Prague, 5. XII. 1945

Protocol

recorded with Ms. Dr. Cäcilie Friedmann, b. 2. IV. 1914, Prisoner of the concentration camps Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, Zwodau, residing in Prague I., Králodvorská 15, czech nationality, doctor

In a book about the Japanese- occupied parts of China it says at one point: Of those who remain at the head of the oppressed people under fascist terror, or who put themselves at the top, there are two types: the majority are weaklings or cowardly opportunists who comfortably become the executive organ of the oppressors, and then there are few and these are the best of their people who, despite the terror, remain in their places in order to save the utmost that can still be saved and in order not to leave their people completely to their own and foreign oppressors.

Of these few, I am fortunate to have known three in the Jewish question sector:

there is above all the chief rabbi Dr. Leo Beck 1Note 1: Baeck, Jakob Edelstein, and Richard Friedmann.

What they have in common is that they voluntarily stayed at their posts, despite that their loved ones and everything that made up their personal life was or could be outside the borders of Germany, originally out of solidarity with the community and later with the awareness that, thanks to the commitment of their person and their abilities, they could be of use to the community in need.

It is known that Dr. Leo Beck 2Note 2: Baeck could have gone to England immediately after Hitler came to power. He accepted the invitation for his children and stayed at his post, where he wanted to hold out as long as Jews lived in Germany.

At the time of the German occupation of Prague, Jakob Edelstein was in possession of documents that allowed him and his family to emigrate to Palestine. At that moment he too felt that departure would be a desertion.

I knew Richard Friedmann from September 1st, 1939 until his death in Auschwitz on May 22nd, 1944. I want to report in detail about his life and work. Jakob Edelstein, with whom he bonded in friendship and comradeship for life and death during these 5 years, wrote to Richard Friedmann on the occasion of a decisive day in his life: You were the bravest and the strongest of us all. To what strength and daring you brought us, I added calm consideration.

I believe that too, and all friends who knew his life and work from close up know that, because the great outside world was only allowed to know very little about this work and this life at this time.

Brief life story.

Richard Friedman is the grandson of Jewish scholars Meir Friedmann, known as Meir Ischalom, whose family came from Košice. Richard Friedmann's father suffered from meningitis as a child and was sickly throughout his life. He was a professional civil servant of the Vienna Jewish Community and in his free time also dealt with scientific and mainly social issues. The mother Elsa Engel came from an old Viennese Jewish family, she was the sister of the later official director of the Viennese religious community Emil Engel, in whose house Richard Friedmann, orphaned at an early age, found his home. At age 11, R. F. lost his father, and at the age of 16 his mother too.

Despite his unusual talent, he decided to give up on high school and attend a business school in order to be able to take care of himself and his sister, who was 5 years younger than him, independently. After graduating from commercial school, he worked as a civil servant in several private companies and then also joined the Jewish community in Vienna as a professional civil servant at the age of 21 . Here he worked according to the regulations of the religious community in various departments, social, medical etc.

In his free time he acquired a deep and comprehensive knowledge, mainly in questions of history and national economy. But there were no questions in the field of human knowledge that were completely alien to him, so that he turned out to be a concise personality in every circle, his versatility in the circle of friends and acquaintances was proverbial, and he in the years in which I knew him, between the ages of 31 and 35, represented an authority for his world without discussion and in a natural way, which, however, was never found to be unpleasant due to his natural being, his warm disposition and his humor.

In keeping with the tradition of his milieu, he was a conscious Jew, proud of his affiliation, and was organized as a Zionist in his youth. In accordance with his personal lifestyle, he was cosmopolitan and did not expose himself politically until 1938. With the day of the occupation of Austria by the Nazis, his whole lifestyle changed completely. The playful, artistic, multi-faceted young man of life suddenly turned into a steely, disciplined, fanatical and conscious fighter, for the cause of Judaism, originally within the framework of the Jewish community of Vienna, where he had been a civil servant for 8 years during this time.

From that day until his death, his life was fully in the service of this struggle, his work became consciously the central problem of his life, private life and relationships with people close to him were explicitly and factually set to the last plan. R. F. had a clear idea of ​​the situation and the position of the enemy parties in relation to one another in all phases of this work. Historically, he differentiated between several phases in his work and the way he saw them, that's how I want to describe them.

I.

Work in Vienna. Effective rescue work, emigration operation

Seen in general, R. F.’s work, like the history of the persecution of Jews in Nazi - Germany, went through 2 major phases. There were 2 campaigns that the criminal gangs organized against the defenseless minority.

A campaign of robbery, which in addition to the political aim pursued in every phase of distracting and dumbing down its own masses, the Nazis were primarily interested in the material and intellectual goods of the Jews. It is the time from 1933 to approx. at the beginning of the war. During this time, despite all the brutalities and the occasional murder, Jews were still released from the concentration camps if they only left everything there that pleased the Nazis. Already at the beginning of the war and especially after 1941, when there were no more cheap victories on the battlefields outside, all the evil instincts of the threatened beasts were released against the only defenseless enemy, the Jews. The great murder campaign began , the time of the mass transports to the east, the time of Maidanky, Treblinky and Auschwitz. Until the time of the mass transports, Friedmann also distinguished between two basically different phases of work and struggle. In the years up to the beginning of the war, an effective saving of human life could be achieved by emigrating to countries outside the area of fascist rule. After September 1st, 1939, when the possibilities of emigration were maximally limited, the achievable goal that he had in mind was the preservation of the individual, ie the preservation of the physical existence under the best possible conditions until the annihilation of fascism.

The working years in Vienna 1938/39 thus represent the first and most positive phase.

It is common knowledge that 120,000 Jews were able to emigrate to freedom from Vienna within a single year and that in terms of numbers Vienna was the largest aid organization to save European Jews. It is difficult to determine how far R. F. was involved in the planning of this work. At that time he was 27 years old and was not one of the leading officials in the religious community. As an old and large institution, the Viennese religious community certainly had people of political stature who adjusted themselves realistically to the given situation. But the generosity of the whole action corresponded so much to the essence R. F.. That he was definitely one of the initiators of the planning and the fact that the practical implementation on this scale and at this speed and in its entire form would be inconceivable without him is completely undeniable. It was a gigantic, organizational, technical and political achievement that was accomplished in that year. It is known that the Jewish action in Vienna started immediately after the occupation with unusual violence and brutality. In the first days homes were looted, Jewish residents tortured, raped and driven into the street, there was excessive panic and confusion and in this situation the leading men of the Jewish Community were put in prison, the institutions of the Jewish community blocked and funds confiscated. The leading men managed to save something from the Nazis and Emil Engel gave this first illegal money as the first illegal fund to Richard Friedmann before his arrest.

From this money, the first emergency kitchens were built on some streets and squares of Vienna in the first few nights, where some of the helpless people who were driven out of their apartments found a meal for the first time. In the night and in the fog somebody brought a kettle, somebody else brought a sack of potatoes, and all these people

disappeared into the darkness of the night. But this wasted time lasted only a few days. Apparently it was well-directed direction that the Nazis used to give the Jews a vivid picture of their situation and their entrenchments. The leaders of the religious community were dismissed, most of the people came back to their homes and the slogan emigration was officially used. The Jews had actually learned from the lesson. They realized that a political or legal fight with these beasts outside human society was pointless and that at the moment clearing the battlefield was the only option. The entire organization of the religious community was put at the service of this work at that moment and the religious community took over the implementation of the action.

Above all, the bureaucratic process for the emigrants was simplified, as the emigrants no longer had to visit 8 to 10 different offices in different parts of the city, which at the beginning took weeks to months, but the matter was centralized. Emigration Office: from each authority there was an official who took the relevant document for processing. With a single appearance, churning out, so to speak, the tax office, police certificate, property matters and everything else were handed over. From here, however, the processing by the individual authorities began, which was no longer carried out by the individual, but by the officials of the religious community.

You had to know Richard Friedmann, his physical strength, his fanatical zeal for work, his tenacity and his speed, in order not to regard the description of his work performance in Vienna as an exaggeration. Myself and all the friends from Prague who later in Theresienstadt heard the stories of its population of Vienna (Desider Friedmann, Stricker and a.) the extent of the use and performance R. F. recorded during this time. Fortunately, there are probably tens of thousands of those who came abroad at that time and they will certainly remember the office in Prinz Eugenstrasse. For months, from 4 am and usually until 12 at night kilometer-long lines of men stood there, and for every hour in these many months R. F. was at his place or the staff of his employees, whom he brought up to the same fanaticism and hard work and with whom he had a kind of deep war comradeship. When he was not in the emigration office, he found himself in ineffable contact with the most diverse authorities, both the Gestapo and the civil administration of Vienna, or in negotiations with foreign authorities for the purpose of obtaining visas or setting up technical travel options. Anyone who has to do with the repatriation of a few hundred or a thousand people to their homeland today and the weeks or months it takes to do so will appreciate which apparatus was maintained to transport 120,000 people abroad in order, depending on the Nazi authorities. Almost every single case required fighting and negotiations with the Gestapo and with the civil authorities regarding the settlement of the financial situation, required concealment and forgery of documents, required intervention and requests, because the Nazis' system was, in principle, designed to make every situation more difficult and not to facilitate it. Despite all the horror, the Jews from Vienna did not leave the country naked and poor as beggars, most of them were able to save at least some of their belongings for their new home. Another part, of which the Gestapo never learned anything, went to the illegal funds of the religious community, from which the emigration and transport costs were paid for those who did not have any funds themselves.

The action was carried out as generously as possible collectively and independently of the material possibilities. There were those who emigrated who had enough initiative and pushed for it. This was particularly true and that is the most positive part of the performance of the Vienna community, for all those people - and there were thousands after the Grünspan affair - who were in custody. As already mentioned in the introduction, after interventions and negotiations with the Gestapo it was possible to get arrested Jews out of the concentration camps on the basis of foreign visas and the corresponding ship or flight tickets. The thousands of visas to various countries around the world, such as Shanghai, Chile, Fiji, etc., were automatically issued in the name of the relatives who reported the arrest. Whole ships were completely bought up for weeks and months by the religious community for the transport of emigrants, and there were airlines that were also occupied by the religious community for weeks and months and were not accessible to other civilians.

And then the Viennese children! Friedmann later said that it was one of the hardest hours of his life when he apparently harshly and brutally insisted to mothers of infants to 20-year-olds to put their children on the Kindertransport to England. Many tears were shed to accompany these only saved Jewish European children on their journey into life. He himself accompanied almost all the Kindertransports to London. The series of his warm and humorous stories and anecdotes from this time of positive work performance included the stories of the small children who were still carried in baskets and the boys and girls in adolescence who participated in the collective of travel and the romance of the company and among whom he had hundreds of small, beloved friends, among the most beautiful. He smuggled a few hundred, sometimes outside of the official lists, a few times he was imprisoned at the Dutch border for a few hours or a few days , but that was nothing unusual, because imprisonment and mortal danger were in dealing with the so-called "higher authority" the daily bread. How often he was arrested in Vienna for hours or for days he did not know himself later, about twenty times. The negotiations were by no means always carried out in a civil or friendly tone, but on their own.

But apart from all these ordinary emigrants and those from the concentration camps and the Emigration Office Austria who left officially, there was a group of people who had to disappear without the Gestapo learning of their existence. These went illegally across the borders and the execution of such emigration was taken over by the official officer of the Office for Jewish Emigration under the direction of the Secret State Police Richard Israel Friedmann, as he was known at that time. He was illegally across the border himself a few times, because his principle was never to negotiate from the green table and apart from planning and organizing, he practically participated in the implementation himself. Young and elderly men from his Vienna Guard, which later spoke in Theresienstadt, characterized R. F.: From this time: Richard was our leader and we obeyed him blindly, because we had convinced us that everything he asked of us should always be done first.

Psychological situation

At this point I would like to raise a question of principle. In circles of the general public who had no insight into the work of the Jewish representatives, and even more so in circles abroad who did not know life directly under fascist terror, it must appear problematic and puzzling that a Jew is de facto right - and achieved success in negotiations with the Gestapo, powerless, even in the highest position . One wonders, rightly, at what price did the Gestapo make concessions? After all, it was the master of the life and death of the Jewish individual, or why did it allow itself to be deceived and deceived for months and sometimes years?

For us, who have seen the work up close, behind the scenes, so to speak, or we have seen the Nazi rule in concentration camps, this matter is less of a mystery.

Above all, one essential fact needs to be established. Most of the Nazi henchmen, almost all of the SS - Unter - Ober - Sturmführer, etc., were dull, stupid, uneducated, incompetent creatures. Their only obligatory ability was cruelty and brutality and enough political stupidity to believe in the victory of the gang of criminals of which they were the beneficiaries to the last moment. The blunt, incompetent journeymen now had to carry out the so-called solution of the Jewish question, so, as pointless as the matter was ideologically, they had to carry out a concrete work plan. In the first phase it was the emigration action, later the regulation of Jewish life, and when the Jews fell more and more out of the framework of normal state life through sweeping legislation, formed a kind of state. This emigration campaign, and later the regulation of Jewish life had to be carried out somehow. And since the Gestapo creatures were themselves incapable and, especially later, were unable to do everything themselves numerically, they had to leave the implementation to a large extent to people of the oppressed people. So in a certain sense they needed people who were superior to the incompetent, and if the latter was sufficiently intelligent to see through their inability and weakness behind the official position of power of the Nazis, then he had psychologically gained power over them. And now comes the most essential part: it depended entirely on the character of the individual whether he used this power for his or her advantage or for the benefit of the community. Unfortunately, in most cases, the former was the case. And so much has the masses got used to seeing a traitor or weakling in a leader of an oppressed ethnic group that the few really strong and combative natures are easily seen from the same perspective. It is like, for example, in the field of some humanities, which are often so compromised by false prophets or charlatans that those who really seek the truth have to fight against a forest of prejudices, for example, the field of parapsychology.

We saw the same thing every day in the prisons and concentration camps. It was always people who organizationally or for example, particularly medically gifted, held leading positions in the self-administration. For the most part, it was the kapos, the bloc and camp elders, who exploited their position of power in known damaging ways for themselves and their closest clique. On the other hand, most of the political prisoners owe their lives to the great illegal organization which had people of special talent and spe-

cial moral strength in leadership positions and which put their position entirely at the service of the salvation of their comrades.

Erich Steinbeck 3Note 3: John Steinbeck captured the problem of the representatives of the oppressed people under fascist rule in a wonderful way in his novel Moonless Nights 3Note 3: "The Moon is Down".. He describes the occupation in Norway and describes how the Nazis force the old mayor of the city, despite the fact that he is an open enemy of their system and makes the greatest difficulties in carrying out their plans, to remain in his place, even at the price of great concessions. You need him because he masters the machine, because he is popular and enjoys the trust of his fellow citizens. Because that was another diabolical moment in the practice of the Nazis, that they wanted to exploit the popularity of even the enemy, but at a time when the public opinion was still there to a certain extent. In the last bloody years they dropped any mask, at that time they really only needed executive bodies. The Mayor of Norway, in whose house illegal defensive movement takes place, remains in place despite repeated request for resignation and is only shot in the last phase of the novel.- The book has shaken me deeply, because it portrays the same life which I experienced up close, which I am reporting on here.

- - -

Prague

When the Germans occupied the Czechoslovak Republic on March 15, 1939, the situation of the Jews here was significantly different from that in Vienna. Most of the Jews were completely absorbed in the life of the entire Czech people and had no ties to a central Jewish administrative body. The religious community in Prague was a small, rather unknown office and a large part of the Jewish population did not visit the community for the first time in their lives until this period of occupation. Correspondingly, the civil servants were also small, modest existences who took over the office of cultural officer more from the tendency to lead a quiet, contemplative life - as some later said themselves - than to be somehow politically active. The official representative of Prague Jewry at the time and head of the religious community Dr. Emil Kafka was just in England and understandably did not return to the country after the occupation. His first secretary Dr. Franz Weidmann and his colleagues automatically became the leaders of the religious community.

Dr. Weidmann was a good Jew, an honest, decent, dutiful civil servant, not very strong-willed, strongly influenced, more fearful than courageous and self-confident, and by no means up to the enormous pressure that the changed situation was placing on him. Perplexity and chaos ruled the religious community, which was now placed under a special office of the Gestapo. The establishment of an office for emigration here was also ordered, the organization and implementation of which did not take place. In order to learn from the experiences of fellow sufferers in Vienna, Pragueofficials drove to Vienna, but afterwards the situation was no different.

The representatives of the Zionist organization, to which personalities such as Jakob Edelstein and Dr. Franz Weidmann belonged, among others, had little to do with the Jewish community and Palestine office before the occupation by the Germans.

In order to speed things up, Richard Friedmann was assigned to Prague for a few days in August 1939 as an advisor on questions relating to the emigration campaign. It would lead too far to carry out an in-depth analysis of the mentality of Czech Jews at this point. It was certainly due to the fact that, in contrast to Vienna, the Jews felt the solidarity of the local population here, because almost the entire Czech people naturally saw the German occupiers as a common enemy; perhaps it was also the fact that German fascism in Prague in the first days and weeks was less dramatic, than in Germany and in Vienna; Probably the mentality of the Czech Jews in and of itself was different from that of the Viennese, most of them had lived here for generations and were strongly rooted, while most of the Jews of Vienna had hardly come from the east a generation ago, the times of persecution were still vivid in their memories and they were therefore much more flexible and generous in their thoughts and actions. Anyway, it was the case that R. F. in the first days of his stay in Prague found himself in a completely strange, incomprehensible world. Two worlds faced each other, so to speak.

In the spirit of the Vienna experience and the Vienna program, increased by the troubled times and the nearness of the impending war - August 1939! - Friedmann almost rushed to carry out an emigration campaign in order to transport the greatest possible number of people abroad in the shortest possible time. The so-called public Jewish opinion and accordingly their representatives in Prague responded with the greatest indolence and with the greatest displeasure, most of them spoke openly that they were convinced that the Germans in Czechoslovakia would not proceed so energetically and that yes, War was just around the corner and that it would only be a matter of weeks until the Nazis were destroyed. Friedmann actually faced this mentality in despair and at a loss. With almost brutal openness and clarity, he explained to everyone that he considered such arguments to be nonsense, that every normal person must be clear about the dimensions of the coming war, should not have any useless illusions about the force of the German war machine, he was right with a dispute years ago, he literally said that he thought 7 years of war were possible. He also made it clear to people what German fascism was capable of, especially, and he foresaw clearly that if things go badly for him in the end, of which he was of course convinced from the first moment. At that time, however, his imagination was not enough for gas chambers and Treblinky.

There were innumerable people who, in possession of an opportunity to emigrate, came to ask his advice whether it would stand in favor of still emigrating. To such people he said roughly literally:

For me there is only one point of view and that is out at all costs. They are attached to your stuff, your apartment and your existence and, in the best case scenario, will have saved your life by the end of this war. During this time you probably will have started a new life outside.

It is understandable that such truths, which forced people to give up their rest and comfort, were not felt pleasantly. One reacted with defensiveness, with suspicion and was ultimately more inclined

to accept falsehood and evil will from the preacher of such unpleasant truths in order to maintain his carelessness. (Incidentally, this sad spectacle of indolence has been repeated until recently, after all very few believed in gas chambers and similar atrocities when all the signs indicated it. People liked to lie to themselves in order to keep uncomfortable truths at bay.)

During this time I got to know Friedmann, and I have to describe some personal impressions that may illuminate the situation. The first time we met, I got into a heated argument with him. He told me about the atrocities in Vienna and about their work. Fanatical hatred and contempt for the German people in general spoke from his whole being, with an intensity that I had never experienced before and on the other hand - as it seemed to me at the time - a downright morbid Jewish self-confidence and an arrogance that I had never experienced before. In my attitude at that time (September 1939) I was outraged by the condemnation of an entire people like the Germans and on my part stuck to the theory of the criminal clique, on the other hand I saw in him a wild Chauvinist Jewish nationalist. We two faced each other as two worlds. He had just experienced German fascism in such a concentrated form that after a year he knew what we had come to after 6 years. When I spoke of individual criminals, he said that it was the same people he had played with, with whom he went to school and who were sitting comfortably in the Prater, who were still shooting at cars with Jews in them who had already been arrested were transported to the prisons. And in our endless debates in which I fought against his so-called wild chauvinism, he said after a while: It is possible that this seems exaggerated in normal times. But I need that self-confidence. I need it in my fight against the pressure of this gang of criminals.

How grotesque it must have seemed to me and the little joy that knew him at this time when human myopia managed to assert he drove people to emigrate like the Nazis. We reported to him indignantly and not entirely convinced ourselves, we advised him to let people live the way they wanted to be about the pessimism that dominated him on the Jewish question. The way he reacted to the slander and the whole situation was one of the strongest impressions we got of this person.

Maybe in the end people are right if they don't want to emigrate, maybe I'm no longer objective and have a Viennese shock, but I can't and will not say anything other than what I'm convinced of. And if they resent me for that, I understand part of it and I really don't care - I can't please everyone at this time - and for me there has long been only one authority and that is my own conscience. By the way, I have no desire hotter than that the Prague Jews be proved right and that even their children and children's children tell how I made their life miserable then

he often added with a laugh. The awareness of power and the absolute fulfillment of duty was so strong that it was actually immune to every human attack and every pettiness.

Barrack camp Nisko a. San.

Unfortunately, these discussions were only of practical importance for a short time. On September 1, 1939, the war broke out and the possibilities for emigration were now maximally restricted. Friedmann naturally tried to get all passports from the Gestapo that did not have an English visa, such as Italy - emigrants or other neutral countries for which a visa was not required. Even this tough struggle, which lasted for days, only brought partial success, the passports were confiscated, marked with a J as Jewish passports, with which one could no longer enter Italy. During those days and nights there were queues of people outside his office in Prague, but very few came out. He never gave up trying to get people out and there was always still some country, until actually almost the whole world was at war, and sporadically people got out into it. Ms. Hanna Steiner, who headed the emigration department in Prague, occasionally characterized Friedmann's attitude as follows: If the whole world is already at war, Richard will calmly refer to the fact that work is being carried out on the exploration of Mars. I think he will never give in.

Activities in Prague were interrupted as early as October 1939, due to an episode that was to be regarded as the first sign of the later catastrophe. Today we know how the Jews in Poland were tortured and murdered, but this news reached Central Europe only as gruesome fairy tales and was hardly believed. In October 1939, Jews were transported east from Vienna and Czechoslovakia for the first time. A so-called workers - transport composed only of men was dispatched to Mähr. Ostrau and Richard Friedmann and Jakob Edelstein were sent as officials, so to speak. The background to this action has never become completely clear. Friedmann and Edelstein took the following from the talks with the notorious SS - man in Jewish affairs Eichmann: he presupposed that regions in Poland between the rivers Bug and San, where the war had raged, were depopulated and as the border between the German and Soviet - Union was just there, he wanted to settle the Jews as a buffer in the area. He sent men who were fit to work to build barracks into which more Jewish people would come afterwards. On the trip to Nisko Friedmann was physically abused by the SS-man Dresel almost all the time. The first days and nights in Nisko were full of the most severe hardships, people lived in the woods and in these cold nights in the snow and mud the friendship between Friedmann and Jakob Edelstein emerged, which lasted, as banal it sounds, to their almost simultaneous death. In a short time a healthy collective spirit prevailed in the camp, a few barracks were built and the doctors of the transport bought food for almost the entire community through their work from the surrounding peasantry. R. F. succeeded in persuading one of the SS-men on watch to bring him with a car in the city of Lublin, where the first major office of the Gestapo was. He tried to convince the local SS - leadership that the action was taken under false pretenses, that the area local is not depopulated, and that on the contrary the indigenous population was rebelling against the influx of new people because their own existence was still threatened after the damage of war. From files that were later in Vienna and perhaps still exist today, it was clear that the Lublin Gestapo office negotiated with Berlin and one can probably assume that the action was discontinued due to these negotiations.

Some of the men concentrated there went across the border to the Soviet Union, part later came back to the protectorate. Jakob Edelstein was the first to come back after a few weeks; On his initiative, a request was officially submitted to the so-called superordinate authority in the name of the religious community, in which Richard Friedmann was requested for the community of Prague, with the indication that his cooperation in Prague was more urgently necessary than in Vienna at that time. In December 1939 R. F. was also back and from there the regular activity within the framework of the religious community in Prague begins. The type of activity can best be classified as follows:

External representation

There were two offices of the Secret State Police that dealt separately with the Jewish question. The first was the so-called Central Office for Jewish Emigration, an office that dealt exclusively with Jews, etc. with the surveillance of their so-called civil life, a surveillance which over time got mixed up in the life of individuals down to the smallest and most grotesque details.

The second office, the usual notorious Gestapo, which filled the peoples with fear and horror wherever fascism had set its footing, also had its own section for Jews. This department arrested the Jews for breaking the so-called Jewish laws, and of course there were Jews in all other Gestapo departments, such as the communist department, the department for sabotage and others.

1.) Central Office for Jewish Emigration

As we said in the introduction, emigration was no longer feasible after the outbreak of war. The retention of the name Central Office for Jewish Emigration is a symbol of the mendacious and clumsy practice, which hid nothing other than the common robbery of goods. Lies and cowardly hypocrisy were the leitmotif of everything the Nazi gangs did, but they disguised their crudest and most obvious crimes with a cloak of justice. Although emigration was now practically impossible, around 50 people were summoned to fill out the so-called portfolios every day and the grotesque spectacle took place that these masses of people had to submit their applications for emigration with all formalities completed, without even specifying the destination and of course without the visa. This ridiculous comedy was carried out because the emigrant voluntarily relinquished his movable and immovable property of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. But this comedy had another purpose. The activities of a horde of SS - men who were fatter every day in the struggle against the enemy and thus removed from the battle at the front, had to be founded. Since the same interest dominated the whole gang up to Himmler, they lied to each other in an equally grotesque manner and silently took each other seriously. Giant statistics with wonderful numbers and drawings migrated weekly and monthly about the emigration campaign to Berlin, which was running at full steam, and at regular intervals a broad medal was emblazoned on the heroic chest of Obersturmführer Günther and his employees. In this legal way, the central office first acquired the houses, then later through special laws the furs, the jewelry and finally

the dogs, cats and songbirds (that's no joke) from the property of the Jews. Richard Friedmann and the same goes for Edelstein and Weidmann - because all three of them formed an absolutely inseparable unit vis-à-vis the Gestapo - of course saw through this whole ridiculous comedy and never left the gentlemen of the Gestapo in any doubt that he saw through it. However, he had the following attitude: As long as this comedy related to the material goods of man so far that his current existence was not endangered, he considered the condition as bearable. And he was ready to play down the comedy to distract from the action. He considered the most important function of the leadership of the religious community to be the so-called buffer effect, i.e. the entire operation and above all the entire responsibility was deliberately and consciously concentrated in the hands of the leadership towards the Gestapo. The management received all orders directly and personally from the organs of the Gestapo; the execution was of course carried out collectively in the enormously increased apparatus of the religious community, but the management was again solely responsible for the result. R. F. strictly insisted that the Gestapo generally did not know who was doing the individual work, that it was practically not supposed to know anyone except Friedmann, Edelstein and Weidmann, and above all that they were not allowed to hold them accountable in any way. He took the correct position, which has also proven itself over the years, that the Gestapo would become more or less brutal and abusive towards the senior officials for every stupid thing about which there was daily noise, depending on their mood , and they did not care at all - without giving up serious measures, such as arrest or deportation, which could be the case with a lesser known and important official for every little thing. In all these years it never happened, and this can be confirmed by all surviving employees of the Prague and Vienna religious communities, that any head of a subdivision was held responsible for his work by the Gestapo (an exception was personalities such as Dr. Franz Weidmann, who was an authority even for the Gestapo and negotiated directly with it, including on the tragic death of Dr. Hans Bonn and Emil Kafka in the first Heydrich days on the pretext that their department had sabotaged registrations. They were arrested and, after 3 weeks in the concentration camp Mauthausen, killed. This was the prelude to the grisly period of transport.)

I have already partially characterized Richard Friedmann's attitude towards the Gestapo. He was quick-witted, courageously self-confident and, above all, fearless. He not only displayed his fearlessness in his whole demeanor, but literally held it up to them at every opportunity. Roughly literally, he repeated stereotypically to every threat:

You can no longer scare me with concentration camps. This has been my professional risk since I've dealt with you. For me, I count on it and there is no one else in the realm of your power for whom I have to fear.

And those weren't just empty words. One of the prerequisites for his calm and security was the fact that personally was really fearless and that he had no one in Europe to fear for. His only sister had emigrated to England in 1937. In his humorous way he called his later friendship with me

an industrial accident and was strictly careful that no one and never the Gestapo would have any idea that he had personal ties. How well thought-out and consistent his thinking and acting was, proves the fact that his saying I don't need hostages is reflected in the incredible fact of my existence. I am the only person from this circle who survived and this cannot be explained otherwise than that his complete independence was so well known and so often blatantly emphasized that ultimately in Berlin the death sentence was issued only to him and in the German official mold, which was carried out strictly, it stayed that way even though I arrived in Auschwitz on the same transport.

It was fundamental that the pressure that was so concentrated on the leadership of the religious community was actually absorbed by it. It was one of the most important and fundamental principles of Richard Friedmann that he carried out strictly and in an ideal manner and that he also required the entire circle of employees never push down.

He worked tirelessly himself, if it was necessary, he knew neither day nor night and every employee of the religious community in Prague knows that in most cases he did not leave the office before midnight, especially when people were waiting for him to give him their little and great worries. Accordingly, he often demanded increased work performance from some departments, but in any case the invitation to this work was made in the most amicable, comradely manner and above all in absolute terms and the employees worked and the pressure of the Gestapo never weighed on the individual official. Countless cases are known in which the Gestapo, with the usual threats of imprisonment and manslaughter, demanded some kind of report or statistics in a ridiculously short period of time. It was always Friedmann personally, resp. Edelstein and Weidmann, who at every hour resp. every day fought for the extension of the deadline personally, often under the most dramatic circumstances (shouting and constant threats with arrest were the least and actually made no further impression) and a work colleague was never allowed to hear the saying if it is not finished at this time, we will held accountable.

Negotiations with the Gestapo and responsibility towards the Gestapo were strictly and in principle only a matter for the senior officials.

His cordial and comradely relationship with every employee was literally from the porter to the operator, who, however, had a very difficult existence with three telephones always working in his office. His whole being was cordial, humorous and warm, but it was also training and strict self-education that was expressed in his relationship with the employees.

He repeated again and again among his friends and colleagues: We, who have to do with the Gestapo gang, have to be particularly careful so as not, perhaps unconsciously, to use even the slightest form of the too comfortable methods of the master people against a subordinate. And above all- and he emphasized this again and again - one of our employees must never hear a threat from the Gestapo from our mouth.

Specific scope of duties

As I already mentioned, over time the entire life of the Jews fell out of the normal framework and the administration and regulation of life was taken care of by the religious community as a kind of state within the state.

Financing the large masses of the dispossessed, housing issues, schools, hospitals and medical services, travel within the country, later even the trip with the electric car and a thousand other little things were directly subordinate to the administrative apparatus of the religious community.

Of course, every single regulation had the purpose of making life as unbearable as possible and it was now the task of the religious community to get the most out of the situation and this was of course only through constantly and systematically going around the SS authorities.

Social care

One of the most important duties was to fight for the budget. From the confiscatedmoney of the Jewish property the Zentralstelle received, so to speak, the apparatus of the religious community, but of course that was a variable sum, depending on the changed circumstances. The religious community had to justify what it needed, so to speak, and it does not need to be mentioned that there have been bitter fights with the Gestapo over every single post over the years . It goes without saying that the Gestapo must have had the impression that the majority of the money is needed for the management of the departments working for them, such as statistics, drawing rooms, etc., and that the social welfare of the Jewish people was the last priority. Dr. Franz Weidmann was, so to speak, the finance minister in this eerie state and was a master at camouflaging and falsifying every publishing house to the greatest possible extent. The fight for money, which was mostly like a horse trade, was then jointly led by Dr. Franz Weidmann with Richard Friedmann, resp. Edelstein and Weidmann carried out. It was one of the often-told memories of those named how they had to apply to the Gestapo for the first Kč 10,000 in 1939, while the budget later amounted to many millions.

The social welfare was well developed for the given circumstances, the so-called people's kitchen, which was initially miserable, was better in 1940 and 1941 than the so-called middle-class kitchen, which was set up for civil servants and payers, because you only got meals for ration cards at the latter, while the people's kitchen as an institution of the religious community had its own allocations, officially from facilities of the religious community, such as vegetable gardens and the like, in reality partly food procured with black money. Thanks to the help of the Czech authorities and good relations with Dr. Franz Weidmanns to the same, this succeeded after skillful intervention with the Gestapo, in that it was made clear that this relieved the central office fund, to obtain the approval that some socially supported Jews from the so-called blocked account of the rich to the tune of around Kč 1,000 to Kč 1,500 a month.

School system

One of the greatest achievements was camouflaging the entire school system. According to a regulation by the German authorities, Jewish children were excluded from all public schools and Jewish schools were not allowed to open. Under the sign of the department for retraining for the purpose of emigration, thousands of children and young people received some practical but also theoretical training according to their age. Prof. Maxmilian Adler, of whom it was always known in internal circles that he was actually the director of the school at all times - he was responsible for regulating the lessons for several thousand children - organized and supervised the teaching in an excellent and self-sacrificing manner. Of course, as for everything else, the responsibility for this large-scale fraud was borne by the leadership of the religious community.

Health care

The Jews were excluded from all public sanatoriums, the religious community received its own hospitals, its own outpatient departments and its own medical service for poor patients. Almost all Jewish doctors were built into the health system; the Gestapo was of course never allowed to gain proper insight into the extent of the supply of medicines.

Travel permits

It goes without saying that every travel permit for every single individual had to be fought for under a false title and even then acquired with tiring interventions. When electrics were banned for the Jews, only sick people or those employed in the religious community were allowed to receive ID cards after intervention. With the help of the Czech authorities, who were ready to help in any situation, we managed to turn the ban into a farce. The humorous Prague tram conductors said that never were so many Jews in the electric tram as after the ban. Part of the population was now sick and thousands more were doing occasional temporary work.

This is what the company looked like from the inside, of course, as Friedmann put it, to the outside world it presented itself as a policy of the lesser evil. With the commitment of the whole personality and in constant grueling petty struggle it was of course possible to create general and personal relief. And yet it was a bad life - it doesn't need to be specifically said - that people led during this time, they just didn't know what was going on behind the scenes and that life could have been much worse than it was around that time already.

A small example to illustrate the situation.

One of the most difficult situations for the leadership of the religious community towards the population whose interests it represented, was the time of the so-called house action. On the order of the Gestapo, real estate property had to be transferred in some "legal form" to the central office. R. F. basically had no understanding of the tragedy of this action, he saw it as a ridiculous farce, he said literally that of all the goods that the Nazis destroyed, they would not be able to carry away the houses and properties and that every signature - and every contact would be invalid, that had to be obvious to every normal person. True to the principle of restricting any direct contact between the civilian population and the Gestapo as possible, the community invited people

to go through the formalities here. Most took the matter disproportionately tragically, as the formal loss of the house seemed to them the collapse of their existence. (Even a government minister, who has been returned to his home, made a tragedy out of the matter). How difficult was it in such a situation to bring someone else's point of view and, above all, how impossible it was to make it clear to the person concerned that the Gestapo would not shy away from classifying delay as sabotage or acts hostile to the state. This fact could not even be brought to the lips, because no matter how carefully it was phrased, it was nothing more than an indirect threat that was expressed with it.

It is a well-known phenomenon that the man on the street often does not recognize the real cause, but sees the culprit in the person closest to him with whom he is negotiating. That had to be the same at this time, of course, and Emil Engel characterized this relationship when he was in Prague before leaving for America, with the following words:

If the religious communities had done nothing else during this difficult time than be scolded with impunity, then they have already fulfilled their purpose.

2.) Secret State Police

However, Friedmann considered his most difficult and most important duty to the community to be his function as lawyer in so-called criminal cases vis-à-vis the political secret state police. In the first weeks after the occupation Edelstein concerned himself with this office, but over time it passed completely into the work area of Richard Friedmann.

Without any official purview, even without the official title of a lawyer, solely on the basis of the authority that was instilled in his person, he earned the trust of the entire public as the most successful lawyer and - as paradoxical as it sounds - the respect of the Beasts in human form who held office as so-called commissioners.

In this role of the lawyer he was able to bring out his strong positive qualities most openly. He enforced respect through his quick-wittedness, his mind and skillful handling of the so-called legislation. He impressed with his courage and to a certain extent bluffed with his proud and rather superior demeanor. However, what made his situation particularly favorable and what made him superior to all professional lawyers of that time was the character of his personal lack of interest, plus his proverbial and even grotesquely increased incorruptibility.

While every professional attorney ran his office as a business, so to speak, Friedmann was known to appear solely as a completely disinterested representative of his community and so he could appeal again and again without loss of prestige after each rejection, it never was something personal and never something that was supposed to benefit himself, that he fought for.

His incorruptibility was one of the most characteristic traits of Richard Friedmann. It was carried out so extremely that, as I said - it seemed grotesque under normal circumstances. He was a better judge of people than any of us and knew that all things had to be done in a particularly clumsy and downright tasteless manner in order to be grasped by the Nazi creatures. It was known that he would not accept cigarettes from the people who sought his help, even if they were old acquaintances, and over the years every candy bar and every bottle of liqueur that was sent to him on the occasion of holidays or other occasions was forwarded with innumerable receipts, such as letters of thanks to the donor to the hospitals, orphanages and old people's homes of the religious community. His usual formula was: I hope to have acted in your favor, etc., etc.

But in the area of ​​representation in so-called criminal matters, the results actually achieved were unfortunately always lower and lower. Most of the time it was possible to get the people out of the prisons who were in custody for violating the direct Jewish laws. It was possible, especially later, at the time of transport, for Jews to bearrested and held in the ghetto Theresienstadt rather than sent to a concentration camp which looked at the time like a great opportunity; little did one know that this path would also ultimately lead to Auschwitz, albeit years later.

As for the political prisoners, for whom Friedmann exposed himself in an almost indescribable way, an effective liberation could unfortunately not be achieved, since these cases were not dealt with in Prague, but mostly by higher authorities. The local Gestapo only handled the case. How much unspeakable agony and horror was hidden behind this word, will hopefully have been made known to all people in the whole world today. What he achieved was at most exchange of messages and, at best, arranging visits of the next of kin, but what that meant in this situation can only be measured by those who experienced the Gestapo prison.

His greatest merit in this area, however, was the following, and if this means nothing more than an abstract term for those who are far away, those who have experienced the situation knew how to appreciate it and for it they had the deepest gratitude to Richard Friedmann.

Richard Friedmann was for all those who had suffered the greatest misfortune of that time, that they knew their loved ones in Gestapo custody, a safe and stable entity in whom they placed all their worry and the whole burden of the situation and with whom they were convinced that they were in the very best of hands. Every individual, who, even after waiting hours and days, had the opportunity to speak to him personally under all circumstances, had the secure feeling when he left him that he had done everything humanly possible for his neighbor under the given circumstances.

He had a wonderfully warm and humanely close relationship with all these people in need, an incredible calm and unwavering patience. Especially for such cases, which in their desperation often immediately sought advice and help, he could be reached by telephone over the years without exception,

day and night. Something else added to the special confidence he enjoyed in these matters. He never made empty promises; in a humanely compassionate way he was also able to convey cruel truths, if they were unchangeable, and when he did communicate something joyful, one had unlimited confidence in it. He just had, as he called it, the courage to be unpopular, which ultimately proved to be the source of great popularity.

A few examples to illustrate the work.

In 1940, when normal emigration was almost impossible, there was a Slovak consul in Prague who was bribed and issued visas to Jews without the necessary authorization from the higher authorities. Friedmann never conducted such negotiations himself, he was too well known and exposed, but he found a man who knew the consul and negotiated with him (Hajek). Friedmann got some of the money for the visa, negotiated with him on behalf of the people and concerned himself with the emigration permit from the Gestapo, while somehow cleverly disguising the origin and the type of visa. One day the story was blurted out at the consulate, both the consul and Mr. Hajek were arrested. The narrowest circles around Friedmann were justifiably nervous and it was expected with certainty that he would also be arrested the next day. In this situation Friedmann did the most daring thing he could do; the next day he went to the commissioner of the Jewish department for Hajek apparently calmly to intervene, but counted himself on the fact that he would probably stay there right away.

Hajek did well, didn't tell anyone, the consul was deported to Slovakia and Hajek was free after about 6 weeks.

Dr. Salomon Lieben

I don't think there is any need to know much about Dr. Salomon Lieben. Friedmann often said what people know about Prague Jewry abroad, that is the Old New Synagogue and Dr. Salomon Lieben. Dr. SL is a legendary figure for the poor of Prague and not only of poor Judaism, but also for the entire poor population of the district in which he lived. Tirelessly day and night in the miserable apartments of the poorest of the poor, always helpful, unselfish, humble, instead of taking fees, bringing medicine and often also food, that's how the Prague population knew him. The doctor and leading actor in the White Disease by Karl Čapek was named after him in the form of Dr. Sal. Lieben.

One day in April 1941 when Friedmann and Edelstein were in Holland, Dr. Salomon Lieben was arrested. Not only the Jewish population, but almost the entire city was appalled. When Friedmann came from Holland, Dr. Lieben was transferred from the Prague prison to the concentration camp Small Fortress near Theresienstadt and his file was passed on to Berlin. The motive for the arrest was one of the most grotesque that had ever occurred. In the years before the occupation of Prague by the Germans some people collected money Black Front, which had been founded by Strasser, at first a friend and collaborator of Hitler who later came to dispute with him. Dr. Salomon Lieben, basically apolitical, without seeming to know what it was about, donated a small sum like thousands of others who came to the ordination for donations. In 1941 a list of the Black Front was found on which Dr. Salomon Lieben and a second Jew from Prague, Ing. Hirsch, acted as donors. So these two Jews were

grotesquely charged with having ties to the Black Front group.

Richard Friedmann waged a tough, tireless, grueling battle over the person of Dr. Salomon Lieben. He was on the Gestapo every day, fought with all the arguments available, described the type of Dr. Liebens, which would remain historical, described the impression on public opinion, etc. He described Dr. Lieben as the type of absolutely apolitical, pure philanthropist who, as he told the Gestapo, would donate for a collection for orphaned Hitler children as for Jewish orphans. The commissioner sent additional reports to Berlin in which he assessed the situation for Dr. Liebens and tried to make it more favorable. But one day the decision came - as in all cases at this time - negative. Dr. Lieben should be sent on to the concentration camp in Germany. However, Friedmann succeeded in influencing the Commissioner so strongly that he did something that was unique in the mentality and practice of the Gestapo. These creatures, as courageous and heroic as they behaved towards the defenseless prisoners, are cowardly, willless and blind tools of every organ higher than them. None of them ever had the courage to expose themselves to their superiors for a prisoner and especially a Jew, even if he would sometimes have done it personally. That was the diabolical thing about this system, that the criminals sat anonymously at the top and that such a murderer had a whole staff of blind executive organs.

In this situation Friedmann forced the Prague inspector to send the decision back to Berlin, demand a revision of the judgment and justify that a conviction of Dr. Sal. Lieben represented an unbearable loss of prestige for the Secret State Police as a criminal instance.

In the meantime, Dr. Lieben received the order to pack at the same time as Ing. Hirsch and to be ready for the transport. You knew what that meant. The next day Ing. Hirsch went alone to the concentration camp in Germany and Dr. Lieben stayed in his place. In a black letter to his relatives, Dr. Liebens assessed the situation and wrote literally: Either a miracle has happened for me or I have a powerful protector.

One took a deep breath and was happy about the current success. But the days of tension that Friedmann experienced until the response from Berlin arrived cannot be described. The decision came after a few weeks.

Dr. Lieben would not have been declared guilty, he was innocent and therefore only in protective custody until the end of the war. Berlin had decided. Dr. Sal. Lieben was sent to the Dachau concentration camp. After several months, a telegram arrived with the news of his death of a stomach - and intestinal catarrh.

Another instructive case was the following: A young communist (Helene Fantl) was pregnant at the time of arrest in 1940. She was temporarily released from the concentration camp Ravensbrueck for the birth of the child and should return to the concentration camp after a few months. She could not flee herself, as this would have endangered her relatives as well as perhaps friends who had taken care of the child, the terror at this time was too great for a whole family to go into illegality. It was decided to choose the lesser of two evils and ensured that the woman and her children were not sent to

the concentration camp, but to the Theresienstadt ghetto, which was already in existence at that time. Friedmann intervened in this regard with the Secret State Police. The commissioner originally refused because it would be against his rules, but after further negotiations he agreed to overlook the matter, so to speak, if she were accidentally added to the transport. But his condition was that the central office that put together the transports did not know anything about the facts. (The various offices of the Secret State Police and the SS were mostly opposed to each other as hostile groups, because they always lived in paranoia that the others had more loot).

At this time there were transports to Theresienstadt at short intervals and people waited in fear that Helene F. would be added to the line. It was a treacherous coincidence that she was not on any transports. The date of their return to the concentration camps came closer and closer, the Commissioner promised that he would have to wait, but one day - to the horror of everyone involved - she was fetched from the apartment at night and transported to the Small Fortress. And this time, too, something unusual and unique succeeded. After the intervention the next day, it turned out that a particularly zealous sub-official had sent them. Helene F. was brought back from the fortress that same day. To accelerate her addition to the transport, SS-man Bartels who will still be discussed, was the only one willing to help and was brought into her confidence to have her transferred into the transport. She lived with her children in Theresienstadt until the big liquidation in autumn 1944. In October, like all mothers, she went straight to the gas chamber with her children.

I want to mention yet the cases that were released from prison on the basis of medical reports and placed, on personal responsibility of Richard Friedmann, in sick - institutions of the Jewish community, where they were housed and from which most came back to freedom.

On the occasion of one of the first of these cases, the following conversation developed: Who is liable to me that the Jewess does not disappear. I am personally liable to you. You risk your head, you are a bit reckless, Friedmann, Friedmann replied with a laugh. Until people are interested in my head, the reason will be found, for the time being it is not that far.

From today's perspective, it is one of the many harrowing truths that Friedmann clearly had in mind over the years. He knew that one day he would have to disappear, unfortunately they were always a few hours faster than him.

Holland

In March 1941 Friedman and Edelstein received the order to go to Holland to help the local Joodsche Council set up the central office.

The diabolical system of the Nazis wanted to take advantage of the popularity and trust these two representatives enjoyed in the Jewish public for their own purposes. Since the political situation at that time was such that there was of course no question of emigration and the Dutch population could be counted on to help implement the Jewish laws, the plan was completely sabotaged.

The two months that Richard Friedmann spent in Holland, he himself called his first holiday after 5 years. Every day he wrote long letters about the Dutch sky and Dutch painting. The central office was founded neither during Friedmann's first stay with Edelstein, nor during Friedmann's second stay in May 1941, but only much later. Friedmann returned from Holland in a particularly optimistic mood. It was the only time that he saw the politically unreal. In Holland the invasion and the end of the war were expected.

On the occasion of his departure, the value Friedmann represented for the Jewish population was revealed. You had to event. reckon with the possibility that he would not come back and he felt individually as if he had lost his moral footing. Suddenly there was a lack of an authority to whom one could turn in all situations and with which one had saddled all worries and hardships.

His specific tasks were effectively divided into 5 departments, mostly headed by old, well-rounded lawyers, but it was clear to everyone that the head and the heart of the company were missing.

Olomouc. Meanwhile, the decisive event of the war occurred, the attack on the Soviet - Union. After the first weeks of victories, you could feel the change in the Nazi situation. The atmosphere was tense. The SS overcompensated for their disappointment, their anger and the unacknowledged shame about the failures expressed themselves in particular brutality.

At this time it was especially great in Olomouc. The pressure of the notorious SS-man Bankl was the then head of the Jewish community, an old, completely apolitical and anxious person was killed and among the Jewish population many lived wild. Friedmann went to Olomouc, and what his employees there later told about his work seemed unlikely even to people who knew Friedmann. It was foolhardy in a sense, without having something else behind him as his personal courage and initiative, he bluffed the SS - man Bankl by almost reversing the roles and appearing to him in the form as it were of a supervisor. He felt, as he later laughed, like a kind of animal tamer. The method was successful and the situation in Olomouc changed fundamentally. There was also an enormous tension of the physical and mental strength and as minor and small as this episode was, we have seldom seen Friedmann as changed as after this hussar show of 3 weeks. After these 3 weeks he left the battlefield, but he officially remained the head of the Olomouc community for months and the appeal to him always had its effect from a distance.

Heydrich - time in Prague

Friedmann was in Olomouc for a few days when he was dramatically recalled. A new phase had started. The ultimate great tragedy of Judaism began! Heydrich had come to Prague; The registration of Jews was carried out in the religious community. Dr. Hans Bonn and Emil Kafka, the official heads of the registration department, were arrested for sabotage and Richard Friedmann was fetched from Olomouc by telegram. No one else grasped the seriousness of the situation as completely as he did; he rejected all optimism and knew that the two colleagues, of whom Hans Bonn was a personal friend, were lost in this situation.

A few days later, the first transports from Prague to the east started. It was the transport to the Lodž Ghetto. Apart from the tragedy that this fact meant for every Jewish person, for Friedmann it meant, so to speak, the collapse of his many years of work. The broad masses of the population, which should have been preserved through the blind commitment of their own lives, were now sent en masse to extermination. He knew nothing about the highly organized death machine in Poland, he imagined the matter as not so systematic, but certain extermination of large parts of the population.

This fundamental change in the situation also brought about a fundamental change in its position to the whole work with him. He saw very clearly that the time for action and even the lesser evil was over. The salvation of one person had to be bought in principle through the life of another. He said literally that from that day on one was no longer a negotiating partner in any way, from now on the Gestapo only needed executive organs. A concrete event from his life characterizes this situation.

A mutual friend, whose husband wasexecuted as a communist Heydrich's first days, crossed the border illegally into Hungary. Friedmann made the specific suggestion to go along on the same day. He said literally: I've come back from London countless times and otherwise had the opportunity to disappear and never did because I didn't want to desert. I no longer feel a moral obligation to persevere; what we can do today bears no relation to the price we will pay for it.

He didn't talk to anyone else about it, because he didn't want to burden anyone with the knowledge except me, who was supposed to go with him. Perhaps it failed because of a certain indolence on my part, and we were too large a group to illegally cross the border. The helpers should come back. In the meantime the situation had changed and Friedmann could no longer leave.

After a short time, the death news came from Dr. Hans Bonn and Kafka. There was general panic and perplexity. For the moment, Friedmann felt too connected to the community to save himself above all in this situation.

Transports

The transports in Prague were arranged as follows. The central office had a card file of the Jews and the SS men withdrawals now completely arbitrary mostly after parrot - system, the index cards. The religious community had the right to draw up a so-called protection list that contained the names of the employees. After 1000 participants fell on each transport, the Gestapo usually issued 1200-1300 index cards from which the protected employees were then to be removed. In principle, the Gestapo decided on the fate of the individual, the community had, so to speak, a limited right to complain, and this privilege naturally became the focus of protection. It goes without saying that there were no ideal conditions in these matters. It would require a community of sheer superhuman idealists who, under these life and death circumstances, would not have fought for the ability to make their close relatives and friends, insofar as they had the power to do so, members of the community. The community of Jews was neither worse nor

better than the world around them.

Friedmann suffered and struggled particularly under this problem. Originally he had a completely rigid position, he said that no one had the right to declare one person better or more valuable and to decide about his life, and he took the general position that the salvation of one should pay for another after the number of participants was a fixed one. Even if he was unable to keep those around him from giving up family and friendly considerations, he strictly and consistently refused to buy someone out for himself through a stranger, so to speak, because they were personal friends. From our circle of friends he stood up for some families who had small children (Ing. Klein, Dr. Winternitz). Mrs. Klara Hutter, in whose house he had found a second home in Prague and whom he loved like a mother, went to Theresienstadt in one of the first transports. A woman who was originally my patient, and later one of those closest to me, Elisabeth Winter because single and without children and also went on one of the first transports and committed suicide in Theresienstadt because the transport should go east. There was, however, a general political standpoint accepted and stood up for two people who were described as correct by and for a community.

In all respects this period was a constant moral struggle and always required new concessions. In principle, Friedmann was reluctant to have anything in common with the transport administration from the first moment. He clearly stated in the first few days that he would withdraw completely and was not ready to take part in the execution of this diabolical work.

The type Mandler, known to be bad in Prague, who had led a private life until then, was brought in and took over the execution of the transport from the delivery to the collection point to the departure.

Friedmann was of course still responsible for the operation of the religious community, which now had to be largely adjusted to the transports, especially since after the arrest Dr. Hans Bonn and Emil Kafka none other than he would have had the courage to head the whole company.

The handling of the transports proceeded roughly as follows: after the so-called transport list was drawn up in the central office, it was handed over to the religious community. The religious community informed the people about their inclusion in the transport and between this notification and the arrival at the assembly point about 3 - 5 days passed. In these days everybody tried to submit a complaint for whatever reason. All of these complaints partly due to economic positions, partly due to so-called unclear racial conditions, and for the most part due to illnesses, went through the apparatus of the religious community and the medical service of the same.

In addition, the community made available a large portion of its employees, especially the young people, and even older children took part in the service of the so-called auxiliary service. The same helps those affected with the preparations for the transport, with the dissolution of the household, procurement of food, suitcases, etc. and finally the wagon and people brought the luggage to the collection point. A special technique of packing and special aids were developed, which had a peculiar specific character, which is difficult to describe and whose imagination hardly anyone will get used

to who has not gone through this gruesome time. The dissolution and devastation of every once cozy family circle repeatedly made a shocking impression. Those involved were mostly the calmest in this situation. Everything almost always happened calmly, there were relatively few hysterical situations and only when you were there yourself did you understand how all friends had been so calm before.

At this point also a question of principle. Richard Friedmann found it eerie again and again that all these masses of people - even if one did not grasp the extent of the tragedy at the time - obeyed the mass agitation so calmly and so were disciplined, so without any defense. He kept asking himself, and this question preoccupied and tormented him during the entire time of the transports, whether the administrative assistance of the community made this process easier or even possible. From a comparison with other countries, where the matter was going on less calmly, it emerged that where the Jews were indiscriminately caught by blocking streets and city blocks almost without prior agreement, the Gestapo always had a sufficient staff of drivers and decrees by leading organs to carry out the action planned each time. The argument that more people could escape and hide in a chaotic situation is also invalid.

Something critically important has to be recorded. Every Jew personally had the opportunity to flee and go into illegality. Due to the period of 3 - 5 days that lay between the notification and the departure of the transport, you could even prepare everything for the illegality in peace, you could live undisturbed in your apartment until the notification and had time in these 3 - 5 days to disappear. No Jew who did not join the transport was seriously or consistently wanted by the Gestapo in Prague. The Gestapo had agreed that the municipality would notify the Czech police of the non-appearance and that the Czech police had to find the person concerned. It does not need to be specifically stated that this was purely pro forma, that one was satisfied with the one-time appearance in the apartment of the person concerned and with the explanation that he had disappeared and that the case was reported as undetectable.

The reason why so few disappeared was the same as for all other non-Jewish people who were somehow politically threatened and still fell into the hands of the Gestapo. The reason was the tremendous and ever increasing terror, the incredibly dense network of Gestapo agents and the fact that each individual absolutely had to take a group of people in the illegality into their trust, who would shelter them and provide them with the most necessary food and all of them were in mortal danger. The individual did not lack the courage to lead the life of a hidden and hunted animal, but very few had the courage to put a group of people, even if they were the closest relatives and friends, in constant mortal danger.

Theresienstadt

After the first transports to the Lodz ghetto, the Theresienstadt ghettowas set up, which was originally intended for the Jews of the Protectorate. Edelstein, with a group of employees, volunteered to lead the camp. After Theresienstadt was the only camp accessible from Prague, Friedmann concentrated more and more on supplying this camp.

A separate department, the so-called department G, was set up in the religious community, which had the task of supplying the ghetto. In the course of time this department G became the absolute domain of Richard Friedmann and what was going on under the guise of this legal institution in the form of breakneck and daring illegal transfers to Theresienstadt is difficult to describe in detail in a short report. There existed the basic approval of the Central Office, the Ghetto Theresienstadt with the most essential things of Prague from supplying, uzw. partly through purchases, the control of which was reserved to the central office, partly from the holdings of the religious community. The necessities were under the guise of this principle approved now at his own risk by Richard Friedmann, who alone against the Gestapo was responsible for the implementation of this agenda, all the ghetto needed and what kind of legally and mostly illegal achievable ways, bought up the in maximum quantities and made it out. The examples could be cited in the thousands, starting with the hundreds of thousands of sacks of straw that were in such quantities in Theresienstadt that they sometimes rotted in the dirt in the courtyards, food, apartment and kitchen inventory, musical instruments, books, writing and drawing materials to the fantastic supply of medicines. If nothing else tangible and material remains (apart from the thousands of rescued humans) of the activity Richard Friedmann undertook, after destruction of all documents, the amount of medical material and drugs, which were found in Theresienstadt even after liberation astounded every outsider, who assumed that all of this must have been done with the "approval" of the Gestapo, was a clear testimony to the activity of R. F. in these times.

A few more words on this question. An action was held in Prague. Jewish doctors and pharmacists toured almost the whole Protectorate and bought huge amounts of hidden medicine reserves from the Czech pharmacies, which were happy to help in this action, especially since the items were paid for accordingly, which the Nazis never saw would have done. Friedmann succeeded in buying up a large amount of morphine in a way that none of us had ever known, which not only guaranteed the supply in the years of existence of the ghetto, but was probably also partly available after the liberation. This morphine in the form of dry cubes was in his apartment for weeks until the opportunity arose to smuggle it via illegal routes into the ghetto. It would have been enough to supply large parts of the German army with morphine, at a time when there was such a shortage that in the area of ​​the German Reich the use of poppy seeds was subject to the highest punishment and one spoke of the death penalty.

Typical of Friedmann's attitude towards the Theresienstadt supply issue was an anecdote that circulated about him and which is also recorded in a humorous poem by the G department. There is talk of 1000 kg hyper manganate. When he was told by telephone that hyper manganate was available and how much one could buy, he replied as usual that he wanted everything you could get, at least 1000 kg.

It does not need to be particularly emphasized that the money for the procurement was fought for in the usual manner of the Gestapo in constant tough fighting and with constant falsification of the budget proposal. During this time it often happened that Friedmann got into debts, so to speak, with other departments of the religious community and the grotesque situation arose that he stood there with a bad conscience in front of his creditors as if they were gambling debts until the Gestapo approved a larger sum. On the day before his deportation, the Gestapo approved 6 million crowns for the G department and Friedmann was carefree like never before.

However, all this would not be possible if the Jewish community had not had the help of the SS-man Bartels. This was the only SS-man who in all the years provided illegal aid. Friedmann said too little about the person of this man and lost contact with him later in Theresienstadt. It is not possible for me to characterize it clearly, I do not know the motives that determined his actions, without doubt, however, is the fact that SS-man Bartels rendered the Jews valuable services during this period. The following event that sticks in my memory is typical of the situation. The Gestapo received a complaint against Bartels from a pharmaceutical company that was under German management at the time (I think it was the Medika), stating that it was approving disproportionate amounts of drugs for Jewish purposes. (Bartels was namely the Gestapo advisor for economic matters and, so to speak, responsible for supplying Theresienstadt from the Gestapo). Bartels turned to Friedmann quite at a loss as to what to do about the matter. Friedmann sent him the letter to the pharmaceut. company, in which he declared that he would be ready at once to leave the supply of medicines to the Theresienstadt ghetto to the company if the company gave him a written declaration that it assumed responsibility for the prevention of epidemics that did not recognize racial boundaries. This was followed by a detailed description of the hygienic conditions in the Theresienstadt ghetto, and the matter was smoothed out in this way.

Negotiations between Gestapo and economic group Bertsch

In connection with SS-man Bartels the following must be recorded. A few months after the start of the deportation of the Jews, the economic group around Bertsch began to trend towards stopping the deportation of the Jews and using them as workers in the context of general labour. Certainly there were no humane considerations that led to this attitude, either they actually did not want to lose the too cheap labor of the Jewish worker in their internal marrow, or it was principled opposition to the Gestapo, because, as I already mentioned, the different groups stood against each other with hostility, not even for ideological reasons, but because the Gestapo always got the richest and fattest piece of the common spoil. This fact was one of the most essential pillars in the so-called tactics of the oppressed minority and it was often possible to achieve certain advantages on the basis of this antagonism by pitting one authority against the other.

This time it was about the greatest thing that could be achieved in this way. The Bertsch economic group needed material to prove the unprofitablity of the extermination of the Jews. SS-mann Bartels had relations with this group and knew about its tendencies and Richard Friedmann provided the statistical and other

material as a basis for the negotiations, which were repeated two or three times at regular intervals. The tension Friedmann went through in the days of negotiations known to him through Bartels is difficult to describe. The Gestapo always emerged victorious. Deep depression followed and after a short time the struggle started again. Unfortunately, here too, as in matters of great politics, the Gestapo remained victor until the last moment.

Change of internal situation

Even if the Gestapo was completely in control of the situation on the outside, the changed political situation, in which the defeat of the Germans became ever clearer and clearer, was not without consequences for the mentality of the SS and fundamentally changed their attitude and behavior.

At this point it must be emphasized once again that Friedmann's attitude towards the Gestapo was either exaggeratedly correct or, depending on the mood and situation, rather challenging and arrogant, but in any case always hostile. However, since the negotiating partners were of a clumsiness and primitiveness that would be hard to imagine for someone who did not know these gentlemen, Friedmann was not content with the attitude, but expressed his attitude in clear words. In negotiations he spoke again and again of correct enmity, of the fact that both he and they would be condemned to negotiate with one another and that everyone had to defend his claims with the means at his disposal. In all these years he never had any doubts about the fact that the partnership is currently an unequal one, that although they have all the power in their hands, that he would still not surrender because he was not afraid for himself and because he was convinced that his cause is ultimately the thing. All of this was possible and relatively safe at a time when Germany was going from one victory to another. The situation changed, of course, when these gentlemen were haunted by uncertainty, doubt and feelings of inferiority. What happened on a large scale happened here on a small scale, the thought became unbearable for them that the enemy, whom they cynically and confidently wanted to humiliate and destroy, should now witness their own defeat. Richard Friedmann and Jakob Edelstein, whose specialty was holding political talks with them, became a symbol of the relentless enemy now triumphing over their defeat for the Gestapo, with whom they had negotiated over the years. In their primitiveness, they themselves characterized the situation through the following little incident. On a day when the Germans had suffered a major defeat, Günther (the head of the so-called central office) suddenly yelled at Friedmann why he was in such a good mood. He drew his attention to the fact that if things got worse, the Jews would not have anything to laugh at either. Friedmann then said that he was looking forward to the time when he would no longer laugh. In the first days of the transports Günther asked Jakob Edelstein literally:

What does Friedmann say now, is he still laughing? In the second half of 1942 there were days and weeks when Günther refused to speak to Friedmann at all; he simply couldn't stand the sight of him.

It was perfectly clear that these SS-men were determined that people like Friedmann and Edelstein, for them the concentrated enemy of Judaism, not get to experience defeat and that they also had the power to prevent this. There was no doubt that they had to be removed from the world in the final phase, in which they were fully aware of the defeat, and it was just a matter of time and it just mattered which of the two was the fastest. Friedmann knew that he had to go. The situation is becoming more and more acute. Friedmann was spied on, more than ever before, he felt it and also talked about it. However, around this time he was doing the most daring things in connection with the care of Theresienstadt, somehow out of the feeling that it was the last effort anyway and he would not have much time left.

The carelessness he committed included direct telephone contact with Theresienstadt, mostly at night from his apartment and also directly from the office . This fact became known to Günther in a way that later became known, but which I do not want to talk about. One day in December 1942, Friedmann was summoned to Günther's office and subjected to an interrogation in which he naturally denied everything. Afterwards Friedmann could hardly move his legs for a few days and officially had to stay at home with sciatica, he admitted 140 squats from this interrogation to his closest friends. None of us ever heard what else happened there. We also knew that Günther was not open-hearted and clearly stated to Friedmann that it would be the last time he would get away so cheaply, the next time there would be concentration camps. Friedmann knew that himself, however. It was December 1942 and we were seriously considering fleeing. The fact that Friedmann could not speak the Czech language made the situation in Czechoslovakia more difficult; he was supposed to go to Switzerland via Austria.

On January 28, 1943, an unexpected event occurred. In celebration of 10 years of National Socialism the liquidated Jewish question was laid as a gift at the Führer’s feet. The religious communities of Berlin, Vienna and Prague were officially dissolved, the leading functionaries were assigned to the ghetto and the remaining offices in Berlin, Vienna and Prague were subordinated to a council of elders. A few days before you could feel at the central office that something was being prepared. On the night before January 28, 1943, those closest to me found out that Dr. Weidmann, the official head of the cultural community in Prague had discreetly received the order from Günther to prepare for the transport to Theresienstadt. Friedmann spent the night of January 28th at Weidmann’s, as it was agreed that he and some other closest staff would come to the central office in the morning to say goodbye to Weidmann. Friedmann did not, of course, talk about it among his colleagues in order not to burden anyone with the knowledge, but he was determined to disappear immediately.

On the morning of January 28, 43, while Friedmann was at the central office, Mrs. Eugenie Dangl was in our apartment. Friedmann had met her in the circles of Legationsrat Dr. Kamil Hofmann, and she, as an honest, self-sacrificing German anti-fascist, had the opportunity to help out in the illegality due to her relationships and did so with all her strength. She was ready to make her apartment available for a temporary illegal stay, of course this was out of the question, but we were preparing about the possibility of illegally crossing the border into Switzerland.

At 11 o'clock it was announced that Friedmann and with him some other exposed personalities, including Dr. Franz Kahn, well-known from Zionist circles, were arrested in an elegant way: they were not allowed to return to their apartments or to telephone their relatives and were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto on the same day as so-called single travelers. The families and their luggage were allowed to be forwarded the next day. There were 24 hours in which neither those involved nor their relatives believed that they would actually meet in Theresienstadt. A legitimate suspicion always told you that the opposite of what the Gestapo officially declared would be true. This attitude was later increased to the point of morbidity in the concentration camps. You just didn't believe anything anymore.

This time it wasn't a lie for once. On January 29, 1943, the relatives of the deportees also arrived in Theresienstadt.

Theresienstadt

The description of the conditions in Theresienstadt required a separate or several extensive volumes and therefore I have to limit myself to a few keywords. In order not to give the impression of a one-sided judgment due to the brevity, I would like to begin with the following. (I am speaking of the phenomena of internal life, so to speak of the reaction of the interned Jewish masses, not of the institutions of the SS, which are all too well known).

In spite of the many negative phenomena that emerged under these terrible living conditions and under this constant pressure of fear of death, the balance of this Jewish collective is, on the whole, certainly a positive one. In contrast to other concentration camps, in which the majority of internees were political prisoners, Theresienstadt had a population that was composed of all social classes. In general, it turned out that precisely those properties that were also internally ascribed to the Jews as negative have turned out to be incorrect. The Jews brought about an incredible technical and organizational achievement. The forced relocation of the men's barracks of 5000 people within 24 hours, which roughly corresponds to the relocation of a small town, was a miracle in terms of technical and other work performance. The hygiene of the individual under these inconceivable difficulties was also admirable.

The youth, partly organized in a Zionist way, partly included in the very strong illegal communist organization, was morally and culturally at a level hardly matched by a youth anywhere else at this time in the area occupied by Germany. Where, strangely enough, the Jews failed almost completely, that was in their administration, so that the saying, Theresienstadt is a concentration camp, aggravated by self-administration was rightly common. It was for something like this. The majority of the people employed in the administration were recruited from the Jewish petty bourgeoisie. Through the grotesque miniature state that Theresienstadt represented through self-government, these people came to positions that gave them power like hardly ever before in their lives. In grueling everyday life, like every other petty bourgeoisie, they lost their relationship with the big events and exploited their positions of power in the most unpleasant way for the community. It was the fact that each of these positions also provided a relative protection from the transports to the East and so it was natural that everyone who was at the helm tended to his entire family-

and friends in the administrative apparatus to accommodate and so arose over a real jungle of administrative, corruption and clique economy. The deepest root of this sad evil was the fact that in Theresienstadt it was the Jews themselves who had to fully decide on the composition of the transport lists to the east. It does not need to be elaborated on which power apparatus the so-called transport derivative represented.

Friedmann noted all this in the first 24 hours of his stay in Theresienstadt and when we came to Theresienstadt the next day, Friedmann was, for the only time in these years - not excluding the hours before his execution - somehow disturbed and unbalanced. In this sector he was particularly shocked by the fact that Edelstein, whose moral strength and purity he could not doubt, had not been strong enough to prevent all of this. He never understood that, contrary to the Prague practice, they had taken on themselves to decide the life and death of the individual members of the community. There have been many discussions between Friedmann and Edelstein, but this is too intimate for a third party to speak about. Friedmann later also explained this by the fact that the people who belonged to Edelstein's closest circle were loyal and devoted to him personally, but were never human or politically close to his format, they were small people who even developed a kind of local patriotism in their positions of power.

The first arrivals later acted like a kind of pioneers, it was the aristocracy of Theresienstadt who looked down on the later arrivals with a certain disregard. All these intellectual perversities that arose in this abnormal situation would be more grotesque than tragic if they did not always turn out to be have grown in practice. Situations arose where excellent surgeons or other specialists who had arrived later were unemployed because the less talented who had arrived earlier had a moral right to their managerial position.

It is difficult to judge how far the insight into these internal circumstances influenced Friedmann; in any case, it was in the line of his decisions to disappear from so-called public life as soon as his work was no longer crucially necessary. After no one insisted on assuming a managerial position in Theresienstadt due to the circumstances mentioned above, he carried out his decisions consistently from the first day of his arrival. Friedmann was sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto as a so-called prominent. The Nazis referred to people as prominents who, firstly, were assumed to be known abroad, and secondly, honored some of the bad types who had served them at the time of the occupation. Prominents included in principle all university professors, former diplomats, high ranking military and leading people from the Jewish public life. The celebrities had certain privileges, the right to their own apartment with their families, certain albeit very small allotments of food and no obligation to work. Friedmann rejected the preferential treatment on principle, as it was officially

the initiative of the Nazi authorities. During the entire time he was in Theresienstadt, Friedmann did not receive any food allowance. He underwent the work requirement from the first day of his arrival by attending the so-called hundred. The hundred was a Theresienstadt specialty; every newcomer was obliged, regardless of his / her qualifications, to do physical, so-called black work for a certain period of time. This included cleaning work, sewer work, corpse stretcher duty and other things. When asked by his friends, especially with regard to illegal work, Friedmann was forced to accept his own apartment. This was a privilege that the Jewish self-government would of course have offered him under all circumstances.

For Friedmann personally, the stay in Theresienstadt was a break after years. After he no longer worked in the hundred, he tried to work as part of the economic department in a subordinate position, but could not reconcile with the situation and eventually participated in the work no longer. After a while, Dr. Eppstein, Edelstein’s successor as Jewish elder of Theresienstadt informed him that it was unacceptable that he sabotaged the cooperation and that the higher authority wished that he would use his abilities. Friedmann rejected this to Eppstein in the most unequivocal and uncompromising manner and from this point on went as a worker in an agricultural group. Shortly before his deportation, the pressure from the Gestapo was renewed in full from Dr. Eppstein. Friedmann had to give up his work in agriculture and take on a role in the work center. This time was a very unpleasant one for him, he had to struggle with pettiness and vanity and these things in the circle of his Jewish employees sometimes wore him down more than the life-threatening fight with the Gestapo.

Dr. Eppstein

In this context it is absolutely necessary to briefly talk about Dr. Eppstein because he is the prototype of a tragic and fateful existence as a direct result of the immense pressure of the Gestapo. Dr Eppstein was a young talented docent of national economics, not very original, not very brave and would not in any way become much more noticeable under normal circumstances. Through emigration and the death of his predecessors, over time he automatically came to a leading position in the Reich Association of Jews from Berlin. Eppstein was arrested for a few weeks in Berlin and morally broken while in custody. He had given in to the immense pressure of the Gestapo and since then has been their willing instrument in all things. He was the right man to take over the position in Theresienstadt at this time when, as I said in the introduction, only comfortable executive organs were necessary. Apart from internal grievances against which he was too weak, Edelstein had succeeded in getting the most out of the Gestapo. His initiative, his courage and his quick-wittedness had succeeded in creating a relatively tolerable atmosphere from the original concentration camp, in which 19 young people were publicly executed in the early days. In 1943, Eppstein also arrived in Theresienstadt from Berlin, and Edelstein had to hand over his position as Jewish elder to him and was appointed as his deputy. Since two worlds collided here, cooperation, although this would be of the greatest importance for the good of the collective, was absolutely impossible. In his whole attitude and in his whole practice, Eppstein was the exact opposite of the working method of Friedmann, Edelstein and their circle described up to now.

While forgeries and sabotage were the highest principle for the latter, Eppstein was an overly correct devoted servant. While the latter consciously and consistently concentrated all the pressure of the Gestapo on themselves and never passed it on, Eppstein was a tyrant towards his employees and constantly tried to keep the entire apparatus under pressure. In order not to appear unobjective, I would like to point out that friends of Eppstein, who knew his life, try to excuse his attitude as follows. It would allegedly be his completely different lifestyle, his Prussian correctness, which was so immersed in him that he could not be anything other than correct even to the Gestapo; this may explain some things, but not excuse them. Incidentally, it is the same problem as that of the entire German people. Today we cannot excuse the slaughter and devastation of almost all of Europe because it was ordered and commanded. In this context it is immaterial to judge how far Eppstein was guilty of the almost simultaneous death of Edelstein and Friedmann, who were shot in May 1944. His guilt is more of a negative one and consists in the fact that he was one of the few people who were already well informed at the time, participating in the Gestapo comedy and not even clearly pointing out the danger. How great is the guilt towards the whole collective and how must it have looked in a person who knew for years that the people and friends around him would go to gas death and that he could be as silent as the grave for years. The same applies to Murmelstein, who is basically the same type, even more brutal and dirty in form.

The pressure from the Gestapo grew ever stronger, and the practices of Eppstein, Murmelstein and their accomplices became increasingly intolerable. And the gap between this circle and people like Edelstein and Friedmann got deeper and deeper. In November 1943 Edelstein, on the pretext that the population statistics were wrong, was arrested and deported to Auschwitz with his whole family on the outgoing December 1943 transport. Edelstein lived in Auschwitz's bunkers for exactly 6 months while his family was in a sub-camp. After just six months, he was shot in Auschwitz together with his wife, child and mother-in-law. Edelstein’s surviving fellow inmates said that he never lost his morale while in custody, he gave lectures, held discussions for hours and was exemplary in his demeanor.

May 1944

The conditions in Theresienstadt reached a climax of meanness and mendacity in the summer of 1944. The Nazis, who until then had murdered millions of people in the most brutal way, now wanted for inexplicable reasons to demonstrate to the world the prosperity and happiness in which the Jews in the Third Reich eke out their lives. Theresienstadt was supposed to be the showpiece, a commission of the Red Cross was expected and prepared for it with this in mind. While people were lying on top of each other like herrings inside the houses, covered by lice and dirt, all the houses outside were whitewashed. Young revolutionary painters, who for years had secretly drawn the gray Theresienstadt, were asked to decorate Theresienstadt with their works of art. While in the courtyards old men waited in line for hours to beg a little soup

that did not differ from dirty dishwater, a music ensemble played on the marketplace. And one day the most beautiful building in town, in which a hospital had been established, was evacuated of patients as quickly as possible. The largest hall was converted into a concert hall and the high point of the festivities was a concert to mark the inauguration of the hall. The Theresienstadt orchestra had to be ordered by Dr. Eppstein to perform the Ninth Symphony (Ode to Joy) by Beethoven. This concert was only for invited guests, the so-called elite of the camp should take part. Friedmann received the official invitation and sent it back with the remark that he was unable to attend. He then received another invitation from management and a direct invitation from Dr. Eppstein. Although he was aware of the danger of this affront due to the tense mood, he was under no circumstances willing to participate in this undignified comedy. He took the position that he lived as a private person in Theresienstadt and that no one could force him to take part in things that he was against and that he had no obligation to represent in any way. Friedmann was the only one who did not attend the concert. This happened a few days before the transports, to which he was then assigned as a special inmate.

Out of the blue, so to speak, in the middle of these festivities, 3 transports of 2,500 people were dispatched to the east in May 1944. The night before the last transport was disconnected, Friedmann was called to Eppstein and was given the task of preparing for the transport. Dr. Eppstein explained to Friedmann that he did not know the exact motive for the sudden deportation, but the commandant's office had indicated to him that this transport would not go to Poland, but to a new labour camp near Dresden, which Friedmann was entrusted with building. This harmful comedy was not only performed in front of Friedmann, but also spread through whispered propaganda in the Theresienstadt ghetto and thus consciously exploited Friedmann's popularity to raise the mood. Despite this apparently great staging, they did not have enough faith in Friedmann's good faith. They knew that he was on to their tricks like hardly anyone else and were probably afraid that he would disappear at the last moment. He was therefore arrested on the same day in Theresienstadt, spent the night in the bunker and was brought to the assembly point early under police guard. He drove from Theresienstadt in a normal transport car with another 30 transport participants. However, just on the next stop he was taken by SS-man Heindl from the car and driven from there on in a special car under surveillance by said SS - man and three German policemen.

Auschwitz

The entire incoming transport came to the notorious family camp. Friedmann was also originally admitted to this camp, again with special security and was again in prison in the block of the orderly room (camp administration). However, since there was nothing left to lose in Auschwitz and there was little compliance with the regulations, we were in constant contact with Friedmann during the 3 days he was detained in this camp. The orders that changed almost every hour from the Gestapo headquarters regarding his person were completely mysterious to the camp management. In the first hours it was stated that he should not be tattooed in this camp because he was going to be transferred into the men's concentration camp. The next day it was said that he was to be treated as a normal prisoner in the family camp, and

suddenly the order came to transfer him to the men's camp.

Friedmann was fully aware of his situation from the first moment. When we spoke to him for the first time in Auschwitz, he said, this time with a little bitter humor, now I've lost the game. His calm, his superiority, his clear disposition and even his patience with the confusion and panic of the surroundings was more admirable than ever. It was on the evening of 21 May 1944 that the men’s concentration camp inmates were instructed to come to the punishment block. He went to the block early with his fellow inmates in a commando, that is, in the Auschwitz language to work. The capo of the commando had the order to lead him beyond the chain of posts and refused. Then an SS - man took Friedmann out that several steps further than was the limit for prisoners. He was shot from behind. A detailed protocol with a description and drawing of his escape attempt was drawn up with the title Shot while trying to escape.

- - -

During these two days in Auschwitz, we talked in peace about all the problems that this new situation resulted in. What preoccupied and tormented him most was who and how many had known the truth about Birkenau. To describe the impression that 5 chimneys burning day and night and the constant smell of burnt organic matter had to make on every normal person is beyond the scope of these considerations. He clearly asked himself what consequences of the event. knowledge of this monstrous thing could have had. He came to the conclusion that he could never have remained silent knowing that with his full signature or through any possible whispered propaganda he would have spread the truth in the camp and then would have disappeared. Despite the panic and chaos and the small possibility of rescue, even with the knowledge of the full truth, nobody would have the right to keep this secret. He also believed that the individual would have had more chance to save himself even with the risk of fleeing and that even chaos and an event. uprising would have cost fewer victims than this unprecedented mass destruction.

Friedmann said a lot in his clarity and truthfulness in this situation that was particularly shocking.

One of these sayings is this: Later, when they speak of our time and our work, and if you are there, then tell the people that others may or probably have done better did than we did. But no one could have done it with cleaner hands and with a purer heart

I wanted to convey this to the survivors on behalf of Friedmann.

Signature:

Friedmannová C.

The minutes recorded:

Helena Schicková

Signature of the witness:

For the documentation campaign:

For the archive: Tressler