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6-Reflections on Germany, Religion & the Tritters

What is your attitude on Germans today?

I still have a tremendous amount of ambivalence toward them. There is an attitude that Germans have that could easily make them fascists again, and that is that you take orders and you don't disobey. It's built into the family system and it continues in a major way. However, having said that, I understand, this is true in Vienna. I was just reading about it recently. They have the same kind of up bringing as Germans do. I understand the third generation is now examining the history very carefully. They are your age as a matter of fact and they are researching this now like never before because their parents never told them anything.

So I don't know if I'll ever drop that feeling. I also like to tell myself that I want to give the younger generation every chance in the world to encounter their history, to understand it, and to never allow that to happen again. I have that hope, but it could happen elsewhere, too, because we've learned in history now that a government can give orders for the destruction of a whole race of people. We never knew that before historically in the world but it can happen again, with not Jews necessarily. It could happen with Jews again. It could happen with any kind of a racial group or an ethnic group. We see that.

Why is religion important to you?

Oh, well, eventually, it wasn't. Eventually I broke the Sabbath and eventually I got to hate religion because I got to hate my father. And everything connected with him, I threw away. Because as I grew up I developed my own thinking and I could analyze what was happening to the individual members of the family and that the religion was not a positive factor whatsoever. It was a destructive factor. But while I was a little girl, I liked the religion for all the reasons I told you but later on. I called it a passing party – a weekly party that passes by and leaves you with nothing.

Did you raise your children Jewish?

I took that as my inheritance from my family, the joy of the Friday night and holidays. I kept that and I gave it to my children so we continue to be a very traditional and culturally connected Jews and we celebrate the holidays very joyously but we're not religious at all. No, and in fact I feel that if it weren't for all the gods that are in this world, it might be a better world.

I am just going back to your early childhood in America, how did you learn English?

I learned it immediately. I loved the idea of coming to America and I wanted to be an American so quickly. I wanted to blend in right away and children have the capacity to learn languages very quickly. And that’s why being sent to the fifth grade was easy enough for the teacher to do because she thought I could catch up very quickly but she wasn't smart enough to realize there were skills being taught in the fourth grade that I should have learned to be able to handle the fifth grade. From then on it was a no-win situation. I never caught up.

Did you do any specific things that helped you in English?

Well, you know things that happened, like I think the turnaround happened when I met a girl in high school. I was already in the commercial track as I mentioned before but I met a girl who was a year older than myself. She was wonderful. She was a poet, she wrote poetry and I had never heard that and I was astonished to hear that. So I started hanging out with her. She liked me, too. She introduced me to literature. I didn't even know about this. The things that she had been learning, it might have been going on in the classroom, but I never knew about it. And she was also a modern dancer, and introduced me to modern dancing. I became a modern dancer. So she introduced me into a whole new way of life and I developed, my development was because of her. My intellectual development or creative development was sparked by meeting her. Does that answer your question fully?

When you first came to America, did you have any contact with the other refugees?

Yes, I met some and became close friends of mine just for a little bit. But I wanted only American friends. I didn't want to hear sad stories. .I didn't want to meet their parents because I might here other sad stories. I just wanted to get away from all of that.

Have you told your children what happened?

Yes, they know everything. In fact, I did a storytelling of my own experiences of growing up in Europe and in the United States with my family. I told about my double life. They know everything. They know all of my stories because they have the tapes now.

What might be some of those stories that you've told them that you haven’t told us yet that relate to your time in Europe?

No, not in Europe. I have nothing in Europe.

Now a days do you feel a certain unspoken connection to other refugee's or do you find it easier to have relationships with them?

Oh sure. Oh yes. Now I'm very connected to the great pain that was caused and continues to be present wherever I go of Jews who have suffered so incredibly. The people who came from the camps how they survived I'll never understand and I really recommend that you read Primo Levy. He's the most, the easiest writer to understand and he writes eloquently. Elli Wiesel is not so easy to understand but Primo Levy is. He's the best of the writers. Yes, I'm totally in touch emotionally with all the survivors. I don't run away from them anymore. I don't run away from anything.

Is your art inspired in any way by your experiences?

Not at all. Maybe in one way it is, from the Jewish point of view because there was a time in my life, this is after I got to art school and was doing art, when my children who were in elementary school not they but they were in schools that became integrated. I became very much involved in the whole issue of integration and worked extremely hard for it, one year in politics and one year in working for the schools alone. I did this for three years. Then I was very, very exhausted and burnt out, as they say. And I tried very hard to think of what I would do next. I wanted to do something for Judaism in a very, very deep way. I didn't tell the story at all? No, okay and I didn't know what I could do, something that was meaningful. I wasn't religious anymore but I had very profound feelings for my people.

I went walking on the beach and was thinking trying to think. I said the only thing that I really know what to do that was Jewish that I could teach anybody was to bake a challah. So what? What is there in that? So this is an incredible coincidence that happened. I came home from the beach and I went out into my garden. My neighbor came out, this neighbor, she said, "Freda, I have something very interesting to show you." She made a copy of a page in the Jewish encyclopedia, a whole page showing Jewish breads. There was a bread with a hand and I read about it and it came from the Ukraine. A bread baked for special Jewish holiday with all kinds of symbolism connected to it and I said I couldn't believe that this was happening to me. And she said, "Here, you can have it." And you know what happened from that? A book was published ten years later which is still in publication still in circulation I should say. Its called The Challah Book. It tells the whole Jewish calendar year, in terms of challah forms. And there’s bible in it, there’s tradition in it, there’s art in it, there’s Jewish symbolism in it. And its my one, but I feel significant, contribution to my people.

While you were in school in the pre interview you mentioned all of your extended family was killed did you feel different from the other children because you didn't have an extended family?

Again, I blocked it out totally. I didn't want to think about it, not at all.

Did you have a relationship with any of your extended family members?

Not very much because, and it wasn't my fault. We did a little bit with the family who sent us the affidavit. But the Tritters, no, because my father didn't want to have anything to do with that man who was a communist and a disbeliever. And my sister Nina, who was so uppity, she didn't want to have anything to do with their daughters because they weren't educated like she was. So when I found out about this later on, when I was doing my tape. Before I did that, my sister did her tape and told her story and I became extremely interested in this whole family, that was not in my life, that I had lost, the Tritters, who were responsible for bringing us here. They were laborers but they saved our lives and were good people and, so what if they weren't educated. This whole thing became very big in my mind and this is now about five years ago, four or five years ago. I began to investigate very heavily and I'm pretty good at research in that sort and I found the son of Herman Tritter who is now a man who is one hundred years old. I went to visit him. I went to Boston where my children live and he is in a nursing home in Connecticut. I went out there with my husband and another cousin. I had to meet him. And since then-- and he is as bright as can be, sharp, he remembers, he has a great hearing deficit-- I wrote him a letter of apology. I apologized for my whole family and how they treated his family. And how could they? I became the spokesperson for them all. How could they? How could my sister have been so arrogant and treated his sisters the way she did? And you know all of that. And I apologized very deeply. I call him for every holiday. It all becomes one piece. Anyway, I've talked to him a lot and he's given me a lot. He told me all about my grandparents and about the aunts. All of them and their children. All of them killed. They were all shot. They all had to dig a grave for themselves. They were shot in the back and they were all pushed into the grave.

I got so much from him just by describing to me. He'd met my grandfather and I had asked him to tell me anything and he told me and to tell me anything about the aunts, my aunts, my mother's sisters, four sisters, and he told me everything. I began to understand the configuration of the family in a way I had never understood before because I only got certain ideas from my mother. So I've put my life together in many ways.

Is that the point where you started to become more interested and open to the past?

I became more interested in the past, my personal past, years before that, but this past, I had totally – it wasn't in my consciousness at all. The Tritters. And then thinking about these people in Chicago wanting wigs and fur jackets to save a life. Its totally unimaginable.

Explain?

Oh, I've talked about it before that when my family was looking for someone in the United States that would send us an affidavit how my mother wrote to relatives in Chicago and they were trying to get things out of us. Remember that now?

Is there a moment in your life when you realized you had to deal with this?

As I was growing up, I began to deal with a lot of things. The more I grew, the more conscious I became. It's an ongoing process. I think everyone’s life is an ongoing process. If you want to be conscious, you work for that and you can do that in many ways.

Why do you feel it’s important to share your story?

It's a very big story. I think the more one learns about life, the better they can deal with life. Perhaps they can contribute more things to life for other people. If you were to meet a German woman your age, you might want to know how she's been brought up and is she being brought up by discipline only. You could have conversations with her, who knows? Who knows what might happen from this relationship? You wouldn't pounce on her and tell her this is the making of a fascist. Now that you know this is some of the training that goes into it from childhood on, who knows how you would handle that topic just to try to help her? In your own soul, it would be a way of trying to awaken her to this. You might have an effect on their whole life. She could affect other peoples lives. So telling your story is very important.

So how does your childhood experience and your experience with Nazi's and anti-Semitism affect your daily life today?

I'm devastated. I'm devastated what’s going on in the Middle East. I'm devastated what’s going on with Israel. I'm devastated with what’s going on with the present government in Israel and how it has responded to the Palestinians. I don't know. It may be that there will never be a state of Israel. It could happen I think the hatred is so enormous against Jews that it may never work out. The hatred for Jews continues. The anti-Semitism virus is alive and kicking. It may lay dormant for a while but it continues to be so. It's infected other races and other people who have entirely different gods and different systems of belief, and that has to do with the basic weakness of homo sapiens. Their brains are not developed enough to live decently morally ethically kindly gently. We're not there yet.

Are there things you remember today that you hadn't remembered for a very long time?

As I said a few minutes ago, it was a very, very big thing for me, suddenly recalling the Tritters, their existence, that maybe someone’s alive still. It was enormous for me. I did this within a week. I was on the phone talking, investigating constantly and I found somebody. Suddenly, a real connection to the past was absolutely important to me.