History of Sorts

The photograph above was taken in January 2013, when Freda Wineman met former prime minister David Cameron at 10 Downing Street ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day in 2013.

Unfortunately, Freda Wineman died on 3 January 2022 at age 98. This is just my observation, but so many survivors who lived a long life looked still so young. Freda would have been 89 in that photo, and she doesn’t look a bit of it.

Freda’s story is inspiring—despite all the horrors she endured. She did not give up hope. She was born Dvora Frieda Silverberg on 6 September 1923. She grew up in a Jewish family living in Metz, [Lorraine] in Northwestern France near the German border.

In August 1939, as war was looming, the whole town was evacuated to Southwest France. Following the German invasion of 1940, life in France became increasingly difficult for Jews. Freda’s mother approached a convent to see if they would hide the family. Although the convent agreed to help, the family was arrested before they could go into hiding. They were sent to Drancy transit camp on the outskirts of Paris.

From Drancy, the whole family was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Upon arrival, they had to undergo the selection process. There were a number of prisoners surrounding the new arrivals, and they told the older women to take babies from the younger women. Freda’s mother took a baby from a young Dutch woman and was sent to one side with Freda’s brother, Marcel. Freda followed her mother but was told to stand in the other line, as her mother was to look after the children. Unbeknownst to them, they were sent to the gas chamber. Freda was taken with the other women selected for work. She was disinfected and tattooed with the number A.7181. At first, Freda worked digging trenches in the camp. Two months after arriving, Freda was selected to be part of a work detail known as the Kanada Kommando. They worked very close to the gas chambers, sorting the belongings of prisoners and those murdered.

Freda struggled to speak about her wartime experiences. She was persuaded to give an interview after attending a survivor’s reunion in Israel in 1980. At the time of her interview with Taffy Sassoon in the late 1980s. Below are some extracts from the interview.

“The Appells were the worst, the Appells, having to get up at half past three in the morning, and, and standing for Appell for an hour and a half, without hardly any food, or anything to drink, a lot of them collapsed, and a lot of them already died by then. The conditions, I don’t have to tell you, I suppose you read them more than once, is that people slept four in a bunk, which means that you had to sleep sideways, you never could sleep flat. We, when we returned from work, we were distributed, I think we got, like a dog, like throw a piece of bread to an animal, that’s how it came to us, you know, each one piece of bread. I think the most awful thing that happened to us, was that we were never allowed to go to the toilet when we needed to go. When you were for Appell for an hour and a half, you know, and you have had terrible diarrhoea, and other, you know, you felt you had to go to the toilet, you were not allowed to go, and therefore you soiled yourself, already for, in the beginning of the day, and you had to live with that for the rest of the day. And the same happened when you were at night, you were not allowed to go out, and you had to learn to wait and wait till you really collapsed, you know, and I think that was, that was so terrible, that it’s difficult to, to understand what you suffer when you cannot, when you’re not allowed to go to a toilet when you have to go, especially that you have terrible stomach aches, and terrible tummy aches, because the food was bad, and wrong. And if you did soil yourself, they would beat you up, so you know, you couldn’t win, you just couldn’t win. And to wash, there was a kind of cold tap somewhere, where everybody had to go in, there was a little water, I can’t remember that we had soap. As I said, I had a toothbrush, but I had nothing to put on it, but I had a toothbrush.”

During the interview, she recalled the story of Mala, a Belgian woman who worked in the camp’s offices as a translator. Freda remembers how this relatively privileged position allowed Mala to keep her hair (camp inmates had their heads shaved) and wear ordinary clothing.

TAFFY SASSOON:
What’s the story of Mala?

FREDA WINEMAN:
Yes, Mala. She was young, she was nice looking, I think she had hair, she had hair, and she was dressed, can’t remember how she was dressed, if she was dressed in civilian clothes or if she was, she might have even been dressed in ordinary clothes, not in the striped clothing, because she was a translator, you know, and she was in the offices.

TAFFY SASSOON:
Where was she from?

FREDA WINEMAN:
Belgium. The only thing we knew is that she tried to escape, you know, she tried to escape in a German uniform, with another man, in German uniform, she got it, I don’t know how, and they were going out of the Camp, and they were going to take a message out of the Camp, to tell the world, and apparently it was planned, fantastically planned, with probably the co-operation of somebody in the Camp, maybe, to get out, well, that far. The clothing and everything. And they were caught, nearly out of the Camp, and then the sirens went, the whole Camp—everybody had to stand appell, and we heard that there was an escape, they dragged her back, there were, we heard they were going to hang her, but she cut her wrists, and therefore, unfortunately, that’s what we heard, they took her right to the crematorium. Of course, there was a curfew afterwards, I don’t know how long. Nobody was allowed out.”

In this part of the interview, she addresses her experiences in Vichy, France stating her opinion on French collaboration with the Nazis. She tells interviewer Taffy Sassoon that the new director of the company she worked for gave her a false identity card with a non-Jewish sounding name so that she could go on holiday. He did this by using official rubber stamps left in the office by the previous company director, who had also been the mayor of a nearby town. On her return from the holiday, Freda was asked to hand back the identity card. She said that the company could easily have issued these fake papers to her and her family and saved their lives—but in her opinion—they lacked the courage to do so.

FREDA WINEMAN:
“When I entered this office, there was an old Director, he must have been in his seventies, and there was a lady Director, she was, I think, his girlfriend, and there were other people in the office, and then he was, at one time, a Mayor of a little town next to Saint-Étienne, and he had all the stamps, you know.

TAFFY SASSOON:
The rubber stamps?

FREDA WINEMAN:
Rubber stamps, in his office. Came a young Director who took over, and that was 1943, and I wanted to go on a holiday with other girls to the mountains, in Tignes in the Savois, the card I showed you with all the girls on it, and I couldn’t go under my name. So this Director, he liked me, he said, “No problem,” he said, “I’ll make you a false carte d’identité” but the stamps that he used were all from the other Director, do you understand? So I had a false name, I was called, because of the initials, you must at least keep your initials, in case there are initials on your handkerchiefs or somewhere. I was called Françoise Suvergnay, which is absolutely the name of the region, F.S., and I travelled with the other girls in the mountains, and we had a nice time. Some of the girls must have been Jewish too, but they would, nobody would say it. And when I returned from this holiday, only ten days, I think, in the mountains, I went back to the office, and the lady director said, “I hear you got a new carte d’identité, which has really the stamp of the former Director. I have to, you have to give it back to me.” You see, they could have given us, the whole family, cards. They didn’t have any gumption or any courage, you see, the young man did it, the young Director. But they said the young Director had no business of doing it, it wasn’t his stamp. But there were very few people who really stuck up, stuck out their necks, you know, to save a few Jewish people. I think only, I only know very few people who were actually helped by the French. Very few. I told you, as patriotic as I was in those days, you know, as little I am today. I have, I was really as French as all the French, you know when you are young—and today I have no feeling for it anymore. I said, “When they could hand over the Jews, on a platter, as they did, without a helping hand, I can have no feeling for them anymore. And whatever they do for us”, I said, “There’s nothing. Nothing.” They let us go on those trains, and they let us go away, and they didn’t do anything. They didn’t try to stop it in any way. So you can’t be patriotic anymore, can you?”

In 1950, Freda married and moved to England, having two children. Her husband David died at age 42. In January 2009, Freda returned to Auschwitz to visit, and it was featured on Blue Peter as part of their Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations. Freda continued to live in London and shared her testimony with students throughout the United Kingdom.

Sources

https://www.het.org.uk/news-and-events/1084-freda-wineman-bem-1923-2022

https://www.bl.uk/voices-of-the-holocaust/collection-items?page=2

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