Revolutions and Final Exams

Roberto Freund re-caps some of the more fantastical adventures of his youth.

All questions in parentheses are mine.
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My grandfather lived well, doing lots of wonderful things. He was a real—a man who could do everything, what do they call that? A Renaissance man. He brought to El Salvador the know-how of beekeeping for honey. It wasn’t done in El Salvador. He had huge bee things in a big yard. He was a marvelous home farmer, growing any vegetable you ever wanted to see. He introduced the planting of asparagus in El Salvador, did things of that sort, etc.

(You attend García Flamenco until high school. What happens after high school?)

Sent to the States, to college.

(Did you have a choice, or did you just—how did you figure out where you wanted to go?)

In those days, not like today, the pupil didn’t have the choice of going to see colleges all over the place, etc. etc. Nothing. I mean, we were grateful to be able to be sent out for a better education. The war had not officially ended yet, and if—my brother and I finished school at the same time. We didn’t start at the same time, but he waited for me for a couple of years. To go to the States under the circumstances, we risked the possibility of being drafted, which my parents would like to avoid. So the plan was to go to Canada, to McGill University. We— (pause) afterwards remind me to tell you something about graduation. We were part of a nationwide strike to topple the government, and it did.

(In El Salvador?)

In El Salvador, yes. I’ll get back to that later. So we went to Canada without yet having been accepted. It looked quite feasible when we got there, but it took forever for them to act. To make a long story short, (chuckles) we ended up not being accepted. Why? Their quota for Jews was filled. In McGill University.

(So what next?)

What next? Back to New York, where the doctor, my uncle the doctor, was, and started to bombard as many of the colleges that could possibly be available for us. My brother wanted to become a farmer. He wanted to study agriculture. I would have loved to become an architect. But because my father was in the building supply business, it would have been bad for my father’s business to have an architect in the family. I decided to study business administration, so it didn’t make much difference where I went. Among the places we applied to at this second stage was the University of Wisconsin, which was A-Number One in agriculture. So that’s how we ended up in Madison, Wisconsin.

(laughs) I’ll quickly tell you about what happened at the time we would have graduated in Salvador, in 1944.

(Yes, please.)

At the end of 1944, we should have graduated. I’ll tell you afterwards about what that meant in El Salvador, to take final exams. The well-known—in El Salvador well-known dictator Maximiliano Martínez had been in power for thirteen years. He really had been very good for the country, but he stayed on too long, and even his friends tried to tell him, “Enough is enough.” And he wouldn’t, because nobody but him could run the country. So a group of officers and private people organized a revolution to kick him out. The revolution failed. He was a very strict person. The people, the higher strata of people who organized this were the children of some of his friends. He had them all killed.

(The friends, too?)

The ones who took part, the younger generation. The country was—

(They were executed in public?)

No, but—

(They were executed.)

Yes.

(What year was this?)

’44. So the government continued, and there was really total dissatisfaction among the people for what he did, for having killed well-known, wonderful people. Nothing seemed to work. It was difficult. The revolution had failed, although it had been very well organized. But the guys were marvelous strategists. It started by university students who had the idea of starting a nation-wide strike. The university students went on strike, and soon after, all the school children went on strike. That was so new for somebody like a dictator. It’s like Gandhi, not with arms, but with peaceful means. The strike lasted a long time, relatively.

(Like around a few months?)

Probably about a month. He continued to be in power, and the country was at a standstill. One boy, a friend of ours, the son of a American, as a matter of fact, but with a Salvadoran mother, was moving around with a policemen on the street, and the police ended up—he got so angry he shot him, dead. When that happened, the American Ambassador went to General Martínez and told him to get out. And that did it. I mean, the country was at a standstill. OK.

All that happened during the time when our final exams were supposed to have taken place, and final exams not only for your last year, but—at the end of every year in high school, final exams were not taken in school. You had to go to the Instituto Nacional, which was the federal high school, so to speak, which was governed by (pause) a French (pause) teacher, but I mean, quite more than a teacher.

(A principal?)

A principal, yeah. And it was done under military supervision.

(This was every year, or just this year?)

Every year. It was the most horrible thing.

(So no cheating allowed?)

Oh, God!

(How frightening!)

Yeah. So we had to wait with this. We had already prepared for the final exams. You have to prepare the five years of high school. So we had all been prepared for it, and then it got delayed for about six months. So it finally took place in the late spring of 1945. Soon after we had the exams, my mother took us, took Martita, too, on a trip to Canada, at first to the States, naturally. (pause) We flew to—let’s see, how did one fly in those days, in 1945? You had to fly to Guatemala. Then we took a night flight to New Orleans. I still remember that, a Boeing Stratocruiser. Those things were used for long flights. You could even have a berth in it, like in a train. The flight went from Guatemala to Merida, Mexico. And then from Merida to New Orleans.

We spent a few days in New Orleans, getting to know the place. We happened to take a streetcar, and something went wrong. People were trying to tell us something, but we didn’t understand what the hell they wanted: we sat in the black section of the train. I had never seen a Negro in my life before. In Salvador there was one Negro, Mr. Banderas. There were no Negros.

From New Orleans we went to New York by train, still very difficult to travel by train because the war was still on. It was full of soldiers going and coming.

In New York we stayed in somebody’s home, a friend of my uncle, some ex-German people. We stayed quite a bit of time in New York before we continued to Montreal. While in New York we had strict orders to go say hello to Tante Fanny Bloom, who you may recall from my notes, she and her husband David Mugdan had—he had gone—after they were married, they moved to San Francisco. She was from San Francisco. David was invited to join the bank of the father-in-law, and David was sent on a fact-finding mission to Guatemala, because Guatemala was looking for a government loan. He accomplished his mission. In those days, the people who worked to do that, for international loans, were given a finder’s fee on the table. No monkey business.

The finder’s fee was so large that David and Fanny decided to go back to Europe. They went to Hamburg, where he was—well, she went to school there, and he was living there, I guess. Hamburg was a wonderful city to live in. They rented a suite in the best hotel in Hamburg, which was the Vier Jahreszeiten, the Four Seasons Hotel. They lived happy there forever after, had no children, just had fun, without the children. They lived there until 1934, when he died, and then she, Fanny, decided to return to the States, but not to go back to San Francisco, where she was from. I presume her parents had long died. She decided to move to New York, where they went to the Plaza Hotel, and she rented a suite where she lived for the rest of her life. We met her in 1945. I think she lived till 1948 or something like that. She had a younger niece of his as a companion. And it was David Mugdan, after having been in Guatemala, who wrote home to oodles of nephews and nieces, nieces and nephews, about what wonderful opportunities there are in places like Guatemala. And that is how my part of the family started going, not to Guatemala, but they ended up by mistake in El Salvador.

(By mistake?)

By mistake. By acts of God, let’s call it. The ship that they were on to go to Guatemala didn’t continue because there had been a revolution in Guatemala, or there was a (pause) health problem, you know, they frequently had outbreaks of who knows what, bubonic plague or who knows. So the ship only went to El Salvador. That’s how the first Mugdan landed in El Salvador.

(And that was Saul?)

No, Félix Mugdan, who had had enough of Salvador and wanted to return home. He asked for his brother to come out, and his brother was Saul. And Saul asked my father to come. And that is how the Freunds landed in Central America.

Transcription by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC