Quique Guttfreund: The New "Chele"

In this excerpt, Lea Freund interviews Enrique "Quique" Guttfreund about his first trip to El Salvador from his native Germany.

This interview was conducted on March 2, 1981. Mr. Guttfreund passed away in 1996.
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(How did you travel to El Salvador?)

It was a very nice little boat of the Hapag Line. It had twelve people on it, because over twelve they needed a doctor and they did not want that. It was a freighter. I had very nice company. We all fell in love with a very nice girl but the ship's doctor finally got to her, so we didn't have a chance. Not the ship's doctor, but the ship's officer or something. It stopped everwhere, and we sometimes went to Colombia. I was in Curacao for a day and Aruba (Netherlands Antilles), Cartagena, and we came even back to Cartagena. Whenever there was something to pick up the boat stopped or even went back when the load was good enough. I arrived in the night when I thought the whole world would go to pieces because of a terrible thunderstorm with lightning. Of course, I did not know that this was a very typical storm. I think, the sixth of July in La Libertad, I heard about the crashing of boats into big trees, and it happens I only knew later that an enormous tropical storm and rain had come over Salvador. The thing they still talk about today is that it washed away big bridges, and that the wind ravaged the entire landscape. When I arrived in Salvador, there was no light (electricity). I arrived in July, and we didn't have light until Christmas.

I didn't know much Spanish. When I wanted to talk to a lady in the market in Curacao, she laughed her head off. She could not understand a word. I remember that for instance, the word sons, which is pronounced "hijos..." I would pronounce it like it would be in German-- "eeyos" so after this disaster I gave up trying to learn Spanish by myself. English I knew and all that came by would say I was the "chele." "Chele" means in Salvador "the white man." I was the new white man for Goldtree Liebes, so it was already known that Goldtree Liebes would import somebody and that Mr. Ernesto Liebes, my cousin, was to await me at the pier. That was 1934.

Transcript prepared by the University of Florida Oral History Program. Interview conducted by Lea Freund.