Gerda Guttfreund Part III: Packing for El Salvador

Gerda lived and worked in Sao Paolo until she met Heinz Guttfreund.

All questions in (....) are mine.

In 1945, as soon as the war ended.

(You met your future husband, Heinz.)

Yes. At that time I was very much in love with a Brazilian poet who I knew would not be the person that I would want for a life companion, but I had a wonderful experience with him. It was a very deep understanding for many things, but not for everything. He was Catholic, very—how do you say it? very religious. He would go to Mass every morning at six. I tried, through the book of Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, through Alyosha, to understand him. We gave each other a lot, and we were friends until he died in 1980. At the time I met Heinz, I was not open to another relationship, but I appreciated him. He was a very transparent person, very fresh, very open and very handsome. We did leave a few times—we did go out a few times, but never anything deeper developed.

But then, a few months after I met him, he had come to ask me if I knew a place that he could take his sister for a vacation. I said, for me, the Jordan campus, campus du Jordan, was the most beautiful place I knew. There’s a lovely Swiss chalet where he could take his sister. I always went to a pensión which I loved very much. And he did take her. And then something happened in the bookstore that I left the bookstore, and they paid me what they had to pay me, one salary per month of the years I had worked. I invited my mother to go to that pensión, not because I thought something would develop between my husband and me, but because I loved the place and I always used to go there.

But when I was there, I thought, I’ll call him and tell him, if he wants me to show him the most beautiful places that I love so much, I will do it. And then, in a few days, walking and talking from morning to night, it developed. There was that love for nature, his love for music, about his social conscience, all the things that were also important to me. And he was a Jew. (chuckles) And in a few days, my mother and his sister left because they were feeling something was developing and they might be in the way. After ten days we really decided to get married a month later.

(Amazing.)

Ja. So this is—

(So you were married in Brazil and then you decided to go on a honeymoon?)

Ja. I wanted to get married in Brazil so that my parents could be present, and so it had to be done very quickly. I invited all the people I knew so that they would see my husband at least. I didn’t invite them for the wedding. We had no money to make such a big party as nowadays people do, but there was like a reception, without any food, after the chuppah, so that people could greet him and we could exchange a few words. I remember when I went down the aisle with Heinz, someone in the community said, “With that one I would go as far away as Central America, too!”

Transcription by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC