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Wednesday 2 July 2014

Freddie Knoller: Living With the Enemy

Last week I drove almost a hundred miles to see someone special at the Chalke Valley History Festival. His name is Freddie Knoller and he is a spritely ninety-three year old Auschwitz survivor. He was born on 17 April 1921 in Vienna, the youngest of three sons born to Marja and David Knoller. His parents were born in Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary but part of what became Poland after the First World War. The three brothers were musicians, the eldest brother, Otto, a pianist and the middle one, Erich, a violinist. Fredl, Freddie, was a cellist.

After the Anschluss and Kristallnacht, David Knoller was determined that his three sons had to leave Nazi controlled Austria, by whatever means. Freddie left for Belgium via Cologne and Aachen at the end of November 1938, entered the country illegally and made his way first to Antwerp, then Eskaarde, near Ghent. When l'exode began, with the German invasion of Belgium on 10 May 1940, Freddie found himself walking to France on roads crammed with refugees. In Lille, he came upon a solid blue cordon of French police. He was taken to a police station, forced to show his penis to prove he was a Jew, and put in a cattle wagon to the internment camp of St Cyprien, near Perpignan. He remains angry with the French for their treatment of foreign Jews fleeing Hitler.

Three months later he escaped under the barbed wire and made his way to Gaillac, in the Tarn, deep in Vichy France. There, he purchased false papers and returned to Brussels to rescue his cello and take the bus to Antwerp to find out what had happened to his friends. When he could find neither his cello nor his friends, he decided to head for Occupied Paris where he lived amongst the Paris demi-monde under the false identity of Robert Metzner, born in Metz in Alsace. In July 1943 he was picked up by the Gestapo for procuring girls for German soldiers. He blagged his way out of Gestapo HQ and hightailed it from the Gare d'Austerlitz to the village of Cardaillac, in the Lot, not far from Figeac.

Freddie was arrested by the French Milice on a train en route from Figeac to Bergerac on 5 August 1943. He was probably denounced by his angry, jilted ex-girlfriend, Jacqueline, to whom he had confided both his Resistance activities and his false, non-Jewish identity. He was an agent de liaison, a courrier who ran messages from one Resistance cell to another. 'I am not a terrorist!' he shouted under interrogation. 'I am an Austrian Jew from Vienna called Alfred Knoller. I am hiding from the Germans and have nothing to do with any Resistance group.'

His decision to betray his origins rather than his colleagues resulted in him being taken to Gestapo headquarters, put under armed guard and taken by train back to Paris. From there, he was taken by the French Garde Mobile to Drancy, in the quiet suburb of Bobigny, the assembly camp for deportation to the East. On 6 October he was put in a cattle wagon to Auschwitz. There, he was reduced to a mere number, 157103. Aided by his friend Professor Waitz who managed to get him extra food, he avoided the selections. In January 1945, as Russian artillery approached, he survived the death marches in temperatures of -20 degrees. He was liberated at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, weighing just forty-one kilograms.

'Every event in my story leads up to Auschwitz and no subsequent thought or action in my life is untouched by the memory of Auschwitz.....The person who stumbled into the cattle truck at Drancy lost once and for all his youthfulness, if not all his naivety.' The man on the stage, charming, amusing, witty and self-deprecating, was a careful observer filled with the will to live. His book, Living With the Enemy: My Secret Life on the Run from the Nazis details his story with no hint of self-pity, just an effusive love of life born of tremendous optimism. With each year that passes, there are fewer survivors like him to tell the story of what happens when a society loses its moral compass.

Freddie's story is one of many which concern the role of the French police and SNCF, France's railway provider. As Leo Bretholz, Freddie's friend and fellow raconteur, says, 'Wartime France was the most important and very venal cog in the wheel of Hitler's co-conspirators.' Undoubtedly, France is coming to terms with Vichy's complicity in the deportation of its own Jews. This process has been slow and painful. Where I live in Ariege, many local people are still unaware of the existence of the Le Vernet camp, the Drancy of the south, as well as the many other camps.

Perhaps they do not wish to remember. Many deportees were not Jewish and they struggled to be remembered too. One of them was Charlotte Delbo, in whose memory a conference which I attended was held at the Institut Francais on 18 March, the centenary of her birth. Charlotte's story, and that of the 229 other women of Le Convoi des 31000, is told by Caroline Moorehead in her book, A Train in Winter. I drove back to the Chalke Valley History Festival two days later to hear Caroline recount their tale, as well as the story of the villages around Chambon-sur-Lignon in the Auvergne which hid thousands of Jews. That story, however, is another blog.

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