Gerda Guttfreund Part V: Living in El Salvador

Gerda has five children: Andre, Noemi, Miriam, Ruth, and Daniel. Despite her responsibilities at home, she remained active in the greater Salvadoran community....

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

The Jewish community, I was always on the board. I was also president for some of it. I did anything that was needed. And with Perla Meissner we put on plays with children for the Jewish holidays. I was part of the Hevra Kadisha (group of men/women who prepare bodies for burial) and head of the Zionist organization for some time. There were so many things I asked people to give money to that one man who was not very agreeable, when he saw me coming in, he would put his hand into his pocket: “For what is it now?” Because it could have been for widows of the soldiers who died in Israel, for anything for Israel or for here.

(Right. And you raised five children.)

Yes. But that was the advantage of Salvador, that you had help at home. You just had to be there when the children come home, and all the other time was free for you to do the things you felt like doing. Ah, I worked also for the police at the police station with children. Teaching. And I taught also how to read and write. That was general, grown-ups and those children. And later, when the children went to—the Señoras de los Abogados, the women of the lawyers, the wives of the lawyers rented a home in Santa Tecla for these children. They had real teachers, but I used to go to tell stories and acted them out with them. They loved that. And then they always told me they were bored there because it was so much more interesting to be at the police station, where there was so much more going on. And sometimes they asked me, they would like to take a drive, and I would take groups for short drives and they got a kick out of that. (chuckles)

(So all of this continued until 1979.)

Yes.

(When you left Salvador.)

Ja.

I’ll make it very short. I hate to talk about it. We had to leave because they kidnapped and killed Ernst Liebes, who was my husband’s cousin, very good friend and associate.

(You moved to Guatemala.)

Mm-hmm.

(And lived there for a little over a year.)

A year and a half, more than a year and a half. The hardest thing in the beginning was that our son wanted to stay on until his graduation in June, and we left end of March, beginning of April. We had to make conditions that we could be calm about it, but he wanted to graduate with his friends. I understood that, and after all the trauma he had been through, I thought he had a right to choose that. But he had to sleep every three nights in a different home, leave and come back at different hours from school, and not go home. He did go home once, and there was a man standing there, but he went with a car up and he told our Pilar, and she went down and looked at him furiously and he disappeared. But that showed him that he can’t do it.

(Right.)

I don’t know if maybe I told you that. I don’t know what else. Guatemala was very difficult. The people of the community were wonderful to us, but there was a lot of violence in Guatemala too, whole families killed on the street. We used to travel a lot to see our children in the United States, in Israel, our family in Brazil. And sometimes we would go to Salvador, and I was very afraid for my husband. I was feeling like a dead leaf, and I said to my husband, “I need to have roots. I cannot live like that any more.”

Then after a year and a half, he made the decision to try to live away from the business, because he had been in constant contact with the business. After five years, they named him ambassador of the Salvadoreños of El Salvador in Jerusalem. Do you want me to tell about that? We did not like it, but we were more or less forced to do it.

(I’d just like you to tell me one thing: why Quique finally said, “OK, I’ll do it.” He heard something that made him—)

He was called by our—how do you call it? business manager that they had told him that the President had said—because my husband didn’t want to accept—he said he was too old to start a new profession, that he can never count on the Jewish community, which hurt my husband, because he felt very responsible for the Jewish community and always been working in all kinds of positions for the community, and that Israel needed much more the Salvadorean embassy in Jerusalem than Salvador needed an Israeli embassy. So these two things were what made us decide, “OK, let’s hope that after two years they will find someone else.” But it was the third President that even after one year did not say that he should leave, so he was ambassador for nine years.

Transcription by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC