Piotrkow, Poland circled in red.
Frieda was born Fredzia Gelcman on June 16, 1937, in Piotrkow, Poland. The maternal side of her family was from Piotrkow. Germany invaded Poland in 1939 when Fredzia was 2 years old. She and her immediate family lived for a time in Lutotow, but she, her mother and her brother moved back with their grandparents in 1942 after her father's public execution by hanging in Lutotow. Frieda noted that she did not have any idea how her family was able to travel from Lututow to Piotrkow, as it was virtually impossible for Jews to travel at this time. Piotrkow was a large Ghetto and Lututow was a smaller Ghetto, but no-one could leave a Ghetto.
Frieda's stated that their house was broken into by Nazis in order to arrest her father. Since that time, her father's execution has "taken hold" of her memory. The horror of it still remains. She remembers her mother trying to cover her eyes during her father's execution, and a Nazi guard knocking her mother's hand away, saying that Frieda had to watch and remember.
Another traumatic memory Frieda shared was that of losing her mother and baby brother. Fredzia, at around age 5, had wandered away from the square where all the town's Jewish population were forced to gather. This was the site of daily selections for deportations to forced labor camps, and then to extermination death camps. This particular day, when Fredzia heard her mother's name called, meaning that her mother was to be next to be pushed unto the cattle car. At the time, her mother held her 18-month-old brother on her arm. Fredzia tried to run so that she could be with her mother, calling out "Mama, Mama," but someone grabbed her, put a hand over her mouth and pushed her down to the ground. Frieda later learned that it was her aunt, her mother's sister, and so Fredzia was saved. She wanted to be with her mother, but avoided being selected because of her aunt's actions. This was in October of 1942, during which times there was a one-week major deportation to the extermination camp of Treblinka. Though, Frieda shared, no one knew where these transports were going, or that Frieda would never see her mother or her little brother ever again. She does not know if anyone in the Ghetto knew about the Nazi death camps.
Frieda stated that these memories are traumatic and many of the facts she learned in her adult life were very painful, and yet even years later, and even to this day, she felt that she wanted to know and continues to want to know more. Her "so-called childhood," as she referred to it, was a big hole for her. She asked us during the course of our conversation if we could imagine being a child and not ever having a toy. Her memory, instead, is that of hiding in a mud hole and playing with rats. She remembers having vicious dogs sent after her. She remembers true hunger--not the sensation of missing a meal, or even a day of not eating. This, she stated, is something you cannot get out of a history book--why it is important for us to know the stories of real people, her family, and herself as a very little child.
In October, 1942, the ghetto in Piotrkow had mostly been disbanded. However, the Germans needed slave labor because of the two major factories in Piotrkow. Though there were very few children, Fredzia was among the few. She was here until November 1944, but as the Russians were now in the war and destroying German armies in Poland and American and Allied forces were also in the war fighting against Nazi Germany, the Germans were totally shutting down the slave labor in the Piotrkow Ghetto. They began transporting the remaining slave labor from the factories in Piotrkow. In November of 1944, she was deported with the remaining women and girls to the Concentration Camp "Ravensbruck" in Germany. In January of 1945 she and a group of Jewish women and a handful of Jewish children, after a terrible journey by cattle train cars arrived in the death camp of Bergen-Belsen in Germany. This particular camp is known by many who have read the "Diary of Anne Frank," as this is where Anne Frank and her sister died of Typhus, and where thousands of people were killed by inhuman means. She recalls the four day trip with no food or sanitation, the car crammed with bodies: "A Hell on earth."
In Aril 1945, Bergen-Belsen was accidentally found by the British troops. Frieda recalls stacks, mountains of naked bodies everywhere. She was housed in a barrack with no roof or floor. She stated that Bergen-Belsen was a place of disease and starvation--hell. Frieda, one of the few child survivors under the age of 10, was liberated. "Being free" was something that did not make sense to her; she did not know what that word meant.
The British had to burn everything from the camp. She and her fellow survivors had been wearing the same clothes for all the months there, and when the British lit the fires she could fear the lice crackling. Frieda stated that with all of the dying, with corpses all around you, it doesn't seem unusual anymore because it's all you know.
Fredzia was supposed to be sent to Sweden for adoption with other very young orphaned children from Bergen-Belsen, however her uncle (her mother's brother) and her aunt (her mother's sister) who also survived several slave-labor camps and concentration camps, found a list of child survivors in Bergen-Belsen and noticed a name that resembled Fredzia's. They found the means to get to Bergen-Belsen, in the post-War Displaced Persons (DP) Camp, and they stayed together with her until 1951.
In 1951, at age 13, Frieda moved to the US, began school and began learning English (though she already knew bits and pieces of many different languages, both by schooling and as a means of survival). This, she stated, turned out to be a wonderful experience. She graduated in Linguistics, speaks French, Yiddish, Spanish and enough German to have helped her survive her Holocaust circumstances.
She now has two grown sons, and three grandkids.
Perhaps the most inspirational thing that Frieda said during our time speaking was this: "Every day is a wonderful happening." Despite the trauma Frieda endured as a child, her lingering questions and the loss of her family, Frieda is glad to be alive.
Frieda stated that she only has vague images of her childhood, and those things that she can remember are terrible. She stated that because of the horror she underwent, her memories have no movement, most of these memories are like still-life. All of her memories have been "reconstructed," pieced together through the research she has done in her adult life and the information provided to her by a genealogist/researcher in Poland who is still tyring to find more information. Frieda assumes that everyone in her family has passed away by now, and was only able to find out her real birthday 2 years ago. Until that time, there was no documentation of her life.
However, through the help of this genealogist, Frieda has been able to see and find out astonishing things. Her birth certificate was discovered. She found out her mother and father's birthdays, their marriage date, where her father came from, that she was born at 6AM, and her grandparents' names. She is named after her father's mother.
Frieda continues to search for more information about her family. She doubts if she will ever stop searching and trying to find someone from her family who might have survived the Nazi murders.
posted by Genevieve La Rocca
I think that's crazy. Not just her incredible story but the fact that she's still looking for members of her family that may have survived. It really seems unreal. Darrell
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