An obituary for the history books - This should be required American history reading

Tallahassee Democrat: Richard A. Friedemann made an astonishing flight from his Nazi captors — escaping from a firing squad on the same day Germany surrendered — but the memories of the concentration camps and the murder of his parents tormented him forever.

Friedemann died Aug. 20 at the age of 92 in Tallahassee, Florida, where he spent his final years. After fleeing post-war Europe, he built a life in the United States, where he married, raised two children and had a successful career as a psychiatric social worker in Iowa, Ohio and Florida.
Holocaust survivor kept his secret, fearing ‘history might repeat’.....

"The family was denounced by a traitorous neighbor. The Gestapo arrived. The family was forced from their home with only a few items.”

A Christian woman, Adela Pilch, hid them in a neighboring village, but the einsatzgruppen, the ruthless SS death squads, were closing in. Rather than expose the kind woman and her family, the Friedmanns returned to Kraków.

Richard A. Friedemann’s obituary recalls a hidden past life intricately woven into Poland’s darkest chapter during World War II, but also a life well lived.  By Beth Dalbey https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/holocaust-survivor-kept-secret-fearing-%E2%80%98history-might-repeat%E2%80%99/ar-AAH5oY4

Richard A. Friedemann’s children didn’t have to hastily scratch out a grave for their father, as he and his brother did for theirs. Mr. Friedemann died with dignity at age 92, in the caress of the family who loved him.

That gentle end had been denied to Mr. Friedmann’s father, who died anything but peacefully at the hands of Nazis in the Płaszów Concentration Camp.

The Nazis took Mr. Friedmann’s father. They took his mother. They robbed him of his childhood. They even managed to steal from Mr. Friedmann the part that most defined him — his Jewish heritage, hidden for decades after his escape to the United States.

How he reclaimed his heritage, and how he became one hell of an American, was the theme of an obituary about his life and his death.

Published in the Tallahassee Democrat and other newspapers, it spells out his life in Poland and his success in the United States, where Mr. Friedmann’s life was one of private secrets and very public achievements..

Mr. Friedmann’s father, Leon, had been murdered, as some 3 million Polish Jews were in the notorious death camps of World War II. His body had been thrown on a cart that was rolling toward a mass grave. Mr. Friedmann and his older brother Zygmunt crawled under the internal wire fence and retrieved their father’s body.

They buried him in a grave they dug with their own hands.

Richard A. Friedmann’s journey — hidden from his two children until late in his life for a compelling reason — is a story intricately woven into the darkest chapter in Poland’s history.
‘Love, Good Food And Art’ — Then, The Invasion

Mr. Friedmann was born into an idyllic life in Kraków, Poland, to a family whose home was “filled with love, good food and art,” his obituary said.

The serenity of that gentle life was fleeting.

Mr. Friedmann was not yet a teenager when the Nazis invaded Poland 80 years ago this month, in 1939. The close, loving family scattered, young Richard with his mother to Lvov (now L’viv, Ukraine) and his father and brother Zygmunt to the Polish Army reserve to resist the Nazis, who gripped Poland for five nightmarish years.

When the Soviet Union invaded in 1941, Mr. Friedmann and his mother fled again, this time back to Kraków, where the family was reunited.

The biggest and most important city of southern Poland, Kraków had remained relatively intact, unlike the Polish cities of Warsaw, Poznań and Białystok, which had been largely leveled. The Nazis had seized Kraków as the capital of the General Government, using it as a base to supply the Third Reich.

Though Kraków looked the part of a vibrant city with gleaming windows, perfect pavement and intact roofs, the Nazis had “Germanized” it with totalitarian harshness, racial and national segregation, and the mass slaughter of Poles of Jewish origin. Polish culture had been stripped from the city with the massive theft of works of art.

The Nazi campaign of hate and fear had also disrupted the centuries-long history of Polish-Jewish relations in Kraków. Treachery was everywhere. Despite outward appearances, Kraków was an unfriendly, unwelcoming place for the Friedmanns even by non-Jewish Poles.

From the obituary:
“The family was denounced by a traitorous neighbor. The Gestapo arrived. The family was forced from their home with only a few items.”

A Christian woman, Adela Pilch, hid them in a neighboring village, but the einsatzgruppen, the ruthless SS death squads, were closing in. Rather than expose the kind woman and her family, the Friedmanns returned to Kraków.

The family was back together — brothers, mother and father — but only briefly until they were rounded up and taken to concentration camps.

‘Hellish Journey’ Through Nazi Camps

After they buried their father, brothers Richard and Zygmunt “began a hellish journey” from one concentration camp to another. From Płaszów Concentration Camp, they went to Auschwitz-Birkenau, to Dachau and its Kaufering subcamps near the towns of Lansburg and Augsburg, and finally to the underground Messerschmitt-werke, a former sand mind converted by the Nazis to build fighter aircraft.

From the obituary:

“Surviving numerous brushes with death, Richard and his brother were forced on a death march from one of the sub-camps in April of 1945. The march was designed to kill prisoners through exertion. Those that survived the march were led to a clearing in the woods near Klimach, where they were to be murdered.”

Then, in a stunning real-life rescue that could have been scripted for the movies, the brothers were in the execution fields when a U.S. bomber spotted them and alerted a nearby tank destroyer unit.

He would eventually end up in the United States, leaving behind the brutality of the Nazis.

A Model American

He was a model American. He served in the U.S. Army, serving during the Korean Conflict. After his discharge, he resumed his education, eventually earning both a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Rhode Island and a master’s degree in social work from Simmons College in 1958.

He met his future wife, Katharine Oliver, while working his way through college as a cook in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. They married in 1954, and moved from New England to Iowa after the birth of their second child in 1960, and Mr. Friedmann began his career as a psychiatric social worker.

Mr. Friedmann lived a full and rich life. He was an empathetic psychiatrist who helped “too many to count,” the obituary recounted. He was a civil rights activist,. He was a patron of the arts. He and Katharine hosted several foreign exchange students. He loved traditional Polish folk music, but also Pink Floyd and The Doors. He adored his family, and traveled with them to every U.S. state.
‘Fear That History Might Repeat Itself’

A half-century after the concentration camps had been liberated, Mr. Friedmann told his adult children, Karen and Mark, the secret of “the terrible history of his early life” and what had been taken from him, the obituary said: He was born a Jew.

He had converted to Catholicism after the war and raised his children as Catholics, keeping hidden his previous religion, not out of shame but out of “fear that history might repeat itself.”

It was 1996. He was only 12 when the Nazis tore apart his life and family. He overcame the brutal murders of his parents. He overcame the atrocities of the concentration camps. He overcame the loss of his country and the loss of his identity.

Now it was time to overcome the last obstacle in his life: to share it.

He returned to Poland with his son to reclaim his birthright, one of the only remaining vestiges of his childhood — the home where Leon and Lilla Friedmann had planned to raise their children to adulthood. He had finally won a claim to it after years of legal wrangling, and reconnected with family and friends who also had survived the Holocaust, introducing his son to his lost heritage.

Mr. Friedmann returned to Poland one more time, with both of his children in 2018 for the publication of his book, “One of Many,” an account of his past, written in Polish.

Mr. Friedmann, who died Aug. 20 in Tallahassee, Florida, is survived by his wife, Katharine, or Kay as she is known; his daughter, Karen; his son and daughter-in-law, Mark and Chitnuchar; two grandchildren; four great-grandchildren; and extended family.

The obituary said “services for this humble and incredible man” were held Aug. 31 in Tallahassee. Memorial contributions are to be directed to the Alzheimer Project there.