On the mass exile.

Today, Roberto Freund explains how his father and other relatives saved family members from Hitler's wrath. Various uncles, aunts, grandparents, and cousins were transported from Germany to Central America; some took it well while others did not.

Also interesting in today's excerpt is the fact that Roberto's grandfather was saved from a German work camp by an individual in the Salvadoran diplomatic corps.

Read on....
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(How did that make you feel, to be called a foreigner?)

Fine. I mean, there was no—

(It didn’t bother you?)

No, it was not— (chuckles) In El Salvador, the Jewish people didn’t suffer like other groups that took the brunt of people’s enmity. Those are the very large Lebanese population, Christian Lebanese.

(Do you know about when they arrived?)

About the same time as the Jewish people, in then late 1800s and then some.

(And they still got the brunt of a lot of—?)

They could not join a club. Although in some instances Jewish people also, in some cases. There was a tennis club, and the Jews were not admitted there.

(Do you remember what that club was called?)

Salvador Tennis Club.

(Salvador Tennis Club. And if a Jew applied, what would happen? They just wouldn’t be accepted?)

Right.

(And the Lebanese were not accepted either?)

They weren’t accepted either!

(So what happened because of that? Was a new club formed?)

Eventually the Jewish people formed a wonderful club which would accept anybody.

(Did the Lebanese join, or no? They didn’t join. Did they establish their own club?)

No. I don’t think so.

(But this club that the Jews formed—)

That was the Círculo Deportivo Internacional.

(Were there also non-Jewish families?)

Yes.

(So it was open to anybody?)

It was open, yes. But it was started by Jewish people because they were not accepted in some of the other clubs.

(Was your father very instrumental in that?)

Actually, my uncle, my mother’s brother, was a great tennis player, and he was instrumental in participating in that.

(And his name?)

William, Wilhelm, in Spanish Guillermo—

(Cohn?)

As a matter of fact, he had changed his name to Korn, with a K! Guillermo Korn.

(So just to backtrack a little bit, your parents lived in Salvador. Did they bring over their families? Because you mentioned your uncle.)

My uncle was two or three years younger than my mother. Those were the only two children of the Cohns. (pause) He came in—way, way back already. Let’s see. I was born in ’27, and he was not there yet, so my uncle must have come there in ’28 or ’29, something like that. And all the rest of the family in Germany thought that there was no place in the world like Germany. In 1935, when my parents took us on a vacation to Germany, my family went to see their relatives, my mother’s father—my mother’s mother had died in 1928. She had cancer. Before, when she was so ill, my parents did go to Germany, in 1928, to visit her. I was eight months old, so I don’t remember too much about it. (laughs)

But the next time I was eight years old, and I remember everything. In 1935, when my parents went to Germany with us, they were shocked to see what was going on with Hitler already. I was only eight years old, and I was scared. There was such an authoritarian society already.

I remember we went to Berlin to see one of my father’s brothers. We walked to one of the big buildings, government buildings. I was eight years old and I was happy as a lark, and I was whistling, for fun. A uniformed German SOB made me stop, because “You can’t make noise in the government building!” Whatever it was. My parents tried to convince everyone in my family to start making plans to get away. This was impossible. Nobody did anything. By 1938, my father’s brother, who lived in Berlin, they moved and went to Guatemala, because one of my father’s brother’s had moved to Guatemala in (pause) probably about, let’s see, probably about the time I was born. My uncle Herbert Freund was the father of Trixie Wolf. And Bina, you know Bina? So in 1939, my uncle George came out and went to Guatemala, where both my uncle and my father and our relative—the Engels, in Guatemala a very well-known Jewish family. They were also related to the Mugdans, because the first Mrs. Engel was a Mugdan. That’s a whole—I have a whole chapter on the Engels. The Engels became very wealthy, and he was quite charitable at the same time. Between my uncle, the Engels and my father, they set up Uncle George in a leather tanning factory in Quezaltenango. Have you been in Quezaltenango? It is the second-largest city in Guatemala.

So up to ’38, nobody had decided to move. But then things came about so quickly in Germany, with the Kristallnacht and everything. My father’s oldest brother was a doctor in Großstelitz. He moved also about 1938. And also my father’s only sister, Frida Kempe, they were living in Breslau, and they also moved out and brought my grandmother with them, my father’s mother. They came to El Salvador and they couldn’t go any other place. My grandmother was moved to Guatemala and moved in with my uncle Herbert in Guatemala, and she lived there until the end of her days, in Guatemala City. The Kempes, my father’s sister, had two boys. The older had been taken out of Germany long before—not long, but a couple of years before everybody else and was brought to Salvador. My father saw that he became employed at the business.

By the way, backtracking a little bit, my father, within the first five years or something like that after having come to El Salvador, was made a partner of Saul Mugdan. So that’s why it became Casa Mugdan, Freund & Cie. OK. Then the saddest case was my mother’s father. He felt, I guess, the safest of all, because they lived in a little country that was in a different planet, (laughs) that little town of Großstein. He had the largest business in town, a general store, and he was—his father already was a very important person in town. He had—in other words, my great-grandfather had that business already in Großstein.

My parents in 1935 begged them particularly to get the hell out of there. No way. In nineteen—at the end of 1938 or something like that, he was abducted from home by the Gestapo or whoever, the SS people, and he was sent to a concentration camp. It was only through the help of the Salvadoran diplomatic corps that he was released from the concentration camp and sent back home. He then packed up, finally, a little late, and came to El Salvador.

(So he survived?)

He survived. His wife, my grandmother, had died in 1928. Four or five years later, he remarried a very nice lady. She was the one who suffered the most from his abduction. She had to survive his being taken away and follow some basic instructions they had, like throwing all their jewelry down the septic tank. “Don’t give it to the Germans. Throw it away.” They were able to take many things with them at the time, including his Mercedes Benz car. My grandfather had a little Mercedes Benz, marvelous! And that they brought. Much of his furniture from home came to Salvador.

All that stuff was packed in crates with big lifts like they do containers now. They arrived long before their stuff, which took months to get to El Salvador. It finally arrived at port, and it had to go through customs. So my uncle took my grandfather to the port of La Libertad to receive the stuff. I was very close to my uncle. I always tagged along with him. So I went along for this trip, too. By the time we came home in the evening, something was very strange at the house. To make a long story short, his wife had poisoned herself. She couldn’t take it. So that was quite an end.

Transcription by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC