Fred Friedman

Alfred Friedmann (later Fred Friedman ; born October 5, 1926 in Salzburg ; † January 16, 2008 in Buffalo ) was a successful refugee from the persecution of the Jews. In 1938 he and his sister were able to flee across the border to Switzerland with forged papers in order to escape the persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime . From there he traveled to France and later to the USA . He lived there as a lawyer in Clarence in New York State .

Life

In 1923 Otto and Hildegard Friedmann moved from Vienna to Salzburg , where they bought a house at Haunspergstrasse 25. The father worked as a timber dealer. Four years after Alfred, Grete, their second child, was born. Alfred was the only Jewish child in his class and felt anti-Semitism especially after Austria's annexation to Nazi Germany in 1938 . At this point, Alfred's father was able to leave Austria through Albert Falk , a friend in Switzerland. Alfred had as a Jew in the sense of the Nuremberg Laws , the junior high school left. His sister was accepted into the Nonntal monastery .

During the "Reichspogromnacht" in 1938, the Salzburg synagogue was devastated, Jewish men arrested, shops destroyed and shop windows plundered. But Alfred and his family, who lived in a suburb, were initially spared from the events. At the end of 1938, Alfred, his sister and his mother took the train to Freiburg . There they stayed with a university professor who helped many refugees. Alfred and his sister were then given to a woman from Basel . Herr Falk had got her a forged passport in which the Friedmann siblings were registered as their own children. At the Swiss border, the border guard recognized the two children because he had lived in Salzburg, but let all three pass.

Alfred's mother continued to live in Salzburg, but soon had to leave the apartment. Thanks to the support of the police commander of St. Gallen , Paul Grüninger , who was dismissed by the government without notice in 1939 and convicted of breach of official duties and forgery of documents , she was able to cross the Rhine into Switzerland.

The reunited Friedman family finally traveled via France and Spain to New Jersey in 1941 on one of the last refugee ships and were picked up by relatives there. Alfred went to school in the USA and later also in the military . In the army, Alfred asked unsuccessfully several times to be sent to Europe to help with the liberation of Germany and Austria . After his military service , Alfred received American citizenship on April 12, 1945 as Fred Friedman .

In the Salzburg apartment of the Friedman family lived during the time of National Socialism Otto Begus, probably a participant in the Dollfuss -Attentats 1934th

Fred Friedman graduated from New York University with a degree in accounting in 1950 and law degree from Brooklyn Law University in 1954. In 1955 he opened his own legal firm. In the 1980s he began to be interested in the fate of his grandparents - all the more since it had never been discussed at home. In the Documentation Center of the Association of Jews Persecuted by the Nazi Regime in Vienna , he learned from the Gestapo files that his maternal grandmother had died in Vienna in 1944, while his paternal grandmother was deported to Theresienstadt and murdered there.

In 2004 he got involved in the Holocaust education program " A Letter To The Stars ", in which more than 15,000 Austrian school children were involved.

From 2002 to 2006 he was Austrian Honorary Consul for Buffalo and Western New York. He left a wife and three sons.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Consul.cc directory ( Memento of the original from November 3, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Obituary in the Buffalo News

Web links

• Fred Friedman: Alfred, you have to pack your little suitcase now ... (PDF file; 279 kB)
• Fred Friedman: Holocaust survivor (English)
• Austrian Press & Information Service (English)