Final Thoughts

It's difficult to describe the array of emotions I felt as I got ready to call Frieda. I felt like an intruder in a way, trying to poke my head in the personal tragedies of her life. I didn't want to be a curious audience member turning her story into a interesting circus act, but yet I knew that part of my interest, and that of many others, in the Holocaust has to do with the absolutely horrific nature of it all. It is difficult for those of us who have never seen utter evil, to understand how it can even come to be.

From the moment I began talking to Frieda, I realized that the questions that were suggested for interviewing Holocaust survivors from the Museum website weren't going to be very useful in interviewing Frieda. Her situation was unique, and really unlike any I had ever heard of before. She couldn't tell me about life in the ghetto--she didn't really remember. She was so young when everything happened, that she couldn't really remember much about the Holocaust, let alone what came before the Holocaust. At first I felt stunted when I realized this. I wondered how in the world we were going to be able to learn any information since Frieda was so young. But then I realized that what Frieda could teach us was about much more than what we could learn in any textbook.

I can learn what life in the ghetto was like from a book. I can learn all of the horrible things that the Nazis did, and how they destroyed lives. But what a book can never, never tell me, is what it feels like to be a Holocaust survivor. And that seems to be Frieda's goal in speaking to young people about the Holocaust. I think that she has come to realize that our generation will never be able to understand the Holocaust, or understand Holocaust survivors--she mentioned to Genevive and I about how we had never experienced true hunger or feelings of starvation--but she can try to get across the feeling of being a Holocaust survivor, and feelings in a way are something universal that is easier for us wrap our minds around.

What is most astounding about Frieda, and I think what distinguishes her from many other survivors, is how she can't really remember a life before the Holocaust, or even much during the Holocaust. Her entire life then, has essentially been trying to put together pieces of who she is. When listening to Frieda speak, what shocked me most was when I realized that when a child endures hell daily, that child does not know of any other way of living. When Frieda was in the concentration camp at Bergen Belson, she walked past mounds of dead bodies daily. She knew all of this was horrible she told us, but she also at this point, couldn't imagine anything else. Unlike adults, Frieda didn't have the luxury of remembering a peaceful past.

From listening to Frieda, it is obvious that she is a survivor in every sense of the word. Despite coming out of the Holocaust alive due to what she called "luck," there is still a definite level courage needed to simply survive in the "normal world" after living most of one's life in such horrific conditions. I can't imagine the emptiness she must of felt at coming out of the concentration camp, only to realize that she didn't really know who she was. I guess I never realized that it is the small details of our lives that make up the person who we are: our birthday, the smell of our mother's perfume, the sound of our father's laugh. Frieda didn't have any of these things--they were stolen from her.

As I've said before, I don't expect to ever fully understand the plight of someone as remarkable as Frieda. Sitting comfortably in my room on this beautiful campus, I think it would be an insult to the 6 million dead to try and say that I could understand. But after hearing Frieda's story, I do think that part of what I understand better is the "feeling" as she called it. The feeling of being a lost child looking for her mother, or the feeling of being scared and alone in a different place. It is this "feeling" that I think Frieda wants to ensure is never forgotten. And I think that it is the preservation of this "feeling" for why it is important to record the lives of Survivors.

Posted by Ariana Quiñónez