A survivor’s journey home

Once a refugee and then a U.S. soldier,
Philip Freund visits Munich as a welcome guest

By Andrea Waxman
of The Chronicle staff

Since Philip Freund left Germany the first time, in May 1939 on the infamous German ship the SS St. Louis, he has returned three times. First was in the early 1950s as a U.S. soldier; then in 2004 with a group of SS St. Louis survivors; and, most recently, this summer, as a guest of his native city, Munich.

In celebration of his 76th birthday on June 5 and his 50th wedding anniversary on June 23, Freund traveled to Germany on June 2 with his wife Belle Anne; daughter-in-law and son, Laura and Mark Freund of Libertyville, Ill.; and daughter and son-in-law, Jacqueline and Craig Fassbender of Delafield; and four grandsons, ages 7 to 13.

In stark contrast to his flight from Munich in 1939, this time Freund’s hometown welcomed him with a bouquet of flowers and money for hotel accommodations and meals, as well as sightseeing and opera tickets, books, hats and official city of Munich pins.

When the mayor’s administrative assistant presented Freund with these gifts soon after their arrival and Freund “thanked him profusely,” the assistant replied, ‘It is the least we can do,’” Freund recalled in an interview last week.

Since the late 1980s, the city has welcomed and hosted survivors this way, Freund said.

Sanitized Dachau

During their visit, the Freunds visited Munich’s Jewish Community Center, where Freund’s son Mark “dug out my father’s death notice from the archives of the newspaper.” Freund also discovered four relatives that he had not known of in a two-volume listing of former Jewish residents who died in the camps.

Over the next two weeks the Freund family toured Munich and the concentration camp at Dachau; traveled to the fortified town of Noerdlingen, his grandmother’s ancestral home, the town of Ellwangen, where Freund was stationed in the American army, the town of Garmisch and Germany’s highest mountain, Zugspitz, as well as the cities of Salzburg and Innsbruck in Austria.

Freund searched out places that he associated with his happier childhood memories — the house in which he grew up, a church where a maid had taken him the Christmas after his father died and where a kind priest had given him his first orange, the home of his great-grandparents on a town square in Noerdlingen where a fountain bears a plaque honoring Jewish soldiers who fought in the German army in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

Freund commented on how much Germany had changed since he served there in military intelligence during the American occupation.
When he visited Dachau in 1951, it had not yet been “sanitized,” he said. “There were still skeletons in the camps. There was nothing but rubble everywhere.”

Now, he said, if you did not know what happened there during the war, you would never, ever, be able to imagine that such violence and destruction took place there.

Rejecting anger, hate

When asked about his feelings toward Germany, Freund said that when he returned the first time in 1951 he remembers standing on the ship’s deck looking toward the shore.

“I said to myself: ‘You can get off this ship and be very angry and hate everybody, or you can be a soldier, and a credit to the U.S. Army, learn a lot and have a good time.’

“And that’s what I did. And I did have a good time.”

As a member of an occupying army, Freund was in a position of power. And on only one occasion in his three-year tour did he encounter overt anti-Semitism.

On that occasion, a stevedore (dock worker) unloading a ship called him ‘a dirty Jew’ and this time Freund did not have to endure the insult without responding. He ordered the stevedore off the ship.

This summer, Freund returned with even more power — his children and grandchildren. The best part of the trip, he said, was to see how much his children and grandchildren enjoyed themselves and how much they learned. Though they have often come when he spoke publicly about the Holocaust, he said, “Before [this trip] I didn’t appreciate how interested they were.”

The hardest part of the trip for Freund was the grave of his father, Max, who died in 1937. Philip’s son, Mark, took some dirt from the grave to put on Philip’s mother, Theresa’s, grave in Milwaukee. She died in Dec. 1986, at the age of 80, having “never recovered” from the events of the war, Freund said.

Reaching America

Unlike the Freunds, many other passengers of the SS St. Louis never made it to safety. The refugees’ destination was Cuba, but before their arrival, the Cuban government revoked their permission to land.

The St. Louis was forced to return to Europe, with agreements from Great Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands to admit a portion of the ship’s refugees. While most of those who were taken to France, Belgium and the Netherlands fell back into the hands of the Nazis and perished, most of the refugees who were taken to Great Britain, including the Freunds, survived.

By December 1939 the Freunds’ application for entry to the U.S., filed by Theresa Freund before leaving Germany, was granted and they moved to Hackensack, N. J., where Theresa’s twin sister, Edith, and her physician husband sponsored them.

After serving three years in the army, Freund entered Wisconsin State Teacher’s College, now the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. There, in 1956, he met Belle Anne Dwoskin, who was born and raised in Fond du Lac. They were married after he graduated in UWM’s first class in 1957.

With a history major and economics, political science and German minors, Freund taught in several Milwaukee Public School middle schools and later became a school guidance counselor at an alternative high school.

The Freunds raised two daughters and two sons and, during all of those years, Philip served in the U.S. Army Reserves in a military intelligence corps at Ft. McCoy, until he retired in 1991.

In 1994, he retired from guidance counseling, but continues to speak for the Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center, volunteer at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital driving a parking lot shuttle bus and as a Whitefish Bay auxiliary police officer one day each week.

Though the family left considerable assets in Europe and began anew in the United States, Freund is thankful for the educational and professional opportunities he received here. “I’m so eternally grateful to this country. I came here with nothing, not even clothes that fit or shoes.”

Freund worries that native-born Americans don’t appreciate the uniqueness of this country and the danger it faces from Muslim extremists.

“Americans don’t really understand what happens when people are oppressed by a tyrannical form of government,” and what can happen during “a period of national insanity,” he said.

Having lived as a Jew in the Germany of the 1930s, Freund understands first-hand what can happen in such conditions. “Unless we start to pay attention, we will lose everything.” Freund said.

That, he thinks, would be a terrible loss, as “this is the greatest country in the history of the world.”