazis his whole style of life changed completely. The playful, artistic, widely interested and widely engaged young bon vivant became at a stroke a steely, disciplined, fanatical and deliberate fighter for the cause of Judaism, initially within the Jewish community in Vienna, for which by this time he had been a tenured civil servant for 8 years.
From that day until his death, his life was entirely committed to the service of the struggle. He consciously made his work the central focus of his life; his private life and relationships with those close to him were put last, explicitly and effectively. In all phases of this work Richard Friedmann had a clear idea of what was happening and of the attitude towards each other of the hostile factions. He distinguished several historic phases in his work, and I will describe them as he saw them.
- Work in Vienna. Effective rescue work. Emigration action.
Generally speaking, Richard Friedmann noted two substantial phases in the history of the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany.
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Two campaigns were established by the mob against a minority rendered helpless. One was a campaign of robbery, in which alongside the political goal pursued in each phase of deflecting and dumbing down their own people, the Nazis displayed an interest above all in the material and intellectual assets of the Jews. This was in the period from 1933 until roughly the start of the war. During this time, despite all the brutality and occasional murder, Jews were still being released from the concentration camps, if they left behind everything in which the Nazis delighted. Even at the beginning of the war, and especially after 1941 when there were no more easy victories on the fields of slaughter beyond the borders, all the evil instincts of the cornered beasts were unleashed on their only defenceless enemy, the Jews. Then the campaign of the great murder started; it is the time of mass transports to the East, the time of Maidanek, Treblinka and Auschwitz. Until the time of the mass transports Friedmann likewise distinguished two different phases of work and struggle. In the years to the start of the war the aim was effectively to rescue human life through emigration to countries beyond the realm of fascist dominance. After 1.IX.1939, when opportunities to emigrate were limited to the greatest extent, the achievable aim he conceived was CONSERVATION of each individual, i.e. retention of physical existence under the best possible conditions until the elimination of Fascism.
The years of work in Vienna in 1938/39 thus represented the first and second phases.
It is generally known that within a single year 120,000 Jews were able to emigrate to freedom, and that in terms of numbers the greatest relief action to enable the rescue of European Jews was accomplished in Vienna. It is difficult to ascertain the extent to which Richard Friedmann was involved in the planning of this action. He was 27 years old at the time and was not one of the leading officials in the Jewish community. The Viennese Jewish community as a long-standing large institution was bound to have people of political calibre realistically attuned to the prevailing situation.
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But the scale of the whole project was so very much in keeping with the character of Richard Friedmann that he must have been one of the initiators of its planning, and it is an incontrovertible fact that its practical execution to this extent and at this speed, indeed in its whole shape, would be unthinkable wihout him. A vast organisational, technical and political achievement was carried out in that year.
It is well known that the actions against Jews in Vienna began with exceptional violence and brutality immedately after the occupation. In the initial days homes were plundered, the Jewish occupants tortured, violated and driven out onto the street. It caused extreme panic and confusion, and in the midst of this the leading men of the Jewish community were also imprisoned, the community institutions blocked and their funds confiscated. The leaders succeeded in saving some of these from the Nazis, and Richard Friedmann was given this first illegal money by Emil Engel before he was arrested, as his first illicit fund.
From these monies the first emergency kitchens on various streets and squares in Vienna were established in the earliest nights, where some of the helpless people hounded from their homes could find their first meal. Under cover of darkness someone brought a cauldron, another a sack of potatoes, all of which vanished again under cover of darkness. Yet this desolate time lasted for only a few days. It appears to be well-led ‘management’ which the Nazis deployed to make the Jews vividly aware of their situation. The Jewish community leaders were released from prison again, most of those driven out returned to their homes, and the watchword ‘Emigration’ arose officially.
The Jews had indeed learned their lesson. They recognised that to base a battle on political or legal negotiations with these thugs from well outside human society was senseless, and that to clear the battlefield at a given moment was the only possibility. The
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whole organisation of the Jewish community was instantly put to serve this work and the community assumed execution of the action.
Above all the bureaucratic process for emigration was made simpler through the people no longer having to get to 8-10 different offices in the most diverse parts of the city - which at the start took weeks or even months! - as everything was centralised in the so-called ‘Auswanderungsamt’ [emigration office]. There one official from each authority sat, taking on preparation of the appropriate documents. With one single visit one was able to receive a tax certificate, political report, statement of assets etc. But not until then did separate authorities start to issue documents, carried out no longer by their own officials but by those of the Jewish community.
One had to know Richard Friedmann, his physical strength, his fanatical zeal for work, his resilience and his speed, in order not to consider the description of what was achieved in Vienna as an exaggeration. I myself and all our friends from Prague did not until later in Theresienstadt hear from the stories told by the Viennese living there (Desider Friedmann, Stricker, among others) of the scale of Richard Friedmann’s commitment and performance at the time. Fortunately there are probably many tens of thousands living of those who got abroad then, and they will doubtless remember the office in Prinz Eugenstraße. For months there were queues of people miles long standing there from 4am, generally until midnight, and at all hours during those many months Richard Friedmann was at his place, or his team of colleagues, whom he trained to be as fanatical and zealous in their work as he was, and to whom he was tied by a type of very profound comradeship-in-arms. Whenever he was not at the emigration office, he was making inexhaustible visits to the most diverse authorities, of the Gestapo as well as the civil administration of Vienna. Or he was negotiating with foreign authorities to have a visa issued, or to make technical arrangements for travel etc. Anyone who today has to repatriate several hundred or thousand people to their homeland and has weeks
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or months to do it, will calculate what system was required to transfer 120,000 people dependent on Nazi authorities out of the country in an orderly way.
Practically every single case demanded a battle and negotiations with the Gestapo and the civilian authorities; required obfuscation, the forging of documents; required interventions and pleas, for the Nazi system consisted principally in making every situation more difficult and in not simplifying anything. But the Jews of Vienna, notwithstanding all the chicanery, did not leave the country naked and in poverty; most could at least save some of their possessions and take them to their new homeland. Some, about which the Gestapo never knew, ended up in the illegal funds of the Jewish community, from which the costs of emigrating were met for those who themselves had no means. The action was carried out in a most generous way as collectively as possible, independently of an individual’s affluence. Those who emigrated were those with sufficient initiative and who urged themselves to undertake it. This was true especially, and this is the most positive part of what the Viennese community achieved, of all those - and after the Grünspan affair there were thousands! - who were imprisoned. As already mentioned, after interventions and dealings with the Gestapo, imprisoned Jews could be got out of the concentration camps on production of a foreign visa and the associated ticket for a passage by sea or air.The visas acquired by the thousand for the most diverse countries on Earth (like Shanghai, Chile, the Fijian archipelago etc) were issued automatically in the name of a person whose relatives had reported the arrest. Whole ships were bought up entirely for weeks and months by the Jewish community to transport emigrants, and there were airlines likewise booked for weeks and months by the community and unavailable to any other civilians.
And then the Viennese children! Friedmann said later that one of the hardest times of his life had been insisting - seeming tough and brutal - that mothers put their children, from babes in arms to 20 year-old youths, on a Kindertransport to England.
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Many tears were shed, accompanying these few rescued European children on their journey to life. He himself travelled with almost every Kindertransport as far as London. In the collection of his warm and amusing tales and anecdotes from this time of positive achievement some of the best were the stories of the little children who were carried in Moses baskets, and of the adolescent boys and girls, who revelled in the collectivity of the journey and the romance of the enterprise, and among whom he had hundreds of young beloved friends. Occasionally he smuggled several hundred more, beyond those on the official list. Several times he was arrested on the Dutch border for a few hours or days, but that was nothing unusual; detention and peril to one’s life were part and parcel of dealing with the so-called “higher authority”. He himself could later no longer recall how often he had been imprisoned for hours or days in Vienna: it was around 20 times. Negotiations were certainly not always carried out in a civil or friendly manner; but more of that elsewhere.
Yet apart from these legal emigrants - including those from the concentration camps - who were able to leave Austria officially via the emigration office - there were also people and groups who had to disappear without the Gestapo learning anything of their existence. They had to cross the border illegally, and managing these emigrations was also assumed by the official in charge of the “Amt für jüdische Auswanderung unter Leitung der Gestapo” [Office for Jewish emigration under Gestapo leadership], Richard Israel Friedmann, the name by which he was known at the time. He himself crossed the border illegally several times, for it was one of his principles never to negotiate only from behind a desk. As well as planning and organising such actions, he always played a practical part in their execution. Young men and older ones from his Vienna ‘Garde’, as we said later in Theresienstadt, described Richard Friedmann from that time: Richard was our leader, and we obeyed him without question, for we were convinced that he always himself first did what he demanded of us.
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Psychological situation
Here I would like to raise a fundamental question. To the wider public who did not have an insight into the work of Jewish representatives at that time, and to an even greater extent to certain groups abroad who have no direct experience of life under Fascist terror, it must seem problematic and curious that a Jew, de facto with neither rights nor power, even at the highest echelons, had successes in negotiations with the Gestapo. One is justified in asking at what price the Gestapo made concessions? They of course had power of life and death over Jewish individuals, so why did they let themselves be lied to and deceived for months and sometimes years?
For those of us who saw this work close to, from ‘behind the scenes’ as it were, who experienced Nazi rule in concentration camps, the matter is less puzzling.
One essential fact must be established above all. Most of the Nazi thugs, almost all of the SS gentlemen of the rank of Unter-, Ober-Sturmführer etc. were stolid, stupid, uneducated, incompetent creatures. The only comptence required of them was cruelty and brutality and sufficient political stupidity to believe to the last moment in the victory of the criminals whose stooges they were. These stolid incompetent fellows now had to carry out the so-called ‘Lösung der Judenfrage’ [‘final solution’], that is, they had a concrete plan to execute, however pointless it was ideologically. In the first phase, then, it was the so-called emigration action. Later the regulation of Jewish life - as Jews fell increasingly outside the framework of normal life because of all the legislation - created a kind of state within a state.
So this emigration action, or later the regulation of Jewish life, had to be carried out somehow. And since the creatures of the Gestapo were themselves incompetent and since they, especially later, did not have the numbers to do everything themselves, they had to leave much of the execution to the Jews. So to a certain degree they needed the superior subhuman, and if he was intelligent enough to see the
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incompetence and weakness of the Nazis which lay behind their official position of strength, then he had won psychological power over them. And now the fundamental thing: it depended entirely upon the character of the individual whether he exploited this machine to his own advantage or to that of the community. Unfortunately in most cases the former was the norm. And so much had the ordinary people grown used to presuming that a leader of their repressed community must be a weakling or a traitor, that the few truly strong and combative natures were easily perceived from the same viewpoint. As for example in the field of many of the humanities, so often compromised by false prophets or charlatans, it is the person really seeking truth who has to fight through a forest of prejudices (e.g. also in the field of parapsychology).
We experienced the same thing daily in the prisons and concentration camps. The people in positions of leadership in the self-administration were always those with particular organisational or, for example, medical skills. E.g. it was the Kapos, the block and camp eldests, who often exploited their position of power in a notoriously shameful way to their personal advantage or that of their closest clique. On the other hand political prisoners generally owe their lives to the splendid illegal organisation which had people of particular talent and moral strength at its head, who committed themselves entirely to saving their friends and comrades.
The problem of the representative of an oppressed people under fascist dominance was presented wonderfully by John Steinbeck in his novel ‘The Moon is Down’. He portrays the occupation of Norway and describes how the old mayor of the town, who openly opposes their system and causes them the greatest difficulties in carrying out their plans, is forced by the Nazis to stay in office, even at the cost of considerable concessions. They need him because he understands the way things work, because he has popular support and enjoys the trust of his fellow-citizens. For that was another diabolical factor in Nazi practice,
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that they aimed to exploit the popularity even of their enemy, albeit at a time when they were to some extent concerned about public opinion. But in the final bloody years they dropped all masks; now they really did need only executive organs. The aforementioned Norwegian mayor, whose house is at the centre of the illegal resistance movement, has to stay in office, despite repeated pleas to resign, and in the final part of the novel he is shot. I was deeply moved by the book, for it portrays the same life as we experienced at close quarters, about which I am writing here.
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Prague
When the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia on 15th March 1939, the situation differed greatly from that in Vienna. There most of the Jews had integrated fully into the life of the whole Czech people, and had no connection to a central Jewish administrative system. The Jewish community administration in Prague was a small quite unfamiliar set-up and a large part of the Jewish population turned to it for the first time in their lives during the Occupation. Accordingly the officials there also had modest little livelihoods, and had taken on a role in the community more from a wish to have a tranquil life - as many later said! - than from a desire to be politically active. The official representative of the Jews of Prague at the time and head of the Jewish community (Dr. Emil Kafka, see p19, has by chance the same name) was at the time of the Occupation living abroad, and understandably did not return to Prague. His First Secretary, Dr. Franz Weidmann, and his colleagues thus automatically became leaders of the Jewish community. (Zionist Organisation and Office for Palestine: Dr. Franz Friedmann and Jakob Edelstein).
Dr. Weidmann was a good Jew, an honest, upright, conscientious official, not very strong-minded,
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easily influenced, nervous rather than courageous, self-aware and not at all capable of managing the enormous pressure which the altered situation now put him under. Cluelessness and chaos dominated the Jewish community, which was now put under a special branch of the Gestapo. Establishment of an office for emigration was also demanded here, but its execution and organisation did not take place. In order to learn from their fellow-sufferers in Vienna, officials travelled there from Prague. But even after their return the situation in Prague barely changed.
To set things in motion, Richard Friedmann was then sent to Prague for a few days in August 1939 as a ‘consultant’ on emigration matters. It would be beyond the scope of this paper to provide a thorough analysis of the mentality of the Czech Jews here. Surely it was because the Jews in Prague, in contrast to Vienna, sensed the solidarity of the indigenous population, for almost the whole Czech people obviously saw in the German occupiers a common enemy; perhaps it was also that German Fascism flaunted itself less dramatically in Prague in the first days and weeks than in Germany and Vienna; probably the mentality of the Czech Jews also differed generally from that of the Viennese - most had been living there for generations and had become strongly middle-class, whereas the Viennese Jews had come from the East barely a generation earlier, and still had a clear memory of the time of persecution - in any case it emerged that in the first days of his stay in Prague Richard Friedmann found himself in an entirely alien and uncomprehending world. It seemed that two worlds stood in opposition to each other.
In the spirit of the Viennese experience and the Viennese programme, intensified by the restless times and the proximity of the war - it was August 1939! - Friedmann threw himself straight away into carrying out an emigration action, in order to get the greatest possible number of people abroad in the shortest possible time. The response from
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so-called Jewish public opinion and accordingly also their representatives in Prague was enormous apathy, and enormous indignation. Most said openly that they were convinced that the Germans would not act as forcefully in Czechoslovakia, that war was imminent and it would only be a matter of ‘weeks’ before the Nazis were destroyed. Confronted with such an attitude of mind Friedmann was fundamentally despairing and at a loss. With brutal frankness he explained that he believed their arguments to be baseless, that any normal person had to be clear about the dimensions of the coming war, and could not be in any doubt about the force of the German war machine; he himself expected the conflict to last years. Indeed he said that he believed it could be seven years. He also tried to explain to the people what Fascism was capable of, especially - and that he saw clearly in advance - “if things go badly for it at the end”, of which he of course was convinced from the first moment. For the present his imagination did not yet stretch as far as gas chambers and Treblinka.
Innumerable people in possession of the means to emigrate sought his advice on whether it still meant that they should leave. To such people he said, and I quote him closely:
“For me there is only one position to take: get out at any cost. You are clinging on to your belongings, to your home, to your livelihood, and at the end of this war you will be lucky to have kept your life. Now you will probably have been able to start a new life outside”.
It is understandable that truths like this, which show people that the alternative is to give up their peace and comfort, did not have a pleasant reception. They reacted with defensiveness and mistrust, and were ultimately inclined to accuse their proclaimer of lies and ill-will in order to retain their lack of concern. (This sad show of passivity was repeated, as it happens, until the final phase; in the end very few believed in the gas chambers and similar horrors, when all the signs were already pointing to them. They deceived themselves in order to keep the terrible
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truths at a distance).
I met Friedmann at this time and must give some personal impressions, which may shine some light on the situation. At our first meeting I got into a most heated argument with him. He was telling me about the horrors in Vienna and of the work the Jews were doing there. His whole being exuded fanatical hatred and disdain for the German people as a whole, more intensively than I had ever experienced, and moreover with - as it appeared to me then - a downright morbid Jewish self-awareness and arrogance which I had likewise never before encountered.
My attitude at the time (September 1939) meant that I was furious about the condemnation of an entire people like the Germans and I clung firmly to the theory of the ‘criminal clique’, and in Friedmann I saw a wild, chauvinistic Jewish nationalist. In us too two different worlds were standing opposite each other. He had experienced German Fascism in so concentrated a form that he knew after one year what we took 6 to learn. Whenever I spoke to him of ‘individual criminals’, he said that these were the same people with whom he had played, with whom he had gone to school, and who were now sitting cosily in the Prater shooting at cars in which arrested Jews were being transported to the prisons. There were endless debates in which I attempted to counter his so-called ‘wild’ chauvinism. Once he said: “ It may be that an approach like mine would be exaggerated in normal times. But I need my self-assurance, I need it in my struggle against the pressure from this gang of criminals”.
How grotesque it appeared to me and our few friends when human short-sighted presumption claimed that “he was driving people to emigrate like the Nazis”. Furious, we told him about it, and ourselves not quite convinced by the pessimism he felt in the Jewish question, we advised him to let everyone live as they wished. The way in which he reacted to the calumnies and the whole situation
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was one of the war strongest impressions we had of the man.
“Perhaps in the end the people are right if they do not want to emigrate, perhaps I have long ceased to be objective and have suffered a Viennese ‘shock’. Yet I can and will say only what I am convinced of. And if they do not like it, I partly understand,and I do not care. I cannot please everyone at this time. For me there has long been only one higher authority and that is my own conscience. Moreover I desire nothing more than that the Prague Jews may be proved right and that their children and their children’s children will be able to tell how I ruined their lives”, he often added with a laugh.
Awareness of strength and absolute devotion to duty was so powerful in him that he really was immune to all human attacks and every pettiness.
Camp Nisko on the San.
Unfortunately these discussions held any practical significance for only a short time. On 1st September 1939 war broke out and the opportunities to emigrate were now reduced to a minimum. Friedmann tried of course to extract all the passports which did not have an English visa (e.g. to Italy or other neutral countries for which a visa was not required) from the Gestapo. This stubborn battle too, which lasted for days, was only partly successful. The passports were marked with a ‘J’ as Jewish passports, with which one could no longer enter Italy. In those days and nights queues of people stood outside his office in Prague as they had earlier in Vienna. Yet only very few got out. He never gave up his efforts to bring people out. He always found some other country which still accepted people sporadically, until almost the whole world was indeed at war and blocked off from one another.
Frau Hanna Steiner, who ran the emigration office in Prague, occasionally characterised Friedmann’s attitude
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thus: “When the whole world is already at war, Richard will calmly refer to the exploration of Mars being undertaken. I believe he will never admit defeat”.
As soon as October 1939 Friedmann’s work in Prague was interrupted by an episode which can be seen as the first sign of the catastrophe to come. Today we know all too well how the Jews were already being tormented and murdered in Poland; yet this news reached central Europe only as a macabre fairytale and was hardly believed. Now in October 1939 for the first time Jews were being transported from Vienna and Czechoslovakia to the East. A so-called labour transport consisting only of men was sent from Mährisch-Ostrau and Richard Friedmann and Jakob Edelstein were sent with it as ‘functionaries’, as it were. It has never become entirely clear what lay behind this action. Friedmann and Edelstein drew the following conclusions from conversations at the time with the notorious SS officer Eichmann, the specialist in Jewish questions: given that regions of Poland between the Bug and San rivers, which had been the site of intense warfare, had been emptied of people, he intended to settle the Jews there as a buffer, as that was just where the border between German territory and the Soviet Union lay. So he sent men fit to work there, in order to erect barracks which would later serve to house the Jewish population to follow.
On the journey to Nisko Friedmann was subjected almost the whole time to brutal physical treatment by the SS officer Dresel. The first days in Nisko were filled with the most severe ordeals. They were living out in the open forest, and in these freezing nights, in snow and mud, the friendship grew between Friedmann und Jakob Edelstein, which, banal as it may sound, lasted until they died at almost the same time.
Within a short time there was a healthy sense of common purpose in the camp. A few barracks were erected , and - through their work with the local farmers - the transport’s doctors were able to find enough food for almost everyone. Richard Friedmann succeeded in persuading an SS officer on guard duty to drive him to the city of Lublin, where
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the nearest larger SS base was situated. There he attempted to persuade the SS officials that the action had been undertaken under false pretences, that the area there had not been depopulated at all, on the contrary, the local population was rebelling against the influx of new people, and felt its own existence threatened as a result of war damage. From files which are said to have gone to Vienna later, and may even still be there today, one is supposed to see clearly that the Gestapo in Lublin had dealings with Berlin, and one may assume that continuation of the action was halted because of these negotiations.
Of the Czech Jews concentrated in Nisko some crossed the border into the Soviet Union, and the rest returned to the ‘Protectorate’. One of the first of these was Jakob Edelstein. At his initiative an official application was submitted to the so-called higher authority, proposing Richard Friedmann as a colleague for the Prague community, indicating that he was needed much more urgently at the time in Prague than Vienna.
Richard Friedmann returned from Nisko in December 1939. From that point he began his regular work with the Jewish community in Prague. The range of work in he was engaged is best presented schematically as follows:
External representation:
There were two Gestapo offices in Prague, dealing separately with the Jewish question. The first was the so-called “Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung” [Central Agency for Jewish Emigration], an office run solely by Jews, including supervision of their civilian lives, a supervisory function which over time interfered in individual lives to the most minute, downright ludicrous extent.
The second office, the familiar notorious Gestapo which filled the people with fear and horror wherever Fascism’s boots had trodden, also had a Jewish section. This department arrested Jews. All other Gestapo departments also dealt with Jewish interests, e.g. the Communist department with sabotage etc.
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1) Central agency for Jewish emigration
As we have already said, an emigration action could effectively no longer be carried out after the outbreak of war. Retention of the name “Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung” was a name for a mendacious and clumsy practice which was a cover for nothing more than common theft of possessions. Lies and cowardly hypocrisy were a common theme in all the Nazi thugs undertook; even their least subtle and most egregious crimes were given a camouflaging gloss of justice. So although emigration was now practically impossible, each day around 50 people were called to what was called ‘Mappenausfüllung’ [preparation of files], and the grotesque scene was played out in that these masses of people submitted their applications to emigrate, and had to fulfil all the formalities, without even being told their destination, let alone receiving a visa. This ridiculous farce was set in motion because in this way the ‘emigrant’ was made to hand over his property and chattels ‘of his own free will’ to the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung. Yet the farce had a further purpose. The work of a horde of SS officers, growing daily fatter in the battle against the ‘enemy within’ and able thus to remove themselves from the battle on the front, had to be justified. Since the whole gang right up to Himmler was dominated by this single interest, they also lied to each other just as grotesquely and without saying anything took each other seriously. Vast quantities of data about the emigrant action going full steam ahead, along with amazing figures and diagrams, travelled weekly and monthly to Berlin, and at regular intervals were rewarded by a wide ribbon emblazoning the heroic chests of Obersturmführer Günther and his colleagues. By these legal means the Zentralstelle first ‘acquired’ the houses, then later through a specific law the furs, the jewellery and finally also the dogs, cats and songbirds (I jest not!) belonging to the Jews. Richard Friedmann - and the same is true for Edelstein and Weidmann, since the three of them formed an absolutely inseparable unit against the Gestapo - of course saw through this whole ridiculous farce, and also never left the ‘gentlemen of the Gestapo’ in any doubt that they saw through it. His attitude was
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that he felt the situation was tolerable, as long as the farce was restricted to the material goods of the people, and their existence was not for that moment in danger. He considered the most important function of the Jewish community leadership to be its effect as a kind of ‘buffer’, i.e. its whole business - and above all its responsibility - towards the Gestapo was intentionally and consciously concentrated in the hands of the leaders. All tasks were received by the leaders directly and in person from the Gestapo’s agencies; carrying them out was of course done collectively by the enormously increased apparatus of the Jewish community, but the leadership was again solely responsible for the outcome.
Richard Friedmann adhered strictly to the principle that the the Gestapo should not generally know who was executing the tasks individually. He was anxious that apart from him, Edelstein and Weidmann, practically noone was known, and noone else could be made in any way responsible. He held the view, which prevailed through all these years, that the Gestapo would fight out any complaint with the leadership, and there were some every day, with a level of brutality commensurate with their mood, without resorting to serious measures like arrest and deportation; less exposed officials were much more vulnerable in this respect. In all the years it never occurred - and all the surviving colleagues from the Prague and Vienna Jewish community can confirm this -, that any leader of a junior department was held responsible by the Gestapo - with the exception of Dr. Franz Friedmann, who was himself seen as an authority by the Gestapo and with whom they dealt directly. (At this juncture I should mention the tragic deaths of Dr. Hans Bonn and Emil Kafka (see p.11) , who were arrested in the early Heydrich days on the pretext that their department had sabotaged registrations, and killed in Mauthausen concentration camp three weeks later - as a prelude to the horrors of the time of transports).
Richard Friedmann’s attitude towards the Gestapo has already been described. He was quick-witted, bold, confident and above all fearless. His fearlessness was not only evident in his whole bearing but was also demonstrated by him at every opportunity. These are close to the exact words he
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repeated in response to every threat, as one might expect:
“You can no longer frighten me with ‘concentration camp’. That has been an occupational hazard for me since I started to have dealings with you. I expect it, and beyond that there is nobody within your power for whom I need to fear”.
And those were no hollow words. One of the qualifications for his imperturbability and certainty was the fact that he himself really was fearless and there was nobody in Europe for whom he feared. His only sister had already emigrated to England in 1937. His later friendship with me he called in his witty way an ‘industrial accident’, and was rigorously careful to ensure that noone, and never the Gestapo, should have any notion that there were any personal circumstances. How considered and consistent his thinking and dealing was is demonstrated by the fact that his maxim for years:
‘I need no hostages’
was reflected in the incredible fact of my existence. I am the only person from this circle who has remained alive, and there is no other explanation for this than that his complete independence was so well-known and so often given blatant prominence that eventually his death sentence was issued in Berlin in his name only, and carried out to the letter by the rigid German bureaucracy, although I arrived in Auschwitz on the same transport.
It was fundamental that the pressure so often imposed on the leadership of the Jewish community should indeed be absorbed by it.
One of Richard Friedmann’s most important and basic principles - which he applied most strictly and ideally, and which he demanded of all his colleagues - was never to exert downward pressure. He himself worked tirelessly when it was required, round the clock. Every colleague in the Jewish community in Prague knew that in most cases he did not leave the office before midnight, especially when people were waiting for him in order to raise with him their major and minor problems.
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Accordingly he did often demand increased productivity from many departments. Yet in every case his demand for this work was made in the friendliest and most comradely way, and above all in an absolutely collective spirit. It was in every way a common task at which he and his colleagues were working, and the pressure from the Gestapo never weighed on the individual official. There are innumerable well-known instances where the Gestapo demanded some report or figures within a ludicrously short time and with the usual threats of imprisonment or death. It was always Friedmann himself, or Edelstein and Weidmann, who fought for every hour or under the most dramatic conditions. (Shouting and constant threats of arrest were the least of these, and truly no longer made any impression!). No colleague ever heard it said: “If it is not ready by this time, we will have to answer for it”. Negotiations with the Gestapo and responsibility towards the Gestapo were as a matter of principle the concern, entirely and solely, of the leading officials.
His warm and comradely relationship with each colleague was legendary, from the doorman to the women operating the telephone, who did indeed have a very difficult life with the three constantly active telephones in his office. His whole being was actually sincere, humorous and warm, yet otherwise it was discipline, strict self-control, expressed in his relationship with his colleagues.
He often used to say within the circle of his friends and colleagues:
“We who have to deal with the Gestapo thugs have to be especially cautious not to use, perhaps unconsciously, the all too easy practices of the ‘master race’ against a subordinate, in even the slightest way. And above all - and he stressed this repeatedly - none of our colleagues must ever hear us utter a threat of the Gestapo”.
Scope of tasks
As I have already mentioned, with time the entire life of the Jews altered and the administration
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and control of life was managed by the Jewish community, a kind of state within a state.
Financing the large numbers of the dispossessed, the housing question, education, hospitals and medical services, travel within the country, later even travel on the tram and a thousand other lesser matters, fell directly under the administrative system of the Jewish community.
Each individual edict was of course intended to make life as intolerable as possible, and it now became the Jewish community’s task to make the best of the situation. This could naturally be achieved only by constant and systematic deception of the SS authorities.
Social Welfare
One of the most important duties was establishing the budget. From the confiscated money from Jewish property the ‘Zentralstelle’ received what might be called the machinery the Jewish community needed to operate, but of course amounts varied as conditions changed. It was as if the Jewish community had to justify what it needed, and through all those years had to fight fierce battles with the Gestapo over every single sum.
Naturally the Gestapo had to be led to believe that the monies were required mainly for management of the departments working for them - like statistics, drawing offices etc. etc. - and that social welfare for the Jew was the least important. Dr. Franz Friedmann was the ‘finance minister’ in this strange kind of state and was expert at disguising and falsifying every proposal to the greatest degree possible. The battle for money, which generally resembled a cattle market, was then carried out by Dr. Franz Friedmann with Richard Friedmann, or with Edelstein und Weidmann. Their stories, often recounted, included how in 1939 they had to request the first Kc 10,000.- from the Gestapo, whereas later the budget ran to several millions.
Given the prevailing conditions, social welfare was extended extremely well. What was called the Volksküche [people’s kitchen], which was at first
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quite dreadful, was better in 1940 and 1941 than the so-called Mittelstandsküche [soup kitchen for the middle class], which had been set up for civil servants and those who could pay. There one could be given food only in return for food coupons, whereas the Volksküche, as a Jewish community institution, had its own rations - officially from the ‘stocks’ of the Jewish community, from vegetable plots and so on, but in fact partly from foodstuffs acquired on the black market. Thanks to help from Czech authorities and Dr. Franz Friedmann’s good connections with them, it was possible to keep the Gestapo’s agreement, after some skilful intervention to ‘explain’ to them that in this way the pressure would be taken off the Zentralstelle’s funds, that some Jews being supported by welfare could draw a monthly sum of around Kc.1,000.- to Kc 1,500.- from the savings accounts of the rich.
Education
One of the greatest achievements was disguising the entire education system. According to an edict of the German authorities Jewish children were excluded from the state schools; but Jewish schools could not be opened. Under the label ‘Department of reeducation for emigration’ thousands of children and young people received a partly practical, but also theoretical and academic education appropriate for their age. Prof. Maximilian Adler, who, as was known by those in the inner circle, was really the “Direktor der größten Schule aller Zeiten” [Head of the greatest school of all time], governed lessons for several thousand children and organised and supervised teaching in a most selfless and outstanding way. Responsibility for this large-scale deception was borne of course, as in everything else, by the Jewish community.
Health care
Jews were excluded from all public health institutions, but the Jewish community maintained its own hospitals and its own medical service for patients with no means. Almost all Jewish doctors were tied into this health system. Of course
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the Gestapo must never be allowed to discover the extent of this supply of medical treatment.
It goes without saying that every individual permit to travel had to be fought for with false statements and then with exhausting interventions. When travel on the tram was forbidden to Jews, after interventions only “the sick or those engaged by the Jewish community” could receive permits. But with the assistance of the Czech authorities, who were willing to help in any situation, this ban was rendered farcical. The good-humoured tram conductors in Prague believed there had never been as many Jews using the tram as after this ban. Some of the Jews were now simply ‘sick’ and further thousands were ‘occasional auxiliary workers’.
This then was roughly how business looked from the inside, but to the outside world it naturally presented itself, as Friedmann called it, as ‘politics of the lesser evil’. Through commitment of his whole character and with constant gruelling petty battles he did of course win general and personal alleviations. Even so, people did lead a horrible life at the time, but they were unaware of what was going on behind the scenes and that life could have been far worse than it really was.
I would like to give one illustration of the situation here:
At the time of the so-called ‘Häuser-Aktion’ [houses campaign] the leadership of the Jewish community entered one of the most difficult situations for the people whoe interests it was representing. At the Gestapo’s direction their immovable possessions had to be transferred to the posession of the Zentralstelle by some ‘legal’ means. Richard Friedmann had no sympathy in principle for this tragic state of affairs, and could see only the ridiculous farcical side of it. He did say that of all the goods which the Nazis forcibly acquired, they could hardly drag away houses and properties, and that it would occur to any normal person that every signature and every contract must be invalid. True to its principle
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of limiting all direct contact between private persons and the Gestapo, the Community invited the people to go through the formalities with them. Most of them took the business disproportionately tragically - formal loss of their house seemed to them to mean the collapse of their existence. (Even a ‘Minister’, who has long since been occupying his house again, turned the affair into a tragedy).
It was so hard to persuade someone of a different point of view in such situations, and above all it was impossible to explain to the person affected that the Gestapo would shy at nothing, and would consider any hesitation as sabotage, or ‘subversive activity’. This fact could not be even as much as uttered, for, however carefully it was formulated, one was expressing nothing other than an indirect threat.
It is generally accepted that the average person who does not recognise the true reason will see the middleman with whom he is dealing as the guilty party. In such a time of injustice, this was of course even more intensively the case. The director of the Jewish community in Vienna, Emil Engel, who visited the Jews in Prague once more before he emigrated to America, described this situation with these words:
“Even if the Jewish communities had in these difficult times done nothing but allow people to curse them with impunity, they would still have fulfilled a purpose”.
2.) Secret Police:
Over and over again the fragmentation and destruction of each extended family made a harrowing impression. Those affected were largely the calmest in this situation. There were relatively few hysterical scenes, and not until it was one’s own turn did one understand the friends who had been so calm beforehand.
Repeatedly Richard Friedmann found it uncanny that these masses of people - even if at the time the extent of the tragedy was not appreciated! - obeyed this expulsion in so calm and orderly a fashion, without any resistance. He wondered over and over again, and this question occupied and tormented him throughout the time of the transports, whether the process [was being] facilitated by the administrative support of the Community.
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Without any official power, without even the official title of lawyer, solely because of his personal authority, he won the trust of the entire public as the most successful advocate and - however paradoxical it may sound - also the respect of the monsters in human guise who ruled as commissioners of their ‘office’.
This role of advocate enabled him to bring his strong positive attributes to the fore. He commanded respect through his quick-wittedness, his intellect and his skilful handling of this ‘lawmaking’. His courage was impressive and he to some extent he took people in with his proud and superior attitude. But what had an especially favourable effect on his situation and raised him above all the professional lawyers at the time was his personal disinterest and his proverbial, almost caricatured incorruptibility.
Whereas every professional lawyer pursued his office as a business, it was known that Friedmann acted only as an entirely altruistic representative of his community. He could therefore always appeal again after every rejection, without losing prestige. He was never fighting for anything personal or which could give him a personal advantage.
This incorruptibiity was one of the characteristic traits of Richard Friedmann the man. This conduct was so extreme that under normal circumstances it would, as I have said, have appeared a caricature. But he was a better judge of people than all the rest and knew that everything had to be presented particularly crudely and rather tastelessly if the Nazi creatures were to comprehend it. It was well-known that he never accepted even a cigarette from the people who sought his help, even if they were old friends. In all those years every box of chocolates and every bottle of liqueur he received on anniversaries or other occasions with countless documents, was delivered to
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the Jewish community’s hospitals, orphanages and homes for the elderly, and like a note of thanks, the receipt from the institution was sent to the person who had given it. His customary phrase was:
“I hope that I have acted in the spirit you intended” etc. etc.
Yet in this area, representation in so-called criminal matters, the outcomes he could effectively achieve became ever fewer. People arrested for breaching the direct Jewish laws could generally be got out of prison. Later especially, during the time of the transports, they could succeed in having imprisoned Jews sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto instead of to the concentration camps. Then such a change was still considered very fortunate. How could one foresee that this way too led eventually to Auschwitz.
As for political prisoners, for whom Friedmann stuck his neck out in an absolutely indescribable way, it was unfortuately not possible to achieve an effecive release, since these cases were decided not in Prague but generally by higher authorities. The local Gestapo merely managed the case. I hope that everyone in the world has understood how much inexpressible torment and horror lay hidden behind this word. The most that Friedmann could obtain was possibly the transmission of news and in the most favourable cases permission for visits by close relatives, - but what that meant in this situation, only those who experienced imprisonment by the Gestapo can assess.
His greatest achievement in this field was as follows, and if it appears no more than an abstract concept for anyone far removed from it, it did fill those living through the situation with deepest gratitude towards Richard Friedmann: for all those befallen at the time by the great misfortune of knowing their nearest family to be in Gestapo custody, he was the safe and constant authority onto whom they could load their entire concern and the great burden of their dejection. Everyone felt that with him they were in the very best of hands. Each of these people who - even after waiting for hours or days - was able to speak to him in person, left him with the confident feeling that they had done everything humanly possible in the circumstances for their relatives.
He had a wonderfully warm and human relationship with all these people in their need, incredible calm, imperturbable patience. For all who who were often seeking immediate advice and help, he could be reached day or night on the telephone, without exception, throughout all those years. One more thing contributed to the special trust he enjoyed from everyone. He never made empty promises; in a humanely sympathetic way he was able to communicate dreadful truths, if they were irrevocable. And if for once he had something joyful to announce, he was believed without question. He possessed what he himself called “the courage to be unpopular”, but which proved to be the source of the greatest popularity.
Let me give a few examples at this juncture:
In 1940, when normal emigration was almost impossible, there was a Slovak consul in Prague who could be bribed and who issued visas for Jews without the required approval from the higher authorities. Friedmann himself never carried out that kind of negotiation, for he was too well known and exposed, but he found a man who knew the consul and dealt with him (Hajek). Friedmann provided some of the money for the visa, dealt with the people and also saw to the approvals for emigration from the Gestapo, from whom he adroitly concealed the source and the type of the visa. One day this all blew up at the consulate and both the consul and Herr Hajek were arrested. There was nervousness in the inner circle around Friedmann, and they were sure that he too would be arrested the following day. In this situation Friedmann acted with the utmost bravado. The next morning, apparently calmly, he went to the commissioner of the Jewish department to intervene on Hajek’s behalf, expecting
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that he would himself probably be detained there as well. But nothing of the sort occurred. Hajek held firm, betrayed nobody and after about 6 weeks was released; the consul was sent off to Slovakia.
The case of Dr. Salomon Lieben.
I do not believe it necessary to say much about Dr. Salomon Lieben. Friedmann often used to say that what people abroad knew about the Jews of Prague was the Altneuschul [Old-New Synagogue] and Dr. Salomon Lieben. He was a legendary figure for the poor of Prague, and not only the poor Jews, but for the whole population of the district of the city in which he lived. He was tirelessly in the miserable homes of the poorest of the poor, day and night, always helpful, selfless, modest. Instead of taking payment he brought medicines and also often food - this is how the people of Prague knew him. The doctor in Karl Čapek’s film “Die Weiße Krankheit” [Skeleton on Horseback] was modelled by the main actor on Dr. Salomon Lieben.
One day in April 1941, just when Friedmann and Edelstein were in Holland, Dr. Salomon Lieben was arrested. Not only the Jews, almost the whole city was furious. When Friedmann returned from Holland, Dr. Lieben had been transferred from the prison in Prague to the “Kleine Festung” concentration camp near Theresienstadt, and his file forwarded to Berlin. The reason for the arrest was one of the most grotesque that had ever occurred. In the years before the occupation of Prague by the Germans, some people had collected money for the “Schwarze Front” [= Combat League of Revolutionary National Socialists (Kampfgemeinschaft Revolutionärer Nationalsozialisten)], which had been founded by Strasser, the friend and colleague of Hitler initially, but who had later quarrelled with him. Dr. Salomon Lieben, an entirely apolitical person, without knowing what it was about, like thousands of others donated a small sum when someone came to his surgery asking for donations. In 1941 the name of Dr. Salomon Lieben was found in a list of the Schwarze Front, and that of another Prague Jew, the engineer Hirsch. Thus these two Jews fell under the outrageous accusation of having maintained connections to the Schwarze Front.
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Richard Friedmann led a tough, tireless, gruelling battle for Dr. Lieben. He went to the Gestapo daily, invoking all the arguments available to him, portrayed Dr. Lieben’s character, which “will go down in history”, portrayed the effect on public opinion of his arrest , etc. etc. He described Dr. Lieben as the epitome of the absolutely non-political pure philanthropist, who, as he attempted to explain to the Gestapo, “would give just as much to a collection for orphaned national socialist children as he would for Jewish orphans”. The commissioner sent supplementary reports to Berlin, in which he tried to make Dr. Lieben’s position more favourable. Yet one day the decision came, and as always in those days, it was negative. Dr. Lieben was to be sent on to a concentration camp in Germany. Then Friedmann again succeeded in having so great an influence on the commissioner that he did something unusual for the mentality and practice of the Gestapo; for these creatures, however courageously and ‘heroically’ they acted before the helpless prisoners, were the cowardly, spineless and blind tools of each body superior to them. None of them actually had the courage to go out on a limb before their superior for a prisoner, let alone a Jew, even if they personally held a different view. The diabolical thing about this system was that the criminals sat ‘nameless’ at the top with a whole staff of blind executive organs. Nevertheless Friedmann made the Prague commissioner send the decision back to Berlin and request a revision of the sentence, reasoning that its condemnation of Dr. Salomon Lieben would signify an intolerable ‘loss of prestige’ for the Secret Police as a criminal court.
In the meanwhile Dr. Lieben, at the same time as the engineer Hirsch, was given the order to pack and to prepare for the transport. Everyone knew what that meant. But the next day engineer Hirsch went to Germany to the concentration camp alone and Dr. Lieben stayed behind. In a schwarzer Brief [illegal uncensored letter] to his relatives Dr. Lieben described the situation. His words were:
“Either a miracle has happened to me or I have a powerful protector”.
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There was some sense of relief and happiness about the current success. But the days of tension experienced by Friedmann until the reply came from Berlin cannot be described. A few weeks later the decision arrived.
Dr. Lieben had not been found guilty, it said. He was innocent and was therefore “only to enter protective custody” until the end of the war. Dr. Salomon Lieben was sent to Dachau concentration camp. A few months later a telegram bearing news of his death arrived. He had died of gastroenteritis.
A further instructive case was this:
A young Communist - Helene Fantl - was pregnant at the time of her arrest in 1940. She was granted temporary release from Ravensbrück concentration camp for the birth of the child and was to return to the concentration camp a few months later. She could not abscond, as she would have endangered her relatives as well as friends who had adopted the child. On the other hand the terror at the time was already too great for a whole family to have been able to go underground. So a decision was made to opt for the lesser evil, and a petition was made for the woman to be allowed to go to the Theresienstadt ghetto, which already existed at thie time, instead of back to the concentration camp. Friedmann intervened with the Secret Police in the matter. Initially the commissioner refused. It went against his orders. After further negotiations he declared himself willing to overlook the matter, as it were, if she were to be included in the transport ‘by chance’. His condition was that the Zentralstelle, which was compiling the transport, should learn nothing of the facts. (The various offices of the Secret Police and the SS were generally antagonistic towards each other, because one always laboured under the delusion that the other had more loot!)
At this juncture transports were going to Theresienstadt at frequent intervals, and they waited with trepidation for Helene Fantl to be included on the list. The date for her return to the concentration camp was drawing ever closer. The commissioner promised to delay transporting her,
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yet one day, to the fury of everyone involved, she was collected from her home and transported to the ‘Kleine Festung’.
But this time too something unusual, even unique, was achieved. After an intervention it emerged on the next day that a particularly zealous junior official had dispatched her. Helene Fantl returned from the Festung that same day. In order to speed up her inclusion in a Theresienstadt transport , the SS officer Bartels (of whom more later), the only person prepared to help, was taken into their confidence, and gave the ‘instruction’ to include her in the transport. Helene lived with her infant in Theresienstadt until the great liquidation in the autumn of 1944, when she, like all mothers with children, was made to go directly to the gas chamber in Auschwitz.
I do not wish to omit the people who - for which Richard Friedmann was personally accountable - were released from custody because of a medical certificate and accommodated in medical institutions run by the Jewish community, and who mostly returned from there to freedom.
The following conversation arose in the context of one of the first of these cases:
“Who will guarantee that the Jewess does not disappear?”
Friedmann: “I will guarantee it personally”.
“You are risking your head, you are rather reckless, Friedmann”.
Friedmann, with a laugh: “If anyone is interested in my head, they will find a reason. For the moment we have not yet reached that point”.
From today’s viewpoint this is one of the harrowing truths of which Friedmann was aware in all those years. He knew that one day he would have to disappear; unfortunately they were a few hours ahead of him.
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Holland
In March 1941 Friedmann and Edelstein were given the task of travelling to Holland, in order to assist the Joodscher Rat [Jewish Council] there in setting up the ‘Zentralstelle’. The Nazis’ diabolical system wanted to exploit to their own ends the popularity and trust which these two people enjoyed with the Jewish public. Since the political situation at the time was such that there could of course no longer be any question of emigration, and that in order to carry out the Jewish Laws it was expected that the Dutch population would assist, the plan backfired completely.
The two months Richard Friedmann spent in Holland he himself called his “first holiday” for 5 years. He wrote letters each day containing reams about the Dutch sky and Dutch painting. The ‘Zentralstelle’ was not founded during the first visit of Friedmann and Edelstein, nor during his second stay in May 1941, but not until much later. Friedmann returned from Holland in particularly optimistic spirits. It was the only time that his political view was unrealistic. Like the Dutch, he expected an invasion and an early end to the war.
At his departure it was clear what Friedmann meant to the Jews of Prague. They had to contemplate the possibility that he might not return, and individuals felt that they had lost their moral support. Suddenly the authority to which they could turn in any situation and which they could burden with all their cares and needs was absent.
His range of duties was effectively distributed among 5 departments, mainly led by old well-disposed lawyers, but it was clear to everyone that the business was lacking its head and its heart.
Olmütz
Meanwhile the decisive event of the war had occurred, the attack on the Soviet Union. After
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the first weeks of victories it could be sensed from the Nazis how the situation was changing. The atmosphere was very tense.The SS overcompensated for its disappointment and anger, and the unacknowledged shame over the failures was expressed in especial brutality.
Around this time things were particularly heated in Olmütz [Olomouc]. The leader of the Jewish community there, an old, entirely non-political and fearful man, had succumbed to pressure from the notorious SS officer Bankl, and havoc was being wrought among the Jewish population. Friedmann travelled to Olmütz, and what his colleagues there later said about his work seemed even to people who knew Friedmann to be improbable. In a certain sense he was foolhardy. Relying on nothing more than his personal courage and his own initiative, he bluffed Bankl by almost turning the tables and by presenting himself to him rather as his superior. He felt, as he later said with a laugh, like a kind of ‘animal tamer’. His approach was successful, and conditions in Olmütz changed fundamentally. But it was an enormous strain on his physical and emotional strength, and however minor and incidental this episode may have been, we seldom saw Friedmann so altered as following this three-week long feat. When he left the field of battle, he remained for months the official leader of the Jewish community of Olmütz, and the appeal to him was effective, even from a distance.
The Heydrich period in Prague
Friedmann was just spending a few days in Olmütz again, when he was called back in dramatic fashion. A new phase had begun. The final great tragedy of the Jews was beginning. Heydrich had come to Prague. ‘Registration’ of the Jews was undertaken in the Jewish community. Dr. Hans Bonn and Emil Kafka (not to be confused with Dr Emil Kafka on p11), the official heads of the registration department, were arrested for sabotage and Richard Friedmann was summoned by telegram back from Olmütz.
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Nobody grasped the seriousness of the situation as fully as he did. He did not indulge in any optimism and knew from the first that these two colleagues - Hans Bonn was a personal friend - were lost.
A few days later the first transports from Prague to the East began. They were the transports to the Łódź ghetto. Apart from the anger which gripped every Jewish person in Prague, this fact signified for Friedmann the collapse of his years of work. The Jewish community, which was to remain intact through the blind commitment of his own life, was now being sent wholesale to its destruction. At the time he did not yet know anything of the highly organised machinery of death in Poland, and imagined the business not as systematic, but did know that most of these people were certain to be destroyed.
This fundamental shift in the situation led to a fundamental change in his view of his whole project. He saw quite clearly that the time of “dealing, and indeed the lesser evil” was over. The rescue of one person would have to be bought with the life of another. He was conscious that henceforward one was no longer a partner in negotiations, for now the Gestapo needed only executive organs. I give here an example which clearly illustrates his altered viewpoint:
A mutual friend, whose husband had been executed as a Communist in the early Heydrich days, crossed the border to Hungary illegally. On the same day Friedmann suggested going with her, reasoning:
“I have returned each time from my journeys to London, and had many opportunities to disappear. I did not do it, because I did not want to desert. But now I no longer feel any moral obligation to keep going. What we can achieve today is no longer in any proportion to the price we have to pay for it.”
He did not discuss his plan with anyone, as he did not want to burden anyone with the knowledge, apart from me, as I was to go too. Perhaps it failed because of a certain lethargy on my part;
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we were also too large a group for the border crossing. But the helpers planned to return.
Meanwhile, however, the situation had worsened to the point where it was no longer emotionally possible for Friedmann to leave. News of the deaths of Dr. Hans Bonn and Dr. Emil Kafka arrived and caused general panic and helplessness. Friedmann felt himself too closely tied to the community to think at such a moment of saving himself.
Transports
The transports in Prague were compiled thus: the Zentralstelle had a file of the Jews, and the SS officers drew the cards entirely arbitrarily, largely randomly. The Jewish community had the right to draw up a ‘Schutzliste’ [protected list], which contained the names of colleagues. Since 1,000 participants were designated for each transport, the Gestapo usually presented 1,200 - 1,300 cards, from which the protected workers were to be removed. In principle therefore the Gestapo decided the fate of the individual, and the community had a limited right of reclamation. This privilege naturally became a focus of protection, and obviously conditions were not ideal in this respect. It would have required a community of nothing but superhuman idealists for them not to fight in the circumstances for the possibility - as far as it was within their power - of turning their relatives and friends into ‘community workers’. The community of Jews was no worse, but also no better, than that of the world around them.
This problem caused Friedmann suffering, and he grappled with himself over it. His initial standpoint was quite inflexible. He said that nobody had the right to see one person as better or more valuable than another and to make decisions about his life. He held the general view that saving one would have to be paid for by
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another, since the number of participants was fixed in advance. Even if he was unable to persuade those around him to drop considerations of family and friendship, he himself refused most stringently and consistently to replace someone by another unknown to him, just because he was a personal friend of his.
But there were some families with young children in our circle to whom he was especially close (engineer Klein and Dr. Winternitz). Frau Klara Hutter on the other hand, in whose house in Prague he had found a second home and whom he loved as a mother, he sent on one of the the first transports to Theresienstadt, likewise a woman who had originally been my patient, and later one of the people closest to me, Elisabeth Winter, unmarried and childless, who was also included in one of the transports right at the start, and immediately committed suicide in Theresienstadt, because this transport was sent straight on to the East. On the other hand Friedmann accepted a kind of ‘political’ position, i.e. he sought to keep people out of the transport who were seen as important by the community and for a community.
In every respect this time was a constant moral battle and demanded ever fresh concessions. From the first moment Friedmann resisted in principle having anything to do with administration of the transports. Right at the start he made it very clear that he would withdraw entirely and was not prepared to be part of the executive in this diabolical business.
Mandler, notorious in Prague, who had hitherto led a private life, was given this task and took on the implementation of the transports from delivery to the collection point to departure.
For the work of the religious community, which now also had substantially to be directed towards the transports, Friedmann was of course as ever responsible, especially since after the arrest of Dr. Hans Bonns and Emil Kafka noone but he would have had the courage to lead the whole set-up.
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Processing the transports was conducted approximately as follows: after the transport list had been compiled in the Zentralstelle, it was handed to the Jewish community. The Jewish community then informed the people of their inclusion in the transport,with around 3-5 days between being informed and entering the transport. Understandably everyone tried during these days to be held back under any pretext. All these objections, some because of economic status, some because of ‘unclear racial status’, but most because of health issues, went through the machinery of the Jewish community and its medical service.
Moreover the Jewish community engaged a large number of its colleagues - young people especially and even older children took part - in the ‘Hilfsdienst’ [auxiliary service]. It assisted those affected to prepare for the transport in dissolving their households, the acquisition of provisions, suitcases etc. And lastly carts and auxiliaries brought the luggage to the collection point.
A singular method of packing using special aids developed, which is difficult to describe, and barely imaginable by anyone who did not live through this terrible time.
2.) Secret Police:
Yet Friedmann considered the hardest and most important of his duties for the Jewish community to be his function as advocate in the criminal cases of the political state secret police. In the first weeks after the occupation Edelstein carried out this function, but over time it moved entirely within Richard Friedmann’s remit,
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or was at least essentially managed by him. But it turned out that in other countries in which the deportations ran less calmly and smoothly, where the Jews , with almost no prior information, were herded together indiscriminately - by blocking off streets and buildings - , the Gestapo itself still had a sufficient number of executive agents available to it.
One key thing must be noted here: in Prague every Jew did actually have the opportunity to escape and go underground. In the 3-5 days between being notified and the departure of the transport, it was possible calmly to plan everything for going underground, to live unmolested in one’s own home and to disappear. Nor was any Jew who had not turned up for the transport seriously or consistently searched for by the Gestapo in Prague. The Gestapo had agreed with the proposal that the community would advise the Czech police if any Jew failed to appear, and that they would then be the ones to search for the person in question. This was a mere formality, since the police were content with just one visit to the home of the missing person and the declaration that he had disappeared, and recorded the case as ‘untraceable’.
Why then did so few politically threatened people, including non-Jews, vanish, later nevertheless to fall into the hands of the Gestapo? The reason was the enormous, constantly growing terror, the incredibly tight net of the Gestapo agents and the necessity for each individual inevitably to be dependent upon a number of people while underground, whose trust he had to gain, and who had to house and feed him and whose lives were then all endangered. It was not that an individual lacked the courage to live the life of a harried animal in hiding, but very few were able to make the decision to put people in constant danger of their lives, even if they were their closest relatives or friends.
Theresienstadt
After the first transports to the ghetto at Łódź, the ghetto in Theresienstadt was established. Initially it had been intended only for Jews from the Protectorate.
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Edelstein went voluntarily to be leader of the camp with a group of colleagues. Once Theresienstadt had become the only camp which could be reached from Prague, Friedmann concentrated increasingly on supplying this camp.
Section “G”, a dedicated department, was set up in the Jewish community with the task of supplying the ghetto. In time this ‘G’ section became Friedmann’s absolute domain, and in a brief report it is hard to describe how much was shifted to Theresienstadt foolhardily and at great risk under the cloak of this legal institution. The Zentralstelle had agreed in principle to allow the Theresienstadt ghetto to be supplied with ‘essentials’ from Prague, partly through purchases, control of which was the preserve of the Zentralstelle, and partly from the community’s stocks. Under cover of this agreement in principle for ‘essentials’, it was now Richard Friedmann, on his own cognisance, who held sole responsibility in the Gestapo’s eyes for execution of ths task, who bought everything the ghetto needed and which could be had in any way legally, or generally illicitly, in the greatest quantities possible, and shipped them out.
There would be thousands of examples to cite, beginning with the hundreds of thousands of straw palliases (of which there were so many in Theresienstadt that they sometimes rotted in the dirt in the yards) via food, domestic and kitchen equipment, musical instruments,books, stationery, to the fantastic provision of drugs. Even if there is no other concrete evidence available - apart from the thousands of lives saved - of Richard Friedmann’s work since all documents were destroyed, the quantities of medical supplies and drugs found in Theresienstadt even after it was liberated and which would impress any outsider, knowing that all of this was brought there with the ‘agreement’ of the Gestapo, bear witness to Richard Friedmann’s work at the time.
He established a campaign in Prague. Jewish doctors and pharmacists travelled across almost the whole Protectorate
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and bought huge amounts of concealed reserves of drugs, on which the Nazis had never set eyes, from the Czech pharmacists, who were happy to support this campaign, especially since the goods were being paid for at an appropriate price. In a way which none of us uncovered, Friedmann succeeded in buying a quantity of morphine, which not only guaranteed a supply to the ghetto in all the years of its existence, but of which a portion was probably still present after liberation. This morphine, in the form of dried granules, was in his home for weeks until the opportunity arose to get it out to the ghetto illegally. It would have been enough to supply large parts of the German army with morphine, at a time when there was such a dearth of it that the use of poppies in some parts of Germany was punishable with the most serious sanctions, indeed there was even talk of the death penalty.
Typical for Friedmann’s attitude to the business of supplying Theresienstadt was an anecdote which was circulating about him and which was also written down in a humorous poem in “G” section. It refers to ‘1,000 kg. of potassium permanganate’. When he was told on the telephone that potassium permanganate was available, he replied, as usual: all you can get, at least 1,000 kg!
I do not need to stress unduly that the money for the purchases was exacted from the Gestapo in the usual way, after a constant tough struggle, with endless falsification of the budget estimates. It often occurred at the time that Friedmann created apparent “debts” with other departments of the Jewish community, and the grotesque situation arose that he faced his ‘creditors’ with a bad conscience, as if they were gambling debts, until the Gestapo eventually approved a larger amount. On the day before he was deported he had extracted 6 million crowns from the holdings for ‘G’ section, and was ‘carefree’ as he had not been for some time.
Yet none of this would have been possible if the Jewish community had not been supported constantly by the SS officer Bartels. He was the only SS officer who gave illegal assistance to Friedmann in all these years. Friedmann said too little about the character of this man
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and later in Theresienstadt he lost contact with him. So I am unable to draw a clear picture of his character and assess the motives which drove his actions. It is true without any question that the SS officer Bartels afforded valuable service to the Jews at that time. Typical is the following occurrence I still recall. An accusation against B reached the Gestapo from a pharmaceutical company which was being run by Germans at the time - I believe it was ‘Medica’- that he was approving unreasonable quantities of drugs for Jewish use. (Bartels was a consultant on economic matters for the Gestapo and was responsible to the Gestapo for supplying Theresienstadt!). Bartels turned in some perplexity to Friedmann to ask what he should do about the matter. Friedmann drafted the letter to the company for him, in which Bartels wrote that he would be prepared immediately to leave the provision of drugs for Theresienstadt to the company itself, if they would confirm in writing that they would assume responsibility for the prevention of epidemics, as these knew no racial boundaries. Then followed a detailed description of the hygienic conditions in the ghetto. Thus the matter was resolved.
Dealings between the Gestapo and the Bertsch Group
In the context of SS officer Bartels one further thing should be recorded: a few months after the deportations started, proposals emerged from the trade group around Bertsch to halt deportation of the Jews and to use them for labour as part of the general workforce. This attitude was certainly not born of any humane considerations. Either Bertsch did want to secure the all too cheap labour of Jewish workers for their internal market, or it was fundamental opposition to the Gestapo. As I have already indicated, the various groups had always been hostile, not for ideological reasons, but because the Gestapo always gained the lion’s share of all loot. The oppressed minority relied on this fact for its tactics, and it was not rare that they gained some advantage from this antagonism by playing one party off against the other.
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This time it was because the Bertsch trade group needed evidence to demonstrate that exterminating the Jews was not economically viable. The SS officer Bartels had connections to this group and knew of its leanings. He initiated discussions for which Richard Friedmann provided the statistical and other material in document form. The negotiations were repeated two or three times at regular intervals, and the tension Friedmann experienced in these days - he was always kept abreast of things by Bartels - is difficult to describe. Yet the Gestapo emerged the victor as ever. After a brief interval battle recommenced, but this time the Gestapo won at the last moment.
Changes to the internal position
Even if from the outside the Gestapo was entirely in command of the situation, the altered political picture, in which German defeat became ever clearer, did not remain without consequences for the mentality of the SS, and it changed their attitude and conduct fundamentally.
I need here to stress again that Friedmann’s conduct towards the Gestapo was either exaggeratedly correct, or, depending on the prevailing mood and the moment, it was challenging and arrogant; in any case it was always hostile. But since the people they were dealing with were so coarse and primitive, unimaginable for anyone who did not know this ‘master race’, Friedmann was not content to limit this to his conduct, but also made his attitude clear verbally. In dealings he always spoke of ‘honest enmity’, of the fact that he and his opponents were ‘condemned’ to deal with each other, and that both must support their demands with the means at their disposal. In all those years he never left them in any doubt about the extent to which he was aware of the inequality of the partnership for the time being; that they might hold the power, but that he would nevertheless not capitulate, for he did not fear for himself, but was moreover serving the cause of victory.
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Such conduct was possible and relatively free of danger at a time when Germany was rushing from one victory to the next. As defeats followed, the situation naturally changed considerably: doubts, uncertainty and a feeling of inferiority upset their spirits.
What was occurring on a large scale happened on a small scale here too: the gentlemen of the Gestapo could not tolerate the Jews, whom they cynically and confidently planned to destroy, now becoming witnesses to their own defeat. Richard Friedmann and Jakob Edelstein, whose speciality had been holding political debates with them, now became for the Gestapo , with whom they had had to negotiate through all these years, a symbol of the implacable enemy triumphing at their defeat. In their crudeness they gave their own interpretation of the newly arisen situation through the following minor incident.
On a day when the Germans had again suffered a defeat, Günther - director of the Zentralstelle - suddenly bellowed at Friedmann to ask why he was in so good a mood. He wanted to make him aware that if things became worse, the Jews above all would have nothing to laugh about. Friedmann replied that he was already looking forward to the time when he would no longer be laughing. In the early days of the transports Günther asked Edelstein this very question: “What is Friedmann saying now - is he still laughing?” In the second half of 1942 there were days and weeks when Günther refused to speak to Friedmann. He could simply not bear the sight of him.
It was obvious from the start that these SS people were determined that people like Friedmann and Edelstein, who representated a distillation of Jewishness for them, should not be allowed to witness their defeat. It was beyond any doubt that during the final phase they had to be removed from the world - it was a question only of when. Friedmann was well aware of this. He was being spied on more than ever before, knew about it and also spoke about it. He was of course doing the most foolhardy things at just this time, in the context of Theresienstadt; probably because he felt that these were the final efforts, that he would not have much more time.
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He was rash enough to telephone directly to Theresienstadt, generally at night from his home - in urgent cases also from his office. Günther heard about it. Later it emerged how Günther had been told. In December 1942 Friedmann was summoned to Günther one day and subjected to an interrogation. Naturally he denied everything. When a few days later Friedmann could barely move his legs and had to stay at home, officially because of sciatica, he admitted to his friends that during this interrogation he had to undergo 140 knee bends. None of us learned what had happened there. But we did know that Günther was nothing less than candid and told Friedmann that this was the last time he would get off so lightly, the next time it would be “concentration camp”. Friedmann himself knew that, however.
It was then that we began seriously to contemplate fleeing. But because Friedmann did not speak Czech, he wanted to try to reach Switzerland through Austria. Then on 28th January 1943 came an unexpected event. On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the founding of the ‘Third Reich’ the Führer was to be presented with the “Liquidierte Judenfrage” [‘liquidated Jewish question’]. The Jewish communities of Berlin, Vienna and Prague were officially dissolved, their leading offcials sent to the ghetto and the remaining administration iof Berlin, Vienna and Prague was put under an ‘Ältestenrat’ [Council of Elders]. A few days before there had already been a sense that something was in the offing. In the night before 28.I.43 his closest family and friends learned that Dr. Weidmann, the official leader of the Jewish community in Prague, had been told ‘discreetly’ by Günther to prepare for the transport to Theresienstadt.
Friedmann spent the night of 28.I. with Weidmann. They agreed that he and a few of the closest colleagues would be at the Zentralstelle in the morning, to take their leave of Weidmann. Friedmann did not of course talk about this in the circle of colleagues, in order not to burden anyone with the knowledge, but he was determined to vanish without delay.
In our home on the morning of 28th January 1943, while Friedmann was at the Zentralstelle, was Frau Eugenie Dangl, whom Friedmann had met in the circle of
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the former legation councillor to the Czech Embassy in Berlin, Camil Hoffmann, and who as an honest, selfless, Austrian antifascist was helping with all her might because of her connections to the underground. Together we discussed the possibility of an illegal border crossing into Switzerland. At 11 o’clock we were informed that Friedmann had been arrested, along with some other prominent people, including Dr. Franz Kahn, known from Zionist circles. They were permtted neither to return to their homes nor to telephone their families. On that same day they were sent as so-called “Einzelreisende” [single travellers] to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Their families and luggage were to follow the next day.
Those were 24 hours when neither those affected nor their families believed that they would indeed be reunited in Theresienstadt. Justified mistrust warned them that things would turn out to be the opposite of what the Gestapo had officially declared. (In the concentration camps this attitude had later grown to become pathological: they simply no longer believed anything.) This time it was, exceptionally, no lie. On 29th January the families of those deported the previous day followed them.
Theresienstadt
To describe conditions in Theresienstadt requires its own volume, or several substantial ones. I must therefore restrict myself to a few key elements. In order not to create the impression of a one-sided view, I would like to say the following in advance: I am speaking of phenomena of internal life, or of the reaction of the mass of people interned, rather than of the institutions of the SS, which are all too well known.
Despite the many negative phenomena which arose under these terrible conditions, under the constant pressure of fearing death, on the whole the result for this Jewish collective is certainly a positive one. In contrast to other concentration camps, in which the majority of those incarcerated were politicial prisoners, the population of Theresienstadt was composed of all walks of life. In
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general it emerged that those very characteristics ascribed to Jews as negative, even by themselves, were not present. The Jews achieved incredible technical and administrative feats. To give just one example: the forced transfer of the men’s barrack of 5,000 people within 24 hours - the rough equivalent of transferring an entire small town! - was a miraculous accomplishment of technical and other work. The hygienic conditions in Theresienstadt were admirable, given these unimaginable difficulties.
Young people, some of them in Zionist groups, some collected within the very strong illegal Communist group, were on a moral and cultural level higher than almost anywhere else in the German occcupied countries. But where the Jews curiously failed almost entirely was in their administration, so that the saying circulated with justification: “Theresienstadt is a concentration camp aggravated by self-administration”. The reason for this was probably that the majority of people engaged in administration were recruited from the Jewish petty bourgeoisie. Through the grotesque miniature version of a ‘State’ created by Theresienstadt’s self-administration, these people gained positions as seldom before in their lives. The gruelling daily life caused them, as for all petty bourgeois, to lose touch with what was happening more widely, and they exploited their positions of power in the most unpleasant way. Moreover, each of these positions provided relative protection from transport to the East, and so it was obvious that anyone finding himself ‘with a hand on the tiller’ had a tendency to accommodate his whole family and his friends in the administrative machinery. And thus over time a real jungle of administration, corruption and cliques came into being. The deepest roots of this sad and nasty state of affairs lay in the fact that in Theresienstadt the Jews had to make all the decisions themselves about who was included in the transports to the East. There is no need to stress further the powerful apparatus represented by the so-called ‘Transport section’.
All this had been gathered by Friedmann in the first 24 hours of his time in Theresienstadt, and when we arrived there the next day, Friedmann was for the only time - not excepting the hours before he was executed -
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somehow disturbed and thrown off-balance. What rattled him most was the fact that Edelstein, whose moral strength and integrity he could not and would not doubt, had not been strong enough to prevent all this. He never grasped that - in contrast to what was done in Prague - they had taken it upon themselves to make life and death decisions for individual members of the community. There were many discussions between Friedmann and Edelstein, but they are too personal for a third party to pass judgement on them. Friedmann later explained that the people in Edelstein’s innermost circle were probably devoted to him personally, but never came anywhere near his human or political calibre; they were little people, who even developed a kind of local patriotism in their positions of power.
The first arrivals later behaved rather like pioneers. They were the ‘aristocracy’ of Theresisenstadt, who looked down on those arriving later with a certain disdain. All the intellectual perversities which arose in this abnormal situation would have been grotesque rather than tragic, had they not also always had an effect in practice. For example, outstanding surgeons or other specialists were ‘unemployed’, because much less gifted people who had arrived earlier had a ‘moral’ right to their positions of leadership.
It is difficult to judge the extent to which Friedmann influenced insight into these internal conditions; in any case, it was in line with his decision to withdraw from public life, should his work cease to be critically essential . And since because of the aforementioned conditions nobody insisted that he assume a leading position in Theresienstadt, he implemented his determination systematically from the day of his arrival.
Friedmann was sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto as a so-called ‘Prominenter’. The Nazis called those ‘prominent’ of whom it could be assumed that they were known abroad, but they also gave this honour to some nasty pieces of work who had served them at the time of the Occupation. Among the ‘Prominente’
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were mainly all university professors, former diplomats, high-ranking military men and leading people from Jewish public life. Prominente had certain privileges, the right to their own home with their families, some, if very limited, extra food rations, and no requirement to work. Friedmann refused these concessions as a matter of principle, as an initiative of the Nazi authorities officially lay behind them. During his time in Theresienstadt he never accepted food supplements and from the day of his arrival assumed the duty to work, by participating in the labour of the so-called ‘Hunderstschaft’ [the Hundred]. The Hundertschaft was a Theresienstadt specialty: each new arrivial was obliged, regardless of his qualifications, to carry out physical work for a certain period of time. That included cleaning, work on the sewers, disposal of corpses and other similar tasks. At the wish of his friends - especially with respect to illegal activity - Friedmann agreed to accept his own apartment. This was a privilege which would in any event also have been offered him by the Jewish self-administration.
The time in Theresienstadt was for Friedmann personally a quiet period after years. When he was no longer working in the Hundertschaft, he tried to find a lowly position within the economics section, but could not get on with the prevailing conditions there and eventually gave up the work. After a while he was informed by Dr. Eppstein, Edelstein’s successor as Jewish Eldest in Theresienstadt, that the ‘superior’ authority desired that he be employed in accordance with his capabilities, that it was unacceptable that he was sabotaging cooperation. Friedmann rejected this in Eppstein’s presence in the clearest and uncompromising way, and from that moment on worked as a labourer in an agricultural group. Shortly before he was deported to Auschwitz, pressure from the Gestapo was renewed at maximum level, instigated by Dr. Eppstein. Friedmann had to give up his agricultural work and take on a position in the labour centre. This was a thoroughly unpleasant time for him. He had to battle a good deal with petty and futile issues and these things, arising from the circle of colleagues, sometimes ground him down more than the perilous fight with the Gestapo.
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Dr. Eppstein
In this context it is essential to write briefly about Dr. Eppstein, because his was the epitome of a tragic and disastrous life as the direct consequence of the enormous pressure exerted by the Gestapo. Dr. Eppstein was a young talented Economics lecturer, not very original, not very courageous, and in ordinary circumstances he would not have aroused particular attention. Through the emigration and death of his predecessors, in due course he reached a leading position in the “Reichsverband Juden in Deutschland” [Reich Association of Jews in Germany], in the Reichsvereinigung in Berlin. Eppstein had been in custody for several weeks in Berlin, and that probably broke his morale. He had ceded to the enormous pressure from the Gestapo and from then on had been their willing instrument in all things. He was the right man at the time, in which - as I said in my introduction - only convenient executive organs were needed, to take on the post of Jewish Eldest in Theresientstadt. Edelstein had succeeded - with the exception of internal irregularities against which he was too weak - in extracting the most that could be extracted from the Gestapo. It was thanks to his initiative, his spirit and his quick-wittedness that there was a relatively tolerable atmosphere in the original concentration camp where in the early stages 19 young people were publicly executed. In 1943, when Eppstein arrived in Theresienstadt from Berlin, Edelstein had to step down from his position as Judenältester in his favour, and was appointed his deputy. Since two worlds collided here, collaboration for the good of the collective, which would have been enormously important, was impossible. Eppstein’s whole attitude and practice was the exact oppositie of the way Friedmann, Edelstein and their circle worked, as I have been indicating here.
Whereas for them forgeries, sabotage etc were business as usual, Eppstein was a rigidly correct loyal servant. While Edelstein and Friedmann took on the entire pressure of the Gestapo and consciously and consistently allowed it to centre on them and never be passed down, Eppstein behaved tyrannically towards his colleagues and endeavoured constantly to keep the whole system under pressure.
In order not to appear unobjective, I will not omit here that friends of Eppstein, who knew his life,
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attempted to excuse his conduct as follows. They said that it was his utterly different way of life, his Prussian correctness, which was incorporated in him to such a degree that he could not even deal with the Gestapo in anything but a ‘correct’ way. This may perhaps explain much, but it does not excuse it. Incidentally of course it is the problem of the whole German nation. We cannot excuse the devastation of Europe and the slaughter of millions of people by saying that it had been ‘ordered’ higher up. In this context it is immaterial to explore the extent to which Eppstein was guilty of the almost simultaneous deaths of Edelstein and Friedmann, who were shot in May 1944. Eppstein’s ‘guilt’ is more that of omission and consists in the fact that he, as one of the few well-informed people at the time, went along with the Gestapo comedy and did not once give any indication of the danger. What must it have been like within him, who knew for years that the people and friends around him were going to their deaths by gassing, and who was able to remain as silent as the grave for so long? The same is true for Murmelstein, who effectively used the same methods, though in his case they were dirtier and more brutal.
Pressure from the Gestapo grew ever stronger, and action by Eppstein, Murmelstein and their accomplices ever more intolerable. And the gulf between this circle and people like Edelstein and Friedmann grew ever wider. In November 1943 Edelstein was arrested on the pretext that the populations statistics were incorrect, and deported with his whole family. Edelstein lived for exactly another 6 months in the bunker at Auschwitz, while his family was in a neighbouring camp. After precisely 6 months he was shot there, along with his wife, child and mother-in-law. Fellow-prisoners of Edelstein who survived said that he never lost morale even when incarerated: he gave lectures and debates lasting for hours, and was exemplary in his conduct.
May 1944
Conditions in Theresienstadt reached a peak of vileness and mendacity in the summer of 1944. The Nazis, who by then had most brutally murdered millions of people, planned all at once to show the world the prosperity and happiness in which the Jews in the Third Reich were living. Theresienstadt was to be the showpiece.
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A Red Cross Commission was expected and preparations were made for it. While inside the blocks the people lay stacked like herrings, plagued by lice and filth, externally all the buildings were whitewashed. Young revolutionary artists who had been drawing the horrors of Theresienstadt in secret for years, were commanded to ‘decorate’ Theresienstadt with their artworks. While in the yards old people queued for hours to cadge a little soup barely distinguishable from dirty washing-up water, a band was playing in the marketplace. And one day the loveliest building in the town, in which they had succeeded in establishing a hospital, was speedily evacuated of its patients. The largest room was transformed into a concert hall and the high point of the ‘festivities’ was the performance of a concert to inaugurate the hall. The Theresienstadt Orchestra was made - at Dr. Eppstein’s express command - to perform Beetoven’s Ninth Symphony (“Freude schöner Götterfunken”)[Ode to Joy]. This concert was only for invited guests - the so-called elite of the camp was to attend. Friedmann received an official invitation and returned it with the comment that he was unable to accept. Thereupon he received a further invitaion from the administration leadership, and another directly from Dr. Eppstein in person. Although as a result of the enhanced tension he was aware of how dangerous this affront was, he declared himself unwilling in any circumstances to participate in this shabby farce. His view was that he was living as a private individual in Theresienstadt and nobody could force him to take part in things which he was reluctant to do, and that he was in no way obliged to perform ‘official duties’. He was the only one not present at the concert. That all happened a few days before the transport onto which he was put as a special prisoner.
Rather out of the blue, in the midst of these festivities, in May 1944 three transports of 2,500 people were dispatched to the East. In the night before the last transport left, Friedman was called to Eppstein and received the order to prepare for the transport. Dr. Eppstein told Friedmann that he was not aware of the exact motive for this sudden deportation, but that it had been indicated to him at headquarters
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that this transport was not bound for Poland but for a new labour camp in Dresden, whose establishment was to be devolved to Friedmann. This disgraceful farce was not only performed in front of Freidmann, but also spread through rumours in the Theresienstdt ghetto, and thus Friedmann’s popularity was exploited consciously to ‘raise spirits’. Despite this apparently splendid performance they appeared to have little trust in Friedmann’s credulity. They knew that he, like almost no other, was a match for their deviousness, and probably feared that he would disappear at the last moment. So he was arrested in Theresienstadt that same day, spent the night in the bunker and in the morning - under police guard - was taken to the collection point. From Theresienstadt he left in a normal transport wagon with 50 other transport participants. Yet at the very next station he was pulled out of the wagon by the SS officer Heindl and from there travelled in a separate wagon in the custody of Heindl and 3 German guards.
Auschwitz
The entire transport reached the notorious family camp. Friedmann too was initially allocated to this camp, again under special observation, and was again detained in the Schreibstubenblock (camp administration). Since one had nothing more to lose in Auschwitz and did not much adhere to the rules, during the two days he spent incarcerated in this camp we had constant contact with Friedmann. The orders from Gestapo headquarters concerning him changed almost hourly, and were completely impenetrable to the camp leadership. In the first hours they were told that he could not be tattooed in this camp, since he was to be transferred to the men’s camp. The next day he was again to be treated like an ordinary member of the family camp, until suddenly the order came to move him immediately to the men’s camp.
Friedmann was absolutely clear about his situation from the start. The first time we spoke to him in Auschwitz, he said - this time with somewhat bitter humour: “Now I really have lost the game”.
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His calm, his superiority, his clear plans and even his patience in the distress and panic of his surroundings were more admirable than ever before in his life.
In the evening of 21st May 1944 he was admitted to the men’s camp and sent to the punishment block. Early in the morning with all the occupants of the block he went to the Kommando, which in the language of Auschwitz meant: to work. The Capo of the Kommando was told to to take him behind the cordon of guards, but refused. Then an SS officer went with Friedmann to where the limit for the prisoners was, a few paces further on. He was shot from behind. An extensive report on his ‘attempt to escape’ was written afterwards - with a detailed description and a sketch! - bearing the title:
“Shot while trying to escape.”
In these two days in Auschwitz we raised all the problems arising from this new situation and discussed them calmly. Friedmann was tormented and occupied mainly by the question: who knows the truth about Birkenau, and how many? To describe the effect of the 5 furnaces burning day and night and the constant smell of burned organic matter exceeds the remit of these notes. Friedmann tried to fathom the consequences which might have awaited the individual who knew about this atrocity, and came to the conclusion that he should never have remained silent about it, that he - under his own full name - should have disseminated the truth in writing or through underground rumours. Despite the panic and chaos: nobody with knowledge of what was happening had the right to remain silent about it. He believed that the individual would have had a greater chance to assume the risk of flight, and that even a possible rebellion would have cost fewer victims than this unprecedented mass destruction.
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Friedmann spoke about much more, with a clarity and integrity which had an especially devastating effect in these hours.
I recall the following statement of his:
“When our work is later spoken of, and if you should be present, admit freely that others might have, or probably would have, been able to act better than we did. But doubtless not with purer hearts or cleaner hands.”
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Translation
Jenifer Ball, February 2025
