Joe Friedman Shoah Foundation Testimony

I can put this down. You ready? My name is Ed Hiscock. It is Monday, April 27, 1998. I'm going to be interviewing Dr. Joe Friedman. We are in St. Joseph, Missouri in the United States and the interview will be conducted in English. Dr. Friedman, could you give us a snapshot of your life before the war began and a little bit about your family and your family background?

Do you want me to take it from my date of birth?

Sure, that would be fine.

Well, I was born March the 10th, 1920 in St. Joseph, Missouri. My primary education was here. I went to the, through the eighth grade, through high school and two years of junior college. That's for my education. Of course, I'm a child of the Depression and everyone in the family worked, it seemed. When I was about 12 or 13, I worked in the filling station. Then after school, then for three years, I worked in a drug store and it was kind of a legacy. It was handed down from one family member to the other. I had a cousin who was working in the drug store and he later went on to another job and I fell into it. We were very grateful to have this. When I finished with junior college, I had an associate arts degree and I didn't have enough money to go on to school. It was in 1939. So I went out to Colorado to work in an amusement park. There were these summer jobs that paid more and college kids would go out and work at dude ranches or whatever was available out there through the mountains. And I had a wonderful summer, but it didn't produce enough money to go back to school. So I came back to St. Joseph and went to work in a menswear store, notions, men accessories, and I worked there for two years and I did have enough money then to go back to school. My dad wanted me to study to be a doctor. What Jewish father doesn't want their son to be a doctor or a lawyer. I didn't particularly want to be a doctor and also at that time it was very difficult for doctors or for Jewish students to get into medical school. There was the infernal quota that you hear about and it was real. And I didn't want to fight that. So I did go to podiatry school, which is an allied medical field. I went to Illinois College of Podiatric Medicine. Now, the man that I was working for in the menswear store tried to talk me out of going back. He had opened up, meanwhile, he had opened up several menswear stores, one in Kansas City, one in Sedalia, one in Joplin. He wanted me to take over one of them. But, and I had a feeling of independence after a while, my own money.

And, but I knew that I couldn't put it off. So I went back to school, in Chicago, in 1941, September of '41. Well, we know what happened in December of 41. I was, I was then, ah, rooming in a house in Chicago and I had a bedroom up on the third floor. And when I came down to go to dinner that Sunday, December the 7th, everyone was huddled around the radio in the parlor. And that's how I got the news. Well, we were encouraged to stay on in school, and rightfully so, because we felt that we would be much better to the war effort, the more education we had. I must interject that podiatrists, or chiropodists as we were called then, were not given commissions in the Army, but they were in the Navy. They were commissioned as second lieutenants. So when I came home for Christmas, a buddy of mine and I hitchhiked to Kansas City, which was the closest naval station, naval recruiting station. And neither one of us got in because of our eyes. I don't know what I would have done in the Navy anyway, other than swab decks or something. I came back and then went back to school, but I did get my orders to report to my selective service to the draft board.

So you were drafted?

On Saturday. I was drafted. I had a week of finals, finished on Friday night in Chicago, came here Saturday morning, went to my draft board and told them I was here because they had to fill a quota. Fortunately, one of my junior college classmates was the secretary to the board. And she says, get out, get out of here. I said, look, I have to report. It's an Army directive. She said, we've already filled the quota. If you'll leave and not let anyone see you, you won't have to leave until the next quota, which is July. And I did. I left July the 15th, 1942. And that took me to Camp Swift, Texas in the 95th Infantry Division.

Now, Dr. Friedman, you're a first-generation American.

Yes.

Can you give us a snapshot of your family and family life just before... the war began?

Oh, yes. Yes. My dear father came here during the wave of immigration in 1906. And as many . . .

From where?

From Russia. And as many of the emigres, when he came here, he put a pack on his back, and he started traveling, peddling. He would buy notions at the wholesale houses here. He'd buy pins, thread, dry goods, put a pack on his back, and his territory was Kansas. He'd go across the bridge and go into Kansas, go to farmhouses, and he would exchange these things for food and lodging and whatever he charged for it. When he became a little more affluent, he bought a horse. He was able to carry more. And my dad came from a farm, so this was nothing new to him, riding a horse, going to farms, doing chores around the farm while he was there. And he did this until he made enough money to buy a wagon, which enabled him to have even more merchandise to sell. Then he had made enough money to send for my mother and his sister. My dad's sister was my mother's best girlfriend, and my mother's brother was my dad's best boyfriend, and they came over together in 1906. My uncle and my dad. My uncle stayed in St. Joe and worked in one of the, he worked in one of the dairies here, I think Western Dairy. He was very strong and did menial labor. When mother came over, dad wanted to establish a home and take roots somewhere because he didn't want to travel and be away from home.

Did they have any children at this point?

My dad, my mother came over with my older brother, and he was three years old at the time. And he tells stories about how he, or he was told that he wouldn't call my father dad because he called his grandfather dad in Russia. That was his papa, not the one that he saw here. But they later reconciled, as Jack grew older. So dad established a feed store across from the Union Station in St. Joe, and he had the feed store. We have pictures of it, as a matter of fact, until it came to the point where progress had, was going to pass him by because horses were no longer featured in the work that they did before, and automobiles were taking over. So the feed business sort of went down. And with that, dad opened up a grocery store on 19th and Mitchell in St. Joseph in 1919. The store is still there, and it's being run after the war, my brother, my brother-in-law and my sister took it over. My brother-in-law is still there. Unfortunately, my sister died four months before my wife did in 1995. But he's still running it. It's the longest continuous running, run grocery store in St. Joe, family grocery. And so dad started his family. My oldest sister was born, Lilly, then my next oldest sister, Bess, and then I'm the fourth one. And after me, six years later, my sister Elaine. However... this sister that my dad brought over died at a very early age. She was only 39 and left a son who came to live with us when he was 10 years old, and I was 11. So there were three boys and three girls that grew up in our basic family.

What was your cousin's name?

Joe Drohn, and of course, my name was Joe. We were both named after the same grandfather. But he was very slight, and I was always fat. So they called me Big Joe and Little Joe. And the poor thing, this stayed with him the rest of his life. Now, I must tell you right now that he became one of the country's foremost nuclear physicists. He was on the final Manhattan project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. And when he died at the age of 65 in 1985, he was working for Rockwell International. And our family received a letter from the president of Rockwell saying that the world is going to be deprived of this great mind. And I have some medals that he was given by the government. But we grew up as brothers, and it was never anything else, anything other than the feeling of brother, brotherhood. I was much closer to him than my older brother. And there were 10 years. My brother got married when he was 22, and I was 11. So, um...

Was it a religious family?

Yes, very. We grew up in an Orthodox, in the Orthodox faith. Dad prayed twice a day. My brother and I and my cousin, we were all bar mitzvahed. My brother did the phylacteries, the tefillin, up until the time he got married. And perhaps after that, I didn't. I was too busy. I was too busy. I made excuses, I guess. I did it for a while. And then it just sort of ended. However, I went to synagogue. I'd go on Friday nights with my dad, sometimes Saturday morning, more often Saturday morning, because Friday is eternally date night, I guess. Kept kosher. We had a kosher home. And I ate kosher food. I didn't eat out. In fact, when I went away to college, I subsisted on hard-boiled eggs and cheese sandwiches. I didn't eat non-kosher food until I went into the Army at the age of 22.

Did you still have, were there still family back in Russia at the time?

Yes. I didn't know them. But strangely enough, my grandfather, my mother's father, and my great-grandfather, and my great-uncle came over here in the late 1880s. And they were here for five years when the women refused to come. They didn't want to leave their families, you know, collateral families. So my grandfather and great-grandfather, who was my grandfather's father-in-law, you need a scorecard, I guess, to keep track of this, they went back. But my great-uncle stayed and brought the family over. He was the patriarch who brought everyone to St. Joe, and he established the Missouri Iron and Metal Company, which is still running today. Of course, we called it the junkyard then. But with the war, it became legitimatized and became the Missouri Iron and Metal Company. And my grandfather and great-grandfather and great-uncle established the Orthodox Synagogue. It was among the men who established the Orthodox Synagogue because I recall seeing the cornerstone. It was dedicated in 1892. It was a beautiful building with the onion top roofs, Russian Byzantine architecture. It was torn down to make room for a parking lot for a trucking company. The fate of many buildings here. Now, I didn't know any of them, my aunts and uncles and cousins in Europe. But they were all killed when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939.

How did you learn about that?

Well, after the war, the story came back to an uncle of mine who was the last one to come over and remembered more and really kept in contact with our family in Russia more than we did.

What city in Russia, or was it a small town?

It was a small town. They used to talk about how it was so many kilometers from Minsk and Pinsk and Grudna Giberna, whatever that meant. It was a town called Ruhitchen. After the war, it became a part of Poland, but it was Russia. everyone in the village was herded into a barn. And they were... The barn was set on fire. As they tried to escape, they were machine gunned. And about 27 relatives were wiped out with one exception. A little boy, seven years old, escaped into the woods and was taken, cared for by Russian families until he was able to join the partisans. And he fought with the partisans, whatever he did as a young kid. And after the war, we found him. We found him living in Tashkent, in Samarkand, on the Black Sea. And this uncle, who was so instrumental in keeping in touch with the family and the last one to come over, and who knew his parents, his brothers and my uncles, brothers and sisters, who were my aunts and uncles, visited him there.

What was his name?

Joseph Feldman, my Uncle Joe, and everyone should have an Uncle Joe. He was a wonderful man.

And he told you about what had happened?

Yes, and I tried to get in touch with this young man, the little boy, when I was in Europe and had all the Russian DPs in my camps. But there was, travel was impossible to Russia. He's now living in Israel. He's a father of four children and has a music conservatory in Herzliya, and I plan to go there to visit him. Everybody else in my family, all my cousins have been over, and I was probably the most instrumental in getting him there, and I haven't seen him yet.

Let's return to the time that you were leaving the States. You had been drafted, and you were leaving the States, and at that time was, again, that was in 1941?

No.

1942?

42 and did you want my prior service before leaving?

Sure, that would be great.

Actually my army career was rather divided in half. I spent two years in the States and two years in Europe and Germany. I went into the 95th Infantry Division at Camp Swift, Texas. This was in July of 1942. And I stayed with the 95th until I cadre'd, until I went out to the 97th Infantry. I was very fortunate that I'd had ROTC in high school because it gave me, and not only gave me an idea of army drill, but it gave me a mindset that you must have when you're in the army. It's accepting command without questioning it. It's not quarreling about what you have to do and what you don't have to do. You accept this because this is the army, and you're there for a reason. A lot of people didn't, and they suffered, and they fought it. But the best thing to do, the best way to handle it is just to accept whatever happens, not to be a dishrag or anything, but there are so many ways that you can, again, have your mind made up that you're going to do the best you can, be the best soldier that you can possibly be. Well, I went through the ranks, through the noncommissioned officer ranks, private first class, corporal, buck sergeant, staff sergeant, and then I went out on cadre to the 97th Infantry. You must remember, this was a civilian army that we were forming then, and there weren't enough regular army personnel to take charge. So they used civilians, civilian soldiers. It's kind of a dichotomy, but we were soldiers. And I stayed with the 97th until I went to OCS. I was with the 97th at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, which was a palace compared to Camp Swift. Camp Swift was, see, we built many of these little camps, but the forts were always here for army barracks. Most of the camps now were torn down after the war. I remember going swimming at Fort Sam Houston on New Year's Day. Now, this is New Year's of 1943. Yes. Went in 1942, 1943. From Fort Sam Houston, I went to OCS at Abilene, Texas. I was the first three-month class. Until that time, they had four months, so that was a blessing. And the first day of camp at Officer's Training School, the commander said, now look to the right of you and look to the left of you. Only one of you will be here at the end of the course. And he was right. There were about 500 and, I think around 560 in our graduating class, I think we had 290. I was fortunate enough to be made a second lieutenant. And then I was sent to Camp Blanding, Florida, to a headquarters company for reassignment. But before my assignment came through, I was sent back to Camp Barkley, Texas to go to battalion surgeon assistant school. With my medical background, it finally caught up with my 201 file in the Army, and they saw that I had pre-med. And for once, they didn't send me to the motor pool. They put me in the right, the right peg in the right hole. I became a battalion surgeon assistant and then joined the 320th Medical Battalion. No, I'm sorry. I was in that as an enlisted man. I then went back to Camp Blanding, Florida, and I had several assignments after that. I was with the last underground, I called it underground, the last balloon battalion in the United States. Now these balloons, they're like, they were made on mylar. Now that wasn't even in existence then. That came with the moon trip, I guess. But it was made out of, it was like the Zeppelin's. And they were used in London. You see, any picture that you see during the blitz, you see our balloons. But of course, there was no use for them here in the states. And, from there I was sent to... Then I joined a medical collecting company, and we staged at Myles Standish in Taunton, Massachusetts, went over on the New Amsterdam, took four and a half days, and arrived in Glasgow, Scotland. From Glasgow, we went to... And this was when? This was, this was December of um, '45. No I'm sorry... December of '44.

44. And what did a medical collecting company do?

Well I had a litter bearer platoon, and we are the first echelon of medical attention on the field. It sort of describes itself, a litter bearer platoon. I had men who actually would give first aid, we would give first aid to the whatever casualties we found, put them on the litter, and bring them back to an evac hospital.

Where did you land when you came into Europe?

Well, I landed, I landed at Le Havre. Oh, I'm sorry. That's when I crossed the channel. I landed in Glasgow, and we immediately, by train, went to Preston Lancashire, and we were billeted on a dog track, in the paddock on the dog track, Greyhound dogs. It was better than tents, better than sleeping on the ground, and the people were wonderful. I have a photo of a family that we especially became fond of, and later corresponded with after the war. I became a supply officer also of our company, and our equipment was separated from us. These were more than medical supplies, they were other kinds of supplies, you know? Yes. Sleeping bags, musette bags. Well, we carried our musette bags, but whatever medical supplies and most personal things we packed, blankets, whatever, long underwear, things that we didn't carry in our musette bags. And I finally found it up in Cardiff, in Wales. It was in this, and I was then billeted in a small town called Abergavenny. There's a story that goes along with this that I won't go into, but maybe if we have time later on. We crossed the channel. We went to Southampton, and we were waiting to cross the channel. We spent Christmas in Southampton, and we decorated the trees with the k-ration, the rim of k-ration cans, and with toilet paper.

What unit was this at the time?

This was my medical collecting company, and we would go down to the port at Southampton, the dock, and they would say, now we were a separate company, six officers and 96 enlisted men, and we'd go down to the dock, and they'd say, how many are in your company? And my CO said, well, six officers and 96 enlisted men. You get on this ship. Next batch would come down. You get on this ship. There were two of them in the harbour at the time, and whatever the complement of the ships were, some were smaller, some were larger. We got on a Polish vessel called the Sobieski. We got half way across the channel and there was so much artillery fire, and so much bombing of German planes, bombing the channel and England, that we had to turn back.

And go back to port?

We had to go back to Southampton.

At that point, we need to change the tape, and why don't we do that now?

Alright.

Right at the end of the tape, he was in the underground, he was 22 at the end of the war and a.

This is an interview with Dr. Joe Friedman, August 27, 1998 we're in -

April.

I'm sorry April 27, 1998, we're in St. Joseph, Missouri in the United States.

Dr. Friedman, you had, let's start again from where we had left off. Your ship had actually had to come back to Southampton. Before you tell us about going back again, could you tell us a little bit about the compliment of people in your unit? Were there . . . What kind of people were they? Where did they come from? Were there other Jews in your unit?

Yes, there were. And also, they came mostly from the Midwest and weren't good sailors. That was one of the things that I was really afraid of when I crossed the Atlantic. Everyone in our company got sick, with the exception of another officer and myself. I didn't miss a meal. I guess it shows now. But mostly from the Midwest and the finest bunch that you'd ever want to work with, the company was divided into a litter bearer platoon and medical platoon. The medics . . .

Do you remember the number of the unit at all?

I've been giving numbers. This was the 320th Medical Battalion, Company B of the 320th Medical Battalion. That's what I remember, as closely as I can remember. And um... Not too- no, not too many, I don't think, I- My company commander was Jewish, but I didn't know it. I, I didn't know it until really, 'til after the war.

Did you ever see any incidents of anti-Semitism?

I did. I experienced it.

How so?

Whenever, whenever I was put up for promotion, I was later told this by the officers in the camp, one officer in particular, who was very fond of me and helped me. My first sergeant was regular army. And whenever my name was put up for promotion, he would say, I don't want any goddamn kike on my staff. But I would get the promotion anyway. When I first put in for OCS, he tore up my papers. Now, I could have, I could have brought him up on charges. But my commanding officer of the time, at that time, was Captain Grady of New York. And he said, look, you've only been in the Army five or six months. He said, let it go this time. He said, you have so much to learn.

Had you moved up in the ranks before this?

Yes. Yeah, I've moved up in the ranks.

What ranks?

As noncommissioned officer. And I was a staff sergeant when he told me this. And he was right, because officer command school was very difficult. And had I not had the extra time as a noncommissioned officer, and also the experience of commanding as a noncommissioned officer, commanding a platoon and taking part in various maneuvers, and hikes, five-mile hikes, twenty-mile hikes, bivouacs, where we would go out, stay two or three days, live in tents. All this was good for me. It was good training for what was to come later at OCS.

How old were you at the time?

I was twenty-two. Twenty-two? When I went to OCS, I was twenty-three. Then, when I went out as a cadre from the 95th Infantry to the 97th, my first sergeant was the first sergeant that went to the 97th and took me with him.

The same sergeant?

The same sergeant, because I was doing so much of his work, and he was getting all the credit. This is what I ran into. I didn't run into it at OCS or the rest of my Army career.

And nothing within the platoon itself?

No.

A man in the platoon?

No. No, I didn't.

So let's jump back to that. You had just had to turn around because of enemy fire and come back to Southampton.

Flak.

What happened then?

Well, we left then early in the morning for Le Havre. I didn't know we were going to land at Le Havre, but we took, we got on this, we were on this Polish vessel called the Sobieski. It was named after a Polish general. And we landed at Le Havre. Now, we didn't get into Le Havre because the harbor was, had been bombed, and there were landing craft that we could just see evidence of this terrible, terrible thing that happened at Le Havre. And we couldn't get in, so we transferred to a landing craft. We had to go over the side of the ship, over a rope ladder.

About how many men on the ship? Do you have any idea?

Oh, no, I don't. I don't. It wasn't a large vessel. But I couldn't even pass tenderfoot when I was a Boy Scout. And here I was going down a rope ladder on the side of the ship into the Atlantic Ocean. But we did get into landing craft, and got as close to the harbor as we could, and the front went down, of the craft. I guess I still haven't learned the nomenclature, but we had to wade in up to our necks the rest of the way into Le Havre. We did land in Le Havre and- oh this- I wanted to turn that off. And it was quite different from what we had in England. Of course, we had to sleep on the ground. It was rainy. It was still winter. Fighting going on already. Fighting going on, yes. But we moved very quickly through France. Well, perhaps you've read about the Red Ball Express. We joined Patton's Third Army when we landed in France. And we crossed France in about two days. And lan- ended up in Metz, Verdun. I remember these towns. And our ambulance column was strafed in Verdun. I recall all of us had to leave the vehicle, and we would get into a gully at the side of the road. And I could just hear the p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p on the side of the road. I knew that I was in the Army then, for real.

Could you describe some of the work that you did during that time in the unit? The types of things that you would be doing within the medical unit?

Mostly. Mostly it was seeing that my men were fed properly. And that we were billeted. We would stop at a farmhouse and sleep in the barns. And maybe some of the officers could sleep in the farmhouse. If they were lucky, if there was enough. But we never displaced anyone from their home or from their beds. It was only by invitation of the people who owned the farms.

Your rank at that time?

My rank at that time was second lieutenant. Second lieutenant.

And how many men did you have under you at the time?

I had, I had, let's see. I had about 36 men. Yeah, there were nine litter bearers. Nine, nine, thirty-six, eighteen. That's right. There were two to a litter. And a stretcher, in case anyone thinks litter as in the litter of puppies. But that was mainly our job. Seeing that they got paid. There wasn't any actual fighting. The Army had already moved beyond France. And it wasn't until we crossed the Rhine at Remagen that we got into the fight.

Were you being supplied adequately up to that time-

Yes.

As far as rations and other necessities?

Yes. Yes, we were. And I really think, I often say that's what won the war. There was never, the only lack, the only thing that they did lack was gasoline. We were moving so fast, and as I said, they called it the Red Ball Express, that they- they would run out of gas and the tanks and the vehicles, the trucks would stop right where they had run out of gas. And then had to be supplied so that they could continue. I'm talking about, I'm talking about 1945.

And what month was this time period? You were talking about just getting to Remagen, I believe. What month was that?

Now VE-Day, or D-Day was June the 6th of 1944, right? Sure that's why the harbor was in that condition. This was, this was the winter of 1945. The winter of 1945, yes. We crossed, we crossed the channel, '44-'45, Christmas, New Year's. And we, again, we got into the thick of it when we crossed the Rhine.

What happened?

Actually, during the Battle of the Bulge, we received many, many casualties. And it was a terrible, terrible winter. I think, I remember writing home that at one time it didn't stop snowing for three days. And when it didn't snow, it was cold sleet, rain. This was in Belgium. That was before we crossed the Rhine. Now, I'm going to probably take some of these places out of order, because sometimes it all becomes a little bit of a blur. I thought I could keep it all separate.

How were the casualties handled from the battles, like you mentioned, the Battle of the Bulge?

We would take them, we would get them from the field or from wherever. If they were back at their command post, if they had been carried back by fellow soldiers, and we would get them and mostly, mostly take them to an evac hospital. And because this was happening, more often than not, our litter bearer platoon became assigned to an evac hospital, the 103rd evac hospital. And we were with them, I was with them, until I volunteered to work in the DP camps. Now, the war wasn't over when I went to work in the camps. The war was winding down during March.

If we coud, before we get to that, could we go back to the point where you were making your way across Europe and some of the things that you had been... you say was rather fast and you were coming up, a lot of the advance had already been done, and you were following up with medical units.

Right.

What were some of the things that you saw in some of the places that you went through, as that advance was taking place?

Well, in France, actually, the only, as I said, at Verdun, we were strafed. But we didn't have any actual ground fighting, as far as our company was concerned. In Belgium, in Belgium, we started getting casualties back to the 103 evac hospital. We also took German casualties.

Did you have a chance to talk with any of those casualties, the German casualties, or some from the area that had spent the war there?

Well, yes. Yes.

What were you learning?

They all thought, they all thought that we were going to kill them, because that's what they would have done, taking any casualties, or prisoners. Although, I guess they didn't do it to all the prisoners, but they didn't hesitate if it would serve their purpose. And many of them, many of them, refused to take any kind of injection, any painkillers, any pills, because they were afraid that we were going . . . it was going to be poisoned. Little by little, though, they came around, and the language barrier was difficult, wasn't difficult for me, because I understood German, because it was so similar to Yiddish. But for the army personnel, for the nurses, and the other enlisted men, and medics, it became more of a sign language, as far as the Germans were concerned. As far as the Americans, we did whatever we could for them. And many of them then were sent back to general hospitals, or they were sent back to England, even, for recuperation, sent back to hospitals in France.

Were we also getting casualties from the underground, or the resistance in France during that time?

No.

You didn't see any?

No. I didn't see any. And so the advance kept going on.

How long were you in France?

Really, we were in France about a week.

And from there?

There we went to Belgium. Belgium, we came down to Luxembourg, and from Luxembourg, we went into Germany.

And what did you see? What did you witness as you went into Germany? What were the conditions like there?

The towns had been pulverized. I remember Bitburg, which was just north of Remagen, after we crossed the Remagen Bridge, the Rhine at Remagen. Then when we went into Frankfurt, the 5th Infantry division had pulverized Frankfurt. I don't know, I understand that today they're all rebuilt with the German efficiency, but there are still signs of the battle. But at that time, at that time we saw death and destruction, a lot of it. There's a great deal of it that I've put out of my mind, actually, this whole period. And I haven't been really recalling it until I've been asked to do an oral history. But it seems like, it seems like the weeks and months and the years were kind of telescoped into just one big blob. And when I'm asked about what happened in Luxembourg, what happened in Belgium, or what happened in the first part of Germany, that when we were in Germany, it's just, it's as though a fleeting dream. But it was quite real, I realize. Most vividly are the corpses.

And where did you?

In the evac hospital. They would bring them back before we could put them in bags.

And these were mostly American casualties?

American casualties. And at first, I would look at the dog tags, and I thought, when I get back home, I'm going to call their family and tell them about their sons. But I didn't know. I later thought, that's not a good thing, really. I don't want to tell them about them when they were dead. Let them have the fond memories of them when they were alive. Tell them they died nobly? They know that. They did. I would see them at autopsies, and that was the worst part.

Would these be done at Field Hospital?

Would be done at Field Hospital to see how they died, what type of wound it was, for the record. And it was very traumatic. Very traumatic. Because that's what sticks out in my mind. And, you know, I realized that I hadn't said it until you brought it out of me. And rightfully so. That was the major. That was the major trauma. Seeing all the dead bodies that we collected.

How far ahead of you was the front at that time?

We could hear, we could hear the bombing. We could hear all the anti-aircraft. We could hear the trucks moving up to Bastogne. We were at Montmedy. And at Malmedy. These are two Belgian cities. They're very similar. And we could hear the strafing and the bombing all the time, day and night, day and night. So I can't tell you how close we were, how many kilometers, barely. And we got the bronze star for the battle. So we were there.

Where did your unit go from there?

You know, I, I was separated from my unit shortly after that.

How did that happen?

When I was put into the, when I say separated from them, I mean to the point where I couldn't even contact them. I didn't even know where the C.P., where our command post was. When I was assigned to the 103 evac hospital with just my litter-bearer platoon, the whole company wasn't assigned to the evac hospital.

So it was just you and 30, 30-odd men?

It was just me and my men. And it wasn't until later on in Germany that I was able to find out where they were. And it was only because they were sending my mail to me or trying to get my mail to me through couriers. And then when I knew where they were, I would keep in contact with them or try to find them. Now, I'm talking about around the end of March and the beginning of, well in February, March...

Of 1945?

1945. And when, then we started seeing, we started seeing Russians, hordes and hordes of Russian D.P.s. As we were progressing, we would see them coming back from camps that were being liberated.

About where was this when you started seeing these groups?

This was already, this was in Germany. This was when we were in Germany. And uh . . .

So they were streaming east?

They were streaming, they were streaming west.

West.

They were streaming west to join American forces. They didn't start going east until we made contact with the Russians. They didn't start going east until we, until we set up displaced person camps. But it was about this time that I was sent to military government on temporary duty as a displaced persons officer. Now I . . .

You had already been through a large portion of Germany at that time, is that right?

Just Bavaria.

And you had, had you run into camps?

No, the first camp, the first camp that I ran into was Ohrdruf.

And when was that?

This was in April. This was the early part of April in 1945. And uh . . .

And this was before you were sent to your D.P. duties?

Yes. Yes.

So was it April of 1945?

1945.

And how did you approach that area? What had your unit been doing to get it to where it was in that area?

Actually, we were following, I think, the 4th Armored Division and attending to their casualties. And when we talk about liberating a camp, it isn't all done in one day. To be the first one in, or it's hard to describe how massive this influx was into this area. The camp that, do we, would you like to go into the Ohrdruf?

Yes, please.

First of all, I'd like to read what I wrote home when I didn't write right away. In fact, all my letters, I tried to shield my family from anything unpleasant or anything that I might be in danger. And... Let's see. Oh, yes. Now, this was several days after I went into the camp, 'cause I couldn't write right away. "I suppose you've read in the papers about the Nazi torture camp found at a town by the name of Ohrdruf. I went in there and saw the ovens that were still burning. I'll never forget it. The Nazis had to leave in a hurry because of the advancing troops, so they shot as many of the inmates as they could. All the dead bodies were littered around the ground while I was there. The people had evidently been starved-" That was so naïve, evidently been starved, of course they were, "because they were thin and emaciated. The quarters consisted of piles of straw on stone in dirty shelters. They couldn't even be classed as homes. I saw the big ovens that were used to burn the bodies, and the bodies stacked like logs beside the ovens. I could tell you more about it, but it would be sickening. It gives you some idea what beasts they really were, and we can't deal too harshly with them. Death is too good for those responsible for these crimes." Now, this is kind of mild, I'm sure, but this is what I wrote home. When I went into the camp and smelled it, smelled this odor is still in my nostrils, and I think it will never go away. And when I heard the cries of these people who were in the barracks, and they were lying on pallets, cement pallets, one might have been dead and the other was so weak that he couldn't push him off, didn't have the strength to push him off so that he might be able to stretch his legs. And they were dressed in these striped pajamas, and you hear the cries, the cries of joy, just cries, and the townspeople then would gather around, and perhaps many of the guards who by this time might have changed into civilian clothes to save their lives. I later learned from some of the inmates of the camp that around 2,000 of them were taken the day before and marched to a forest and shot in the head.

This was the day before you arrived?

The day before we arrived at Ohrdruf.

And do you remember the date that you arrived in Ohrdruf?

It was either the 4th or the 5th of April. Now, there's a very famous picture, as you know, of Eisenhower and Patton and Bradley looking at the corpses. It's the first photo that you see at the Holocaust Museum. This is the camp, this is camp Ohrdruf, and I think that photo was taken around, see there's a date on it that we'll take later. That photo was taken around the 14th, and I know we were there about a week before, a week to ten days before they came there.

How long did you stay?

We did as much as we could, but we were still progressing, and the army- the war was still going on. We arrived one day, early one day, and did as much as we could with K rations, with whatever we had, with clothing, whatever food we had, whatever medical supplies that we had, whatever we could do. And we cautioned them not to eat too fast, not to eat too quickly, because you know they would get sick. All they had had was were potato peelings made into a soup once a day, and a slice of bread once a day, until they were put in the ovens.

Yeah, yeah and most of his testimony will come from the time that he ran a number of DP camps and so the majority of his testimony will be concerning that. And then after the war is also something I would like to get - he came back here. He was a podiatrist for 15 years in the age 41 So he wanted to be an actor went to New York got on the stage went out to Hollywood and got in the movies. You know the revival of Grease that's going on now, he was in Grease.

Oh, really?

Then he made documentaries. He worked with Jack Haley Jr. the son of the tin man into the 25th anniversary thing on TV for the Wizard of Oz.

So it is- Oh alright,

It is Monday April 27th 1998. We are talking with Dr. Joe Friedman and we were in are in St. Louis.

St. Joseph.

Excuse me, St. Joseph, Missouri and the interview is in English. Dr. Friedman we were talking about that April 4th and 5th 1945 as you were coming into Ohrdruf a satellite camp of the Buchenwald system.

St. Joseph.

Could you detail for me, please, the area as you came in how you came into the camp whether you were on foot or in vehicles. The the kinds of things you saw the condition of the buildings that kind of thing. What were the conditions?

Yes, we approached it in vehicles and as the guards had already left, there were some who had broken out already, and we saw them, we saw them and it was the first time that I saw these striped uniforms.

Were they walking the down the road or... ?

They were, they were like zombies because they're very close we'd come from... I think Gotha is the town was close by and-

In what, in what direction from the camp is Gotha?

It's, Gotha is I have it on the map, it's north west of the camp. Buchenwald was north almost directly north of Ohrdruf. Very close maybe about four or five kilometers and I know, I know that the people knew what was going on there because they could they could smell it. We started smelling-

The people in the area around the camp?

We started smelling it before we even got to the camps.

Had you been given any information by the military on what you might expect in some of these places?

No.

You were told nothing.

No, I don't remember having been told, I knew I've read I I knew what was happening in 1930 look it began in 33. Started the... systematic annihilation of the Jews. And then Kristallnacht in 1938 I wanted to go to Germany with a hostelers on a bicycle. But I talked to somebody who was there and said that this isn't the time for a Jewish person to be in Germany. Well, I got there through the courtesy of Uncle Sam much later. But, we we- We sort of knew what was happening. But but who in your who in their right mind, could imagine that this the systematic gassing and burning and torturing and maiming? Germany! Germany that had been one of the most advanced countries in Europe. I mean all the, you know all the brilliant scientists and artists. Who incidentally most of them were Jewish. And came to this country to escape Nazism. I mean, that's who we learned from too. But to realize we were the first camp that was unearthed by the Third Army. The first camp in the United States Army.

So as, as you're approaching, how far out did you realize that it was something very different-

It was very close. It was very close. It was very close. Close enough for us to jump out of the cars and start investigating it. Out of the trucks out the jeeps.

Do you remember who was commanding your, your unit at the time?

I was still with the evac hospital and it was a colonel. Who was later discharged. No, I don't, I really don't remember.

So you had seen seen former, inmates.

Yes.

of the camp walking on the road you were coming up. What was the first thing that you saw?

After after the inmates? The first thing that I, we zeroed in on were the ovens. There were two huge ovens side by side.

Did you know immediately what they were?

Yes. Yes. Well-

Was smoke still coming out of the stack?

Yes, yes. See they very hurriedly tried to burn as many as they could. The the guards, the Germans. And you could see you could see the smoke coming out of the smoke stacks and the ovens the ovens were open. It's another thing I hadn't thought of.

The doors were open?

The doors were open, the doors were open. And we could see the we could see the remains. I later learned, or I I heard the next day that that evening, the Bürgermeister and his wife had committed suicide. This is true because I watched Biography on on A+E and they had the biography of Patton. I won't start in on Patton now. Even at this late date I could be court-martialed for what I think about him.

You had followed his.

Yes.

His advance very closely.

Yes. And it didn't so much what he did, how he thinks he won the war. But his treatment of the displaced persons and especially the Jews after the war. The the animals that he called them, but I'm getting ahead of this. When I saw this biography of Patton then I must send for the video you can do that; in the video they have Ohrdruf and they have the Bürgermeister and his wife dead in their home. I didn't know that there was footage of that until I saw it on Patton's biography. Also, and they don't have this, but I heard this later on, I think the next day before we left, I heard from some of the inmates of the camp that they were taken out of their home after they committed suicide and were dismembered and the body parts were hung from a tree in the Civic Center. I didn't see this. But I can believe it, I can believe it.

Who were the people in the camp when you got to the camp, where there were it was it men were there women and or children there?

Men, no, I I only saw men.

And were they uniformly... emaciated?

Yes.

Were some, did some look healthier then others?

No, no, this was the last place before the ovens, and they didn't put them there while they were still able to work. So I saw skin stretched over bones.

Did you... as you were coming in you did you see any evidence of former guards at the camp, any of the administration of at the camp?

No.

Were you were aware of anything of that structure being there?

No, nothing, nothing.

And were your superior officers giving you any direction while you were coming into the camp about how to handle the the the people who had been in the camp.

No, no. Instinctively, I believe, we all knew what to do. The officers, the enlisted men, whoever. We did whatever we could. Get them water, again, whatever food we could, try to make them comfortable.

Was, was it organized?

No, no.

It was just person helping person?

Yes, yes. And it was terrible- just pandemonium. Just chaos. Especially at seeing American American soldiers.

How did, how did the the prisoners react to you?

Oh, they kissed our feet, our hands.

Did you communicate with any of them?

I I could sp- with Yiddish as much as I could, and of course when I started that everyone gathered around me. And I did as much as I could. And we tried to get . . .

What did they tell you?

They... One of them said we took many whippings for Morgenthau Baruch. A big complaint was that we weren't there early enough.

And they talked with th- with you about that?

Yes. That we were duped, the Red Cross went to a camp for inspection. It was a camp that was cleaned up. We know this now. In fact, they've recently admitted their duplicity... as did the Pope. But I won't, I won't offend anyone with that. But, why did we wait so long? Well what can you answer them?

What type of help did you give to the prisoners there when when you go to the camp?

About all we could do, what we could do is give them whatever food we had.

Did you have it in sufficient supply to-

Whatever we had. Yes, whatever rations we had. Cigarettes, candy, and medical supplies.

How how were the medical... treatment handled, was it-

There was so little you could do medically at that time. If there were any open wounds we could we know we could administer to that. Very little now that I think of it. Very little; it was such you know the rehabilitation had to be taken in such small increments that until they could be fed properly and and and get back into sort of a human existence. That was about all anyone could do.

Could you describe the facilities that were there, were there any indication of the of a sanitation system, what condition . . .

No.

were the barracks and the other buildings?

They were filthy. Filthy, was excrement every place. They they had, if I recall, they might have had a single a single lavatory. And I later learned that they could wash there once a week if they had the strength to get there. There might have been, I don't recall seeing anything that even resembled a latrine or a toilet. I'm sure that they defecated or urinated any place that they could and maybe in place. Where they were and the barracks they weren't barracks. They were huts with wood nailed together. Some had straw on the wood, that they could sleep on. Many of them didn't.

Were people in the barracks when you looked in the barracks?

Yes, yes, there were still people in the barracks.

How many people would you see in?

It's hard to say, it's hard to say. The barracks seemed to go on forever, but of course they didn't. And they weren't three-story barracks as we might imagine, they were mostly flat. And... I didn't I didn't go into, I, we went into the first one where people were still lying there, but we didn't go into others because they started coming out and carrying each other out. And all of and our time then was taken up in in whatever we could do.

Did you did anyone arrange a central area where people could receive medical attention then?

We told the towns- we got the townspeople and there's always there was there's always someone in charge even though the bu- if the Bürgermeister was gone there was someone to take his place. there was someone to take his place. And we admonished them that if they weren't taken care of properly until the United States Army could take care of them, that the whole town would be wiped out. We made all sorts of threats. Hoping that they would you know adhere to whatever humane conditions that they could.

Did you bring them in, the townspeople, into the camp or did you go in?

They they didn't go into the camp, but they surrounded it. You know the camps were surrounded with barbed wire, and they looked in. And many of them said it was the first time that they had seen anything like that. I started berating them.

You talked to some directly?

Yes, yes. They said they didn't know. And I said, how could you not know this, and just smell? Did you smell it? What do you think they were doing baking bread in the ovens?

What was their response?

They didn't know, they didn't know. They weren't . . . they were civilians, it was the soldiers that did it. This Nazi ideology was inculcated into their minds so so... severely that it stayed with them for, after many many months and now years after the war. Just one small incident. I was traveling after the war was over. I was going to services, I believe it was in Nuremberg, Jewish services. And coming back we lost our way. Incidentally my jeep driver, and I didn't know that he was Jewish, he was with me all this time when I made arrangements to go to Nuremberg for services. He asked if he could go and I said well, he said yes, I'm Jewish but at any rate we got lost coming back and it was nach- night and dark and I went to a farmhouse and knocked on the door and the windows of a gable over the door on the second floor opened up and the woman looked out and said 'heil Hitler.' Months after the war. And then she said 'Oh, verzeihen.' Please forgive me, and I told her that we weren't there to kill her, come down and she gave us directions. Incidentally, we were almost, front part of the car was in the water. I don't know what river was flowing by there, but we stopped just in time. But they knew, they knew I'm sure.

So while you were there none of the townspeople actually entered the camp?

No.

But did-

But the... those who could walk and those who could get out of the camp started going into the town.

The prisoners started-

Started going into Ohrdruf, yes.

How how far... from the camp was the town, how long of a walk?

Well it was off the highway. It was off the highway It was you know, it was walking distance that that that these very weak people could make, could go.

Were any military people assigned to the to the prisoners as they were leaving camp and going back into town?

No, but we were followed we were followed in there there was there were other troops that came behind I don't know who I don't know how we got the story that they'd been mis- dismembered whether we got it the next day from the inmates of the camp the prisoners, or whether I heard it from troops who came in later on. I'm not certain about that.

As you, as you entered the camp and in the couple of days that you were there you fully expected them to leave there soon and move on and- is that correct?

The first thought that came to me or one of the one of the, reigning thoughts was that there but for the grace of God. I could very easily have been in one of the ovens and I know that this is what caused me to volunteer to stay over and to volunteer to get into the DP camps and hopefully I thought I would get into a Jewish DP camp, but it wasn't to be and perhaps it was better because I was able to do more for the Jewish DPs undercover of regular displaced persons camp of slave laborers than I could of the, survivors the Jewish survivors. Had I had I been in their camps.

As you were in and leaving Ohrdruf, was it your expectation then that there would be other units coming in there and taking care of the survivors and seeing to their needs?

Yes. Oh yes.

Had you talked about, did you know about any formal arrangements being being made to do that?

Only the townspeople. Only with the townspeople. Now how long they stayed, you know we couldn't tell them what to do. They were out to get revenge.

Did-

And I'm, I'm sure that several were murdered, several of the townspeople.

Did you actually hear stories about that afterwards?

Afterwards yes. In many of the camps, and survivors will tell you that they got their measure of revenge. Some of it's written up in some of the books. Some of the literature that's come out since then. And you can't blame them. It's justifiable homicide if there's such a thing. That was for me that was really the end of Ohrdruf. It was rather, rather quick, traumatic, memories are long-lasting. I wish I could have stayed there.

Did your unit handle uh, uh, disposal of some of the bodies in the camp.

No. No. We weren't equipped to do that and then they were dead. What more could you do? Other than give them a proper burial; that we made the Germans do later on. We made the Germans dig the graves.

At the time, did you know that there... were a mixture of prisoners Jews and perhaps Gypsies or other ethnic backgrounds.

No.

You didn't know them.

No.

The composition of prisoners?

No. I these I these I I believe I could be 99% sure were all Jews.

And signage on buildings, were things labeled to be that that would tell you immediately what the particular spot in the camp was was used for?

No.

Nothing like that?

Not that I can recall.

What happened after that?

Well, I was still with the 103rd evac hospital and, we realized that more and more as camps were opening up and not just the camps as the army was progressing... Non-germans who were working in the factories started leaving in order to join the American troops or to join up or to be somewhere where they could be under the auspices of the United States Army and be fed and billeted and so on. So this became, I hate to use the word problem because it was a response- it became our responsibility I should say to take care of the slave laborers people who had been brought from Western Europe, from Eastern Europe, to work in the munition factories and whatever for the German war machine so that the men, and later on the young boys-

And by our problem you mean the US military's problem?

Yes, yes. Now, we were prepared or we were preparing men for this task. They were with military government in the United States and they were going to various schools here, many of the Ivy League schools were teaching the varied the teaching languages, German, Japanese, Russian, and they were also teaching engineers how to handle the... the gas works and the electrical works and the water works of these towns as we went into them because we knew that we were going to have to billet, not only ourselves, but we'd have to billet the slave laborers until they could be repatriated.

Did you have any idea the numbers of people that you were talking about as far as- ?

Not at the time. Not at the time, but I know now that they ran into the hundreds of thousands. Because I ended up at Wildflecken the camp had 20,000 Russians in the one camp alone. Later on in Coburg I had 15,000. As a steady census that was in that was a railhead and we would I'll get to that. We would send out 1500 a day and get as many in so that the the average census of the camp was between 11 and 13 thousand. Now this is the army. The men who they picked to work in the DP camps came from two different categories, they were either men that the company commander wanted to get rid of and here was a chance I'm sorry to say it was it was just as arbitrary as that. Because later displaced person officers that I met later on told me I didn't want to get into here my CO sent me here, and I didn't want to do this. Or there were people who really wanted to to do this work. I like to think that I was the latter and asked my company commander to be relieved of my command and to be put on, what he did, what they did was put me on temporary duty with the G5 section.

When was this?

This was, this was the, towards the end of April.

Right after your camp experience.

Yes. Yes. Yes very soon after that.

And had had your knowledge of the need for somebody to look out after the displaced persons had that that all come about just between the time that you you came into Ohrdruf and and- at the end of April?

Well, let us say it crystallized then. And I had no idea that I would end up doing that before Ohrdruf. But I knew afterwards, I knew that this was going to be a job that I would like to do. And also there was no need for us anymore. All we had to do was wait to be sent to the Euro- to the Japan- to the Pacific theater, and who wanted to go there? Really. So I knew, I knew that I didn't have enough points to be sent home, and if I had to stay, that this is what I would want to do. That's how it started out. It later became really, my, my MOS my modus operandi something that I really really wanted to do.

So how did how did you did you request, did you go to your commanding officer and request this duty?

Yes, yes, I asked- as long as they didn't need us anymore, and you know, how far were we from from VE day? May the 8th. This is the end of April. And the casualties had had you know diminished. I didn't want to be sent somewhere, you know willy-nilly. And I asked if I could continue with this work.

Why don't we stop here and then begin again with a new tape?

It is April 27th, a Monday, 1998, we're talking with Dr. Joe Friedman, and the interview is being conducted in St. Joseph, Missouri, in English.

Dr. Friedman, we had been discussing your decision to volunteer.

Yes.

To work with displaced persons. How did you arrange that assignment, and were there other people interested, people that you knew who were interested in doing that?

Not, not the outfit that I was with. Not in my parent union, nor my- parent unit, nor the evac hospital that I was with. I didn't know anyone else from there. See, it didn't affect them as much as it did me, I'm sure. Also, I don't, I don't, again, I don't think any of them volunteered.

How is it made known to you that this was an option?

Well the war, strangely, I mean this is a strange saying, but the war ended too soon for the people who were being trained in the United States for the various jobs that I mentioned before. And so they had to take officers and enlisted men from the existing units that were in Germany already.

And your rank at the time was?

I, by that time I was a, a, had I made first lieutenant by then? I believe so, yes. I was a first lieutenant, not for anything great, but I had been in grade long enough to become a first lieutenant; through natural progression of things. And we had an appropriate party to, what they call a wetting down my bars. You go, you go into, we had a command post and I bought everybody drinks. Didn't buy them. We were supplied liquor. The officers were supplied and I gave mine to my enlisted men. And I don't, don't deserve a pat on the back for that, but I realized, and it's true, you're only, really only as good as your men, and they didn't get liquor rations, but we did. And in addition to that, we would sort of confiscate champagne, especially in France, along the way. And in fact, I was in the Epernay cellars of France, where they have the champagne cellars, Epernay.

But then, as I said, the war ended too soon. It didn't end too soon for any of us, but it did for the people who were waiting to come over. And they couldn't get to these, that was one of the things, incidentally, that Patton was taken to task for the fact that he had Nazis working in these positions in the gas works and the water works and electrical fac- works. But no one had these positions unless they were Nazis. And he had to use them in order to run the cities, which in turn sustained the Army. And the civilians, and the DPs. But I was released from my duties with my collecting company, with my platoon. And assigned to the G5 section of Third Army. On temporary duty. And I immediately, almost immediately, started in. I got orders from headquarters to report; the first place that I went was Bamberg, Germany, for orientation. There was already a setup in Bamberg for displaced persons. See, all these distances aren't too great. This is all in Bavaria. And we, many of the towns that you'll see on the map that I talk about are very close to each other. And I started working in the Bamberg camp. Now, that that wasn't a large camp. I would say that we would have, well, we'd have from between 5 and 10,000 there. But it was more of a stationary camp. And it grew because people from the surrounding countryside who heard that there was a camp established there in an old German army barracks - incidentally, our, our pinpoint bombers were told not to bomb army barracks, or the IG Farben buildings, or a few other things that had United States money, interests, or stock in these places. Because we knew that we were going to have to use them as bilets for not only the Army personnel, our Army, but for displaced persons. And SHAEF headquarters in Frankfurt was an IG Farben building, as headquarters buildings were throughout Germany, Army headquarters.

What kind of training did you receive, if any, to go into one of these camps?

Very, very little. We flew by the seat of our pants actually. What we knew that we had to do, we had to draw rations from Army supplies. We had to draw rations, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, and fresh meat. To supplement what we would get from the army, we would requisition from the German personnel, from German supply houses.

Did, was there a period when you, for example, you went into Bamberg, and what was your position there, and were you in charge of the entire camp?

No, not in Bamberg. In Bamberg, there was a major Adams was in charge, and he had, we had three officers, and there might have been about eight or ten enlisted men, but the camps by that time, or the camps then, were being mostly run by DPs. They had hurriedly set up their own administration. We would oversee it, but they had their own camp personnel. I'll go into it more when I get to Coburg, because that was, that was really where I spent most of the time. And hospitals were formed, schools were formed. Now this, I'm trying to get it in the proper time frame. I, I didn't get to Bamberg really until after the war. But- no, I'm sorry, I did because, because I was later, I later, I was, I was out in my, I was out when the war ended. I didn't know the war ended when it did. The war ended May the 8th, and I'd like to read from a letter that I wrote home on May the 10th, and this is how, this is how I found out that the war ended. Let me see.

This was a letter that you wrote to whom?

That I wrote to my folks... in commemoration of the end of the war. Oh yes. Yeah, here's the letter I've been promising you, I'll just sort of brief it. "It's been a-" yes, I was at Bamberg- "It's been our job to set up and operate camps to house and feed these people until such time when transportation is available, that is to repatriate them. In the first camp I worked, most of the people were Russian, although there were also Poles, French, Dutch, Italian, Czech, Yugoslavs, and it was hard work, but I enjoyed it very much. I'm now in the process of moving again. I haven't the slightest idea where I'm going, but I'll know tomorrow when I report to headquarters." Now, I won't go into all this except... yes: "On the day the war ended, the day the war was declared over, two German planes were shot down..." I recall that they weren't shot down, they were shot at, but they came down. They came down "...and landed in a clearing about a block from our command post. The pilot got out and surrendered. He had a beautiful woman in the plane with him and also several cases of champagne. We had no celebration, but kept on working. The end was, was sort of an anticlimax, and I couldn't help but think about preparing to go to the CBI." The China-Burma-India region. "The next night, another officer and myself were crossing the Danube when, when we, when we met some officers who had just been liberated from a prison camp." Now these, there was a prison camp that housed American and British Army officers. They were, they were treated rather fairly. After the war, we found these officers just wandering the countryside. There was such, such disorganization. I mean, no one knew what to do, and this was, this was two days, you know, this, this May, May the tenth that I wrote this. After the war ended, when I didn't know that it had ended. "...officers had just been liberated from a prison camp. We invited them to our house-" where we were billeted- "...in which we were staying. And we had champagne and eats til the wee hours. They told us about their experiences under the Nazi rule. It makes you want to, want to kill all " There's a young kid writing now. the Germans. "And just to listen to them. I don't know what future holds in store for me." And so on.

So, we came across these people and, I was on my way to headquarters to get my next assignment, that's how I, that's how I ran into these officers. And that's when the war ended. I went to Wildflecken. Now that's where I was sent, to train them. There was an UNRRA team that had arrived at Wildflecken. Now Wildflecken is near Bad Kissingen.

Now, you had had some experience there at Bamberg.

At Bamberg, yes.

And then went on to Wildflecken.

Went on to Wildflecken. They had 20,000 Russians there. And Wildflecken was the camp for the German ski troops. It's beautiful around there. And wonderful skiing, it was in the Alps, the Bavarian Alps.

So this camp was made up of barracks for, that had been used for the troops?

For, for the troops. For the ski troops.

Conditions there were fairly, fairly good?

Yes, yes, yes. And the UNRRA team, made up of many different nationalities, among them was Kathleen Hulme, who later wrote A Nun's Story. It was made into a film with Audrey Hepburn. She also wrote a book called The Wild Place, which is what Wildflecken means. And it's a primer. It's the definitive, the definitive book on how to run a DP camp and what it consists of. That book is now in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, along with other artifacts that I left there. We trained them for about two weeks. Then came back, I came back to Bamberg. I didn't stay there very long when I was sent to Coburg. You know, this was very fluid. We would do whatever we could. It's an overwhelming number of people that came into the camps afterwards.

And these camps again were very close geographical?

Yes. Yes, very close to each other. I went to Coburg. When I went there, I was sent there with another officer who was later sent to a different camp. So I was left in Coburg, Germany, by myself with six enlisted men. That's where we had 15,000 Poles, from 13 to 15,000 Eastern Europeans, mostly Polish.

And you were in charge of this camp?

I was in charge of the camp.

What was, what was the makeup of the displaced persons there?

Men, women, and children; whole families who had been displaced because of war and had come in, entire families, to work in Germany.

Now, you had mentioned earlier that you had wanted to work with displaced Jews in a camp for them. This was not.

This no.

This contingent was not a Jewish population?

No, no there were no Jews in this- well, there were. There were. I'm getting a little bit ahead of my story if I may. I'll tell you this. We started this camp, and you have the photos that you'll see later. We had set up a school for the children. We had set up a hospital. We had set up a theater. We had kitchens that prepared food. We had supplies of wood that we would get from entire forests that had been cut down so that they could feed the ovens that were making warm soup. The main dish was usually soup. However, unlike the way, the way the concentration camps, inmates had been treated, we had regular dietary rules that we kept. By dietary, I mean, each one was to get at least 2,000 calories a day. They had... and when we sent them home, when we would put them, see, Coburg was near a railhead, that's why it acted as a repatriation point. A railhead called Lichtenfels that was 15 kilometers from Coburg. We would send them with at least five-day rations, rations for five days; kept families together in each box car. And the box cars weren't locked, believe me, with locks and stopped. The trains stopped periodically so people could relieve themselves or do whatever they have to do, anything to keep them from becoming dehumanized the way the Jews were in the box cars and gassed.

How did you determine what the nutritional needs were of the people in the camp?

We got that from Army headquarters. I have it here. I'm pointing to my table that has everything on it. Yes, you'll see. Now-

Did you have people in charge of that?

How did we run this? We ran it with, they ran it with their own personnel. Actually, I was, I supervised mostly. But it was all departmentalized. We had doctors who had been slave laborers and now they were able to practice medicine. But they, they were... they were under the aegis of our medical battalion, our medical personnel. We had, we had cooks, we had chefs, we had entertainers, we had school teachers. We had almost an entire Polish division. Well, it wasn't as large as a division. Might have been what was in Poland was a division. But they had been, they had been in exile, many of them, in London. The reason I know this is because a general, Polish general, Gavilan came into our camp to inspect it because he knew that it was a Polish camp. Camps were always being inspected because we were all, the Third Army headquarters, they were always getting flack about how the displaced persons were being treated and especially the way the Jews were being treated. the Jews were being treated. So these people, the camps almost ran themselves with the help of an UNRRA team and our American Army, whatever was there, myself and the six enlisted men. And we were the final, the final, the buck stopped with us.

How would you define what you were doing at the camps? Why were the camps there? What were you trying to do with the people in the camps?

All right. What we were trying to do was to keep them until they could be repatriated. Now we were able to repatriate the Western Europeans and in connection with that, the other, I didn't mention other, in addition to the UNRRA team, we had a French team called MMLA and it's Mission Militaire Liaison Administratif. And it was composed of two doctors, an army officer, a French army officer, Jacques Jankin, who almost demolished the camp on Bastille Day, and a WAC, what would be equivalent to a French WAC, who was originally from Russia and she spoke Russian and French fluently, which was a big help to us. Now the main purpose of our camp was not to keep them and there was a regular rotation roster of people, of DPs, who were being sent back. Now, as I said, there was no problem sending back the Western Europeans to France and Belgium, Italy. There were even, you know, after the war, the Nazis and the Italians weren't that buddy-buddy. And, but we couldn't do anything with the Eastern Europeans until we made contact with the Russians, so they had to be kept there and clothed and fed and sheltered until, until the Russians, and of course you know, there was a controversy over who would go into Berlin first, whether we would go in or the Russians would go in, and the Russians, of course, we were, we were very lenient, I should say, or accommodating to the Russian wish. It was probably decided at Yalta. Anyhow, that was the duty of the camp and it was run very efficiently. So it was a way station. It was a so it was a way station. It was a way station really. As I said the population was always around 10- around 15,000. But, it was fluid population. We would take 1,500 out each day, almost every day, and put them on trucks, and I don't know where they got them, but they decorated the trucks with bows and leaves, and they decorated with pictures of Lenin and Stalin and Polish officers or whatever.

So these were mostly Russian and Polish trucks?

Russian and Polish, Eastern Europeans, yes, and they would go to the railhead. I have a, I have sort of running rotogravure of this in my photos, and again, the camp was always being inspected.

By, who who would do the inspecting?

By military personnel.

U.S. military?

U.S. military personnel. This might sound a little disjointed, but well, no, I'll tell you this now. This one day, now we're talking about June, we're getting into June.

Of 1946?

1940-.

5?

5, 1945. And you have, I have a photo of this, which I prize very much. A group came into my camp, a group of Palestinian officers, Jewish officers, they were called Palestinians, and we call them Israelis now, who had fought with the British in North Africa, and they came into my camp with, with papers from Third Army headquarters ostensibly to look for survivors of members of the Palestinian Brigade, families of members of the Palestinian Brigade, which was true. They looked through our rosters, and they did, on occasion, find someone that they thought might be related to this or that one, but what they really were doing, were setting up an underground, a Jewish underground, because by now, the Jews who were being sent back to Russia and to Poland, the pogroms had started again. They started killing the Jews and they wanted to get back to the American zone so that they could get to existing Jewish camps and eventually get on ships in Italy and Greece.

Did you realize at the time that this was happening to some of the Poles and Russians who were leaving your camp?

Yes, yes, and it's kind of a sorry thing to relate, but eventually we had to force them back, the Eastern Europeans.

How was that done?

With half tracks, we would take them to the railhead, and with guns mounted on half-tracks, force them to go back. We did. Our security patrols, the Russians demanded that of them, and we even, see, we had, we had Russians at the exchange point, too, that would supervise the, see.

Can you explain what the exchange point was?

Yes, yes. You know, we were divided into four parts, the Russian zone, the American zone, and the British zone of Germany, and the French zone. The American zone was mostly Bavaria. We had an exchange point, Lichtenfels was very close to the demarcation point between the American zone and the Russian zone, to the extent where they had Russian personnel at Lichtenfels also, to see that they got, they told them that when they got back to Russia, they'd get back to their homes, that Stalin wanted them back, and they were citizens of, you know, the Soviet Union. Not true. Not true. When they got back, now the Russians, I understand, I've learned, they weren't even allowed out of the boxcars. They were sent right to Siberia, those who weren't murdered. You know, Stalin and Hitler ran a, Stalin ran a pretty close race with Hitler, as far as genocide is concerned. At that time. Of course, the Cold War is over now. We... then we did have to force them to go back. Now, let's get back to the Jewish DPs that were coming through. Yes, I did tell them, they knew that I would help.

These are the Palestinians who came in and talked with you about-

Right. Right.

And did they tell you directly what they were really doing, what the real purpose was?

Not right away. Not right away, because, first of all, you know, it was against army regulations for me to do anything like this. And it later came out that I was almost court-martialed for this very thing. But, the Jews that would come through from wherever they came from, I had a German Panzer battalion attached to my camp too. They were a transport battalion.

Under your command?

Under my command. And there was a German major, Major McLean, and I have a walking stick that he carved for me that you'll see later on. And the, the strange part here, and the odd thing is, that the Jewish DPs that came into camp, that we knew of, and that I knew of, were transported in the German trucks to a Jewish camps. I knew there was one at Augsburg, and I knew that there was one called the Funkkaserne. Kaserne meaning camp, Funk, near Munich. And they were taken to either one, wherever they wanted to go. Some of them had been there before, before they went back to Poland or to Russia, mostly Poland. Some of them knew that their families were still in these camps and wanted to rejoin them. Now, later on, Jewish camps were formed. Just, I mean, these were Jewish camps, but, but basic Jewish camps. This was after, after Patton was chastised for his treatment of the Jews by Truman, and after the Harrison Report on what was happening to the Jews in the camps. Then they started getting better, the Jews started getting better treatments. But until then, they were still coming into whatever camp they were near, wherever they could get across the border. And they were being, I thought it was rather ironic and kind of funny that here this German major with his battalion of trucks were transporting them to Jewish camps.

We'll stop here now as we change tapes.

It's Monday, April 27th, 1998. We are speaking with Dr. Joe Friedman. We are in St. Joseph, Missouri in the United States, and the interview is in English. Dr. Friedman, you were talking about being approached by some Palestinians-

Right.

About the nature of which you thought there might be something more to what they were talking about than initially, and they were looking actually for someone to help them get Jews into out of the country and into other places.

Right.

Can you tell them?

To get them out of the Russians, after they would get into the Russian zone, after they would leave Poland or Russia and get into the Russian zone, and come into the American zone, and they wanted to get into Jewish DP camps, and, and I did. Now, how many came through? I don't have a figure on it. There were a great number of them, and the reason I couldn't continue with this work is because I was later transferred from Coburg. But not until after it was inspected again by Major General Robertson and a couple of other Lieutenant Generals and Colonels, there were about 14 in the group that came in. Each one was an expert in their field. One inspected the hospital, one inspected the kitchens, was a mess officer, one inspected the barracks, and Major General Robertson, they went, I went through with him every nook and cranny of Coburg DP camp. After they got through, he sort of looked at me, and I was a first lieutenant, and here was this Major General, and the Army is, I mean, there's a hierarchy in the Army that's very strictly adhered to even between the enlisted men, and non-commissioned officers. And yes. this is later on, this is in the fall of 45... And we went back to my office. I had, my office was in one of the barracks on the first floor, and we went back, and he said, Lieutenant Friedman, you deserve a lot of credit for this, what you've done in this camp. And I said, I deserve a rest.

How long had you been there at that time?

I had been working in the DP camps... for, well, since April, and this was around September. Could have been September, October. Yes, because my next post was during the winter, so it was, it was fall, fall of 45, and he said, oh, so I told him that I was only on temporary duty to military government. Whenever I requested rations, I was smoking at the time, and drinking a little, just to bolster my courage to face the daily tasks. And when I would apply for a leave from military headquarters, military government, they'd say, you aren't on our rotation roster, you're just temporary duty. So I would apply to my company, and they said, well, you're no longer on our roster, because you're away on temporary duty. And when we get a, a chance to send somebody on R+R, any kind of rest and rehabilitation, we send our personnel that's here. And I was, I told him that. And he said, where would you like to go? Well, I knew people were going to the Riviera. I also knew they were going to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where they had the Winter Olympics, go skiing. I'm not a skier. But I eventually did go to Garmisch, later on. But I was just, I think, compared to what I am now, I was a kid then. And very flip. I said, I think I'd like to spend some time basking in the sun, on the Riviera. He said, I think it can be arranged. He said, when can you be in Munich? And I said, when can you get, get someone in here to take my place? He said, we'll see to it. And with the help of, there was a colonel who was in charge of several camps, Colonel Richmond. His name was on some of the endorsements, especially the one that I got later from Major General Robertson. And they did send some DP officers into camp. And I did go to Munich, and I did get on a plane, a B-52, didn't have seats. We sat in bucket seats, but didn't matter. Except it hurt my ears. It wasn't pressurized. And I landed in Nice, and then there I went to Cannes and stayed at the Carlton, Hotel Carlton, which is probably the finest hotel on the Riviera. It's where they have the, the film festival at Cannes.

Before I left, I went to the camp barber to give me a haircut. I had hair then, and I wanted to look my best. When I was in the, in France, and I told him, I said, do a, do a good job because I'm going to the Riviera in a few days. He said, I'm from Cannes. He said, my parents are there, and my family, my sisters, brothers, and they haven't heard from me in eight years. He said, I came to live, he says, I was in forced labor in Germany very early. And I don't know why he hadn't communicated with them, with them. They thought he was dead, maybe thought it was best. I don't know the particulars, but he said, would you look them up if you can, if you can? I said, of course. And when I got to Cannes, I did get a taxi, gave them this address, and they took me up into the, into the hills. You know, the harbor there, all of the Riviera, just as you leave, it goes up into these hills, small mountains. And I found his parents, and we had quite a reunion. Then I asked one of his sisters to come back to the hotel with me to have dinner. And she did, and she brought a little bottle of perfume that I have. That bottle of perfume and a bottle of Three Feathers bourbon, that my dad gave me, before I left the United States, is the only thing that I have left from the war.

I'll tell you more about the bottle of bourbon. When I, before leaving for Europe, we had a final 10-day terminal leave, I guess, or 10-day leave at home. And during the time, I didn't tell my folks that I was going overseas. But my dad sensed it, and he knew, knew by my actions, and by the responses that I got, or the responses that he got from me, the night before I left, came into the bedroom. I was packing, and liquor was very hard to get during the war for civilians. He said, Yosele, my Jewish, he said, I want you to take this bottle of Three Feathers and give it to your colonel. He didn't know who my commanding officer was. Give it to your colonel and tell him not to send you overseas. Well, I did take it. And I did tell Captain Franklin what my dad had said. Well, he had a good laugh. He said, if I thought it would work, he said, we'd both drink it. When I told you that our equipment became separated from us earlier on, that bottle of Three Feathers was in my, was in my chest and was wrapped up in my long johns so that it wouldn't break. And when I found it, and they were unloading the ship with my stuff, with our company stuff, they would put it, you know, in these baskets, these rope baskets, and get about this far from the deck of the ship and then drop it. I thought, there goes, there goes a bottle of Three Feathers. But I was going to save it. I was saving it if we landed safely. I didn't know where we were going, but we landed safely. And then I thought, there was an officer in our company whose wife was pregnant when he left. And I thought, well, we'll save it until the birth of the baby. At one time when I got back to our command post, and I can't tell you when this was, but I had that bottle of Three Feathers. I was going to share it with him. And I said, his name was Lieutenant Diaz. I said, am I an aunt or an uncle? I wanted to know about the baby. The mother died in childbirth. And the baby was saved. It was not an occasion to celebrate.

Then I was going to save it for the end of the war. And I didn't know the war ended when it ended. So that went by. There was every occasion that there was to celebrate, like my promotions, I didn't have to use it because we had rations, liquor rations. I had that bottle of three feathers and the bottle of perfume in my Musette bag. When we left Le Havre for New York, along with Swiss lighters, along with a perfume that I was taking to my sisters and my all of the female members of of my family, my sister-in-law, some lace that I had purchased in Belgium when we went through Belgium. Everything was stolen out of my Musette bag, and I was there with honorable officers. There were six of us in the state room. Three bunks on each side. I don't know who got it. Maybe somebody went in, saw that it was empty while we were all, while some of us were retching over the side of the rail because we went back in a washtub. It was a victory ship took us ten days, unlike the four and a half days, going. And the only thing that they left, I don't know how this came about. The only thing that they left was the bottle of Three Feathers and that bottle of perfume. And when I was discharged, well separated from the army at Jefferson Barracks and then came into St. Joe, my father and I took the first two drinks out of that bottle. Two years later, it had become a talisman. It had become my good luck piece. I wouldn't drink anything. I wouldn't open it. I didn't know why. I really didn't know why I was saving it at the time, other than the fact that I thought that this is my good luck piece. But I knew then that my dad and I would take what it was saved from being stolen. That's what it was meant for. And for a long time, I had the empty bottle. But in moving and things that happened subsequently, it disappeared. But I still have, half of it's evaporated, but I still have that little bottle of perfume. Inexpensive perfume.

Now, let's go back to Coburg. Eventually, the army, eventually the personnel did start coming over, who belonged in the various places, who belonged in the jobs that they were meant to do. And with the help of UNRRA, started running these camps more methodically.

What were the needs of the people in the camp-

Food, clothing, and, of course, shelter, the basics.

Were you also set up to try to help them find any information about family?

Oh, you know, they had existed this long, they had survived this long, that they were, they had methods that there was an underground. There isn't anything that a rocket to the moon isn't as fast as gossip or or information from one camp to the other. They had their system all set up. They knew things and they had their their network going with families getting together.

I have another, I have a letter of commendation from a major in the town of, gee, it was near Coburg. And there's a shoe factory in this town, and they had leather soles, ersatz leather soles, but they didn't have any uppers. Now, I knew, I knew through the underground that there was a, there was a warehouse in the Russian occupied zone in Sonneberg, and you'll see that on the map. There was a warehouse full of leather pants that the SS, SS motorcycle troops wore; that were in the Russian zone. So I had some rubber stamps made, United States military government. Oh, I could have been court-martialed many times. But I had these, you know, if you had a rubber stamp on a piece of paper, that's all you needed. And you could put false signatures on. I'll tell you about my Mercedes-Benz car that I put a false ordnance number on so I could draw gas. I had a painted OD with a white star on it and a false number. Take it to the motor pool. They'd service it. But I had to do it. And we, we paid for that. The army did pay for that car and I have a receipt for it.

I sent, I sent these German trucks up to Sonneberg with these rubber stamped requisitions to load the trucks with all available leather pants. And they did. See, this was early on. It was in the Russian zone. They had to pass through, they had to pass through a guard point. They were manned by both Russians on this side and American personnel on this side. But the very odd situation, I think, led them not to question it. Here was a German truck going into Germany. Fine. It was the Russian zone, but it was Germany. And they had a requisition from military government. So it worked on both sides. They brought back the trousers. And I took them over, well, the trucks took them over to the shoe factory. And they were able to make six pairs of shoes out of each pair of pants. And it's documented in the letter that I got from, from, uh, Major Lathum. I think it was his name but it's in there. And I wanted it to bring one pair home as a souvenir. But I knew that if I did that one- someone would be deprived of a pair of shoes. Shoes. If you've, you've been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, you know that bin full of shoes. That's how important shoes were. Those are the shoes that they took off of the Jews before they were gassed, murdered, as well as all the other clothing that you see there. But instead of taking them off and sending them to, to the crematoria, we put them on and sent them home. They weren't gassed. We didn't stack their bodies in the camps. I want people to know that and remember that so that it won't happen again.

It's happening. It's happening in Bosnia. What happened there. Somalia, Sudan, things that we're finding out. Every place all over the world. People killing each other. Genocide. Where will it stop in Ireland, in Israel?

Can you explain some of the administration of the camp, how the camp was administered, how supplies were sent in to you, how you received them?

Yes. But before I do that, I want you to know that when I came back, I was promoted to captain. I wasn't even in grade long enough to be a captain. But Major General Robertson promoted me, which was wonderful. And because of his letter, I received the Army Commendation Medal before I was discharged from the Army. If you receive a letter of commendation from the Major General or above, it entitles you to the Army Commendation Medal. And I thought I would get in touch with him after the war, but I didn't. Because of many things that happened after I got out, I started on our own lives.

But let me get back to what you want to know about the camp. Our major concern was food. Look, you could do without great garments, you could do without, you could sleep in the ground, you could sleep on a tent. But you needed food. And in order to keep the kitchens going, I said earlier, we deforested, if there is such a word, everything around the camp. And you have a picture, there is a photo of myself against a pile of wood logs that we stored in one of the warehouses in order to get to the kitchen, to have them in the kitchens to heat the water for soup or whatever we put into the cauldrons. Now, we received rations from the Army. The German battalion received rations. Periodically, this German battalion, Major MacLean, would go to his headquarters at Kočín. This is engraved on the walking stick that he gave me. Kočín, Germany, you'll find it on the map. And he would get orders, requisitions from his higher up, a general, whoever, on what to ask from the military government. They would ask for gas. They would ask for food. They would ask for cigarettes. And they would get it. We fed them. We fed the Polish Army. They even had, I left it at the Holocaust Museum. They had their own patch, the Polish Army. And it gave them some dignity. It gave them authority. They were given, we had to do rations for them; they ate in the mess hall.

Were they helping out in the camp?

Yes.

What were they, what was their job?

They're security mostly, security. In fact, that was really, if they did anything else, it was mostly the DPs that did, they would oversee many things. But the security, there weren't, we didn't have gates on the camp. Well, we did, but they weren't locks. It was a guard there. And not to keep them, not to keep the inmate, the DPs in, it was to keep other people out that didn't belong in there.

That was the major part, getting food. And we would get the food. We would get UNRRA packages. We would get Quakers, Friends, the American Joint Distribution Committee. Various charitable groups here would raise money for funds for food, the Red Cross, and send it to the displaced person camps. And these had to be rationed. Now, my nightmares later on really evolved around food. When the trucks, when the DPs recognized a Red Cross truck coming into camp, they knew that there were goodies on the truck. And they would en masse, circle the truck, and as we would try to unload, they would, we would see all these hands go up. Cigarettes, chocolate, cigarettes, conservé, that's jam, that we had a lot of that would come over. Kind of hardtack, biscuits, biscuits, biscuits, chocolate, cigarettes. Those were my nightmares when I got out. And there were times in camp when it got too much to be too much for me. And I would take off at night in my Jeep, alone, and, you know, Bavaria's hilly. And there was a kind of a small, miniature mountain, and I have a picture of it. And there was a winding road going up, and I would go up there and get out of the car and start screaming. It was as though I'd been in a pressure cooker, and I'd just scream at the top of my lungs. And, I guess I got it out of my system, and I'd come back, and things would be all right for a while.

How long was it before you realized and before some of the DPs realized that they were not, in fact, being repatriated, but were being taken to Siberia and other places within Soviet Union?

Actually, it doesn't, it seems that it wasn't very long, but we did get many, many transports out.

And yet, the numbers of the camp remained constant because you'd, you would send out 1,500 a day.

Yes.

And 1,500 more would show up. Is that how it works?

Approximately. We would take a census, not every day, but every three or four days we would take a census, and it always, it was always between 10 and . . . between 13 and 1,500, and it had to remain, I mean, that had to be the number because, or they what I should say is people were coming in because we were sending out about 1,500 a day. And it couldn't be, the numbers couldn't jive if this weren't true. People were coming in. Those who were coming in might have been some that were coming back.

Making their way back to the camp after they had-

Making it back to camp. Because word did get back to camp that this was happening.

Now, while all of this was happening, you were also still personally

Involved.

helping, involved with getting Jews from, from the point.

Yes.

An exchange point to elsewhere.

What, what are the, what places were they?

No, at that time, at that time it was just getting them from my camp to camps that were basically Jewish camps. As I said, like Augsburg. Um, Straubing, to the Funkkaserne near Munich. It wasn't until I was transferred from that camp to Ansbach to headquarters of military government in Ansbach and put in charge as overseer of all the camps and the exchange point at Hof, Germany, which was in the, um, Kreis or, or the County of Mittenwald, Germany. Now that exchange point was set up to exchange German nationals who had been displaced because of war prior to September the 1st, 1939. Excuse me 1936. We had an agreement with the German government that we would, if they had been living in Bavaria and were now living in the Russian zone, we would bring them back to Bavaria. If they were living in, um, Bavaria and wanted to go back to their homes in the Russian zone, they would go back there. Through this exchange point at Hof and it was through this exchange point that I was able to bring the Jews who were coming through as German nationals, which they weren't. They were Jews who wanted to get to Jewish camps.

And we'll end that right here and pick up again with the next tape.

It's April 27, 1998, we're speaking with Dr. Joe Friedman in St. Joseph, Missouri in the United States and we're speaking in English. Dr. Friedman, you were talking about your moving Jewish DPs from your camps and other places into Jewish camps.

Yes, yes. Before I complete that part of the story, I received orders from the Third Army, from headquarters of the military government, to find a place for 40 orphans, approximately 40 orphans. Who had been turned back to the United States Army from German families. German families who had taken babies, four, three, four, five, six years old, and taken them to live with them.

Jewish babies.

Jewish babies to save their lives, really. At the same time, an officer received orders from the military government to find billets for returning German prisoners of war, who had been prisoners of war in the United States, and had to find billets for them until they could be repatriated. Of course, you know what priority I gave the Jewish orphans, the children. And I had quite a fight with him. Verbal fight.

With your commanding officer?

No, with the fellow, the officer who wanted it for a, who had been at Ansbach headquarters, too, who wanted it for the returning German, I said, no way. We have to have this, because I knew that there was a, the billet that I wanted was a sanatorium near Ansbach. It was called the Struth Sanatorium, and it was in the city of Fulda. If my memory serves me, doesn't always. But I think it was. And instead, I won. And instead of getting 40 orphans, I got close to 200. Now, it was near Streicher's farm. Streicher, whom I saw at the Nuremberg trials, was the number one Jew-baiter of Germany. His farm was operational during the entire war. And instead of getting angry about it, I was able to feed these orphans fresh fruit and vegetables, meat from the farm. They didn't, they didn't know what an egg was. They didn't know what an orange was. Now, they didn't grow oranges, but we got orange, we had oranges from our army rations. And I later visited that camp, that, the Struth Sanatorium. And I saw them. I saw these children, how happy they were. They had set up the Joint Distribution Committee, had set up a school where they were teaching them Hebrew. They were teaching Israeli folk dances. They were wonderful. They were so happy. And they were going, eventually they knew they would go to Israel. One little girl in camp gave me a present. She had carved an emblem out of a block of wood. And the Star of David, and what looked like the Fleur de Lis, or looked like the Scout emblem, the Tenderfoot emblem that you wear, and gave it to me. And I cherished that block of wood. It's now in the Holocaust Museum in Washington. And I heard from her when she got to Israel. I heard from her. And of all the thousands of letters that I saved, and you know, I have a journal of about two thousand letters that my sisters saved when I wrote home. I read from a couple of them. Of all the letters, I can't find her letter. Maybe eventually it'll show up. But I wanted to tell you that, because that was the perk. There were perks. Even though I had to blow off some steam up on the mountaintop somewhere, I cried to God, this is what happened. These were the things that made, that made it all worthwhile.

Now the exchange point at Hof. I was caught, a security officer called my commanding officer in Ansbach, who was a colonel. I won't tell you his name. He was regular army. Maybe his children followed him in to the army, so I won't embarrass them. He had sent for his family. I knew where they were from. He had appropriated one of the finest chalets in Ansbach for his own when the family would come in. He had appropriated one of Hitler's specially built Mercedes-Benz bulletproof touring cars for himself and family. He got this call from the security officer at the exchange point at Hof, that he had caught about 125 Jews trying to come across the border. Now, the day before, the security officer called me. He didn't ca- I have a, got a little ahead of myself. He had called me and told me, the security officer, that he had caught 125 Jews coming across the border. What did I want done with them? I said, put them in jail in Hof. Now, I knew that the Joint Distribution Committee was working in Hof, and I prayed that they would have, he had taken their papers away. I don't know, the papers probably were false papers anyway. Didn't mean anything. They were false papers, because they were coming across as Germans. And I told him to send the papers to me by courier, which he did. The night they arrived about three o'clock in the morning, and I burned them. I don't know why I burned them. Maybe some movie that I saw way back when, said burn all the evidence. I don't know. But I didn't want to have any record of it. But it didn't help, really. Because the security officer, when he went to the jail the next morning, they were all gone. They had new papers made, and the, with German efficiency, the railroads were running. Everything was running, as before. And they bribed the jailers, they bribed the trains, they bribed the guards, the engineers, and got on trains to take them to, as close as they could get, I presume, to Jewish camps.

On their way to?

On their way to Israel.

And with the United States as well?

And when, when our quotas opened up.

So what happened.

So.

When it was found that they were gone?

So my colonel, my commanding officer, called me in his office, and he asked me what, what had happened, and I told him. Because, because I was involved through the security officer. I told him what had happened. He said, I will have to court-martial you for conduct unbecoming an officer. I don't know what the charges were going to be, but he was calling for judge advocates to come up and take a deposition. And I would be court-martialed. So, in the army, you can delegate command down, but you can't delegate responsibility. The responsibility is always with the next person over you. And I told him, I said, look, colonel, I'll probably be breaking rocks at Fort Leavenworth as a result of this, if you're going to court-martial me. But you're going to be there beside me. He said, what do you mean? I said, it wasn't just 125 Jews, I've been doing this for months. There may, there are between 900 and 1,000 who've come through that way. And that's your responsibility. Why didn't you catch it earlier? And I said furthermore, furthermore you are giving your officers and men leaves and furloughs to come into my camps and to sleep with my women. And not only that, they're drawing rations for them. You're allowing them to draw United States Army rations for the DPs so that they could shack up with them. And they don't even have, I've seen them in the camp because they don't even have the courtesy to get out of army clothes and get into civilian clothes. Well, I knew what was going through his mind. His family was coming over. What did the Jews mean to him? 125, a thousand. The millions that were killed. What did it matter? This regular army man living in the lap of luxury and army of occupation? But he did put me under arrest of quarters. And the MPs took me back to the Goldener Stern Hotel. I have brochure from there incidentally. And in a few days, I was allowed to go. Oh, I mean, there was no deposition taken, I assure you. And no court martial. No court martial. And I was allowed to, but he wanted to get rid of me though. And in a few days, I have it here the orders sending me home.

And when approximately was that?

That was April of 46. See, a lot of time's gone by. I've telescoped it into just a few hours here, but several months. It was April, the first part of April, a year that, after that I first started working in the DP camps. I was almost court martialed. The MPs accompanied me to Frankfurt. We went by car, by jeep, and Frankfurt I got on a train for Paris.

And I told you about this German, this French army officer who almost blew up a DP camp on Bastille Day. I noticed he always wore a signet ring on his little fing- pinky. And it had a crest on it. I didn't think too much of it. Who would? You're wearing a ring. But he said, if you ever get to Paris, call me. And I'll show you Paris. Well, I got to Paris, but it was under rather shady circumstances. And we had to change trains in Paris from one in the Gare du Nord to wherever. I don't remember the names. But while we were in a train station, I called Jacques. And fortunately, I mean just, things happened the way they did. He was home. And I told him what had happened. He said, stay in the booth. He said, I'm only not more than 10 minutes away from there, by home. He said, I'll come and get you. What are the guards doing? I said, well, they're looking at French magazines. He said, stay in the booth and pretend that you're still talking to me. And this is what happened. He came, came in the door. I saw him. I dashed out of the booth, got into his car, and I was AWOL in Paris for, I think it was about four days, three or four days. I could have been there forever because no one, they didn't look for me. They didn't want to find me, I know. I don't think anything happened after the MPs got back. I'm sure or else I would have heard. But I got a little bit antsy about getting to, you know, they named the camps in Le Havre, the debarkation camps, after cigarettes. It was Camp Philip Morris, Camp Chesterfield, and Camp Lucky Strike. I don't think there was a Camel. Yeah, Lucky Strike, Chesterfield, and Philip Morris. And I was sent to Camp Philip Morris, where I got on this wash tub, to come home, and was separated from the service at Fort Leav-, at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis. The second day that I was there, I was called out on the parade grounds, and that's when I was given, oh, I thought that my past caught up with me, and here comes the court martial. But instead of that, I was given the Army Commendation Medal and came home, and that's when I had the first two drinks with my dad.

Could you give us just a capsulated version of your life after that time, and because I know that you've done quite a bit since then.

Well, it's going to be a rather large capsule. You know, 50 years has gone by, 50 more than that, 52 years. I've done a lot of living. It was very difficult. I can't make light of it.

First of all, I knew that whoever replaced me in Coburg or in Ansbach wouldn't do what I was doing. And I kept wondering what's going to happen to these people. And I started having nightmares. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't sleep because, again, I didn't know what was happening, what was going to happen. And I kept seeing these people coming after me for food mainly, because it was never enough, no matter what we did. And I can't, I can't blame them for it. For the life that they led prior to liberation.

I went to visit my brother and sister. I had a married brother and a married sister. No, my sister wasn't married then. My sister waited until I got home, my youngest sister. And I went to visit my brother in Denver, Colorado. And I was on terminal leave until July the 15th. So I went there. I stayed there the whole summer and and traveled through the mountains. My brother's . . . pardon, my brother had a construction company. And his partner had a younger brother about my age who was a major, had been a major in the Army. And he was going through the same thing that I was going through with the terminal leave, but he had fought in the Pacific. And we sort of palled around. We went to the Cheyenne frontier days. We kind of lived it up that summer.

Well, at the end of summer, I had to do something. I had to either go back to school or find a job. And in my mind, I was waiting for someone to tell me what to do, as I had been doing for four years, waiting for someone to tell me what to do. But no one was there. So I thought, I'll go back to podiatry school. And I did. And then my problems became even greater. Because they were either returning GIs who were married, going to school, or to me children 18 and 19 years old coming to podiatry school. And I couldn't get rid of the, in my mind, I couldn't get rid of what had happened the past four years. And I thought that the world had passed me by. Everybody. People were married now and I wasn't. People were in business and I wasn't. People were making, were working and I wasn't. What am I doing here in school? And I went to the VA administration. They had an army psychologist who was giving vocational guidance tests. I thought maybe I'm in the wrong, in the wrong queue here. And every Saturday for six weeks, I went for counseling at the University of Chicago. That's where they had their headquarters. And at the end of that, I was given placement tests. And I tried to be very objective. You know, I did have all the medical education. I had pre-med and then back to podiatry, which was medicine. And I took the tests and the result, it was graded on the curve. The result was that I would do best in personnel management. Next was law and third, medicine. Well, having found that out, I went back to school and let me finish what I started. Let me finish one thing anyway. Well, I did. I finished school. I graduated cum laude. So I guess I was adjusting. I opened up an office here in St. Joseph and I did very well. I had everything that had been deprived of me when I was growing up. I used to wear shoes with, really with cardboard in the soles. I wore pants, trousers that had patches where they had worn thin in the thighs. Very embarrassing. I remember, I remember in grade school, I was down on, we were looking at maps or something on the floor. And I was down on my knees and I heard some giggles behind me. And I looked behind me and the girl was pointing to the patches on my trousers. Well, I ended up with 19 suits. I have shoes that I haven't even worn yet. And I know, I know that this is my sickness.

I practiced for 14 years. I had several relationships. I made my home with my mother and father. Mother died in 54. I made my home with my father then. We had a housekeeper. Dad died in April of 62. May. I was doing theater here as a hobby, a community theater. And I started believing the reviews. And I started liking it very much. Well when dad died, I closed my office. I tried to get a replacement to come in from Mankato, Minnesota. But the last minute he backed out.

Now I had taken the boards in Colorado also because my brother lived there and I thought I might like to practice there. So I packed up one treatment room and joined a melodrama troupe at the Glenwood Springs, at the, yes, Glenwood Springs Hotel in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. And I practiced podiatry in the daytime and sing and dance and work in a melodrama at night. I did that for three months. At the end of the three months I went to New York. I was 42 years old, fat and bald, and no one was waiting for me. I landed on the plane there and things started happening.

I went to, I went to study. I went to school. I studied at the Circle and the Square. I took everything they had to offer, basic acting, directing, playwriting. I even took ballet for movement. I had the largest Capezios that Capezio had ever made. I started doing the soaps. I did two Broadway shows. I did off-Broadway and eventually got into Fiddler on the Roof, which is a long, rather convoluted story. I was studying musical comedy with Charles Nelson Riley at the time and he was doing a showcase production and wanted me to come in and do one of the character roles. And I sang a song for, I sang Sunrise Sunset and the girl that I did the scene with sang Far From the Home I Love. It was a railroad scene where she's leaving to join her husband in Siberia. And in typical show business fashion, and it's true, the casting person for Hal Prince's office was in the audience and called me the next day. I had three auditions before I got into Fiddler. I had one for Broadway replacement, one for the national company, and then one for a touring company that later became the national company. I made the touring company. And since then, I did, I did, I have done packages of Fiddler. And I did close to 2,500 performances. There was a time when I could start at the top and give everybody's line and sing every song, which I do now. I sing, I have a little act that I do. I sing all the songs.

Came back after the first year that I was out and married my wonderful Gladys and we married in 1969. And I, no, yes, we did. We married in 1969. I met her in 1964 when I was doing The Deputy on Broadway. I met her through a cousin of hers, and we fell in love immediately. And it didn't stop until I held her by arms when she died here in the family room. She wanted to die at home. I set up a hospital ambience in there. And this is what happened. She's buried about four blocks from here in the cemetery.

Now, after we were married, I wanted to take roots. I didn't want to travel anymore, nor did Gladys want to travel. She was in Fiddler the last year that I was in, but I went out again in the package of Fiddler. And we moved to Los Angeles. There's a lot that happened in Los Angeles.

I think we're going to have to end here. Thank you very much, Dr. Friedman. I appreciate it.

This, I had talked earlier about Major McLean, who was the commanding officer of the German Panzer Battalion that was attached to my camp. He carved two of these walking sticks for me. One is in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, and I have the other one here. You can see this beautiful Bavarian scene that's carved on the stick. This is the emblem of the Panzer Division. Here's the date that he did this, May the 8th. Well, I think he was commemorating the end of the war with this, because it wouldn't have a date after he worked with me. And here is the 11th Panzer Division. Now, on the one in Washington, and I see it's missing from here, he has Kotzing, which was his army headquarters.

Do you want to take a voice level?

I'm fine.

Okay. Just tell me when. This picture we're looking at, I told you earlier that members of the Palestinian Brigade, who fought in North Africa with the British, came into my camp ostensibly to look for families that belonged to members of the brigade. But what they were doing, sort of Sub-Rosa was setting up a link in the chain, the underground chain of getting the Jews from one camp to the other and getting them into Jewish camps, like Augsburg or the one near Nuremberg, the Funkkaserne. I'm sorry, near Munich. And so that they could get into Italy and Greece, possibly, to get on ships for Israel.

Okay. Go ahead.

All right. The bottom photo is of me in my Mercedes. It was called, I think they called it a Cabriolet. And in order to drive that, I had to paint an OD and put a white star on it and a fake ordnance number so that I could draw rations from the motor pool. Now, we did pay for the car. I don't recall how much, but I do have a receipt for it in my files. And it's truly a government car now, and it remained in Germany. I wish I could have brought it over. It was a 1936 convertible. The other photo.

Okay.

This photo is a camp doctor. We had our own hospital. We had several births that took place while we were in Coburg. And he was a Polish doctor who wasn't able to practice until we opened up our camp. And he had been a slave laborer before that.

What you see now is one of the trucks that was used to transport the displaced persons from Coburg, our camp in Coburg, to Lichtenfels, which is a railhead about 18, 16 to 18 kilometers away.

Okay.

Here we see an exchange point or checkpoint guards. These are Russians who would sometimes help with repatriation of the DPs. Also, they were at the point between the Russian occupied zone of Germany and the American occupied zone. We were very close to that, our camp.

Okay.

Here I am in a warehouse. In the background, you'll see piles of, actually, it's piles of food, grain that was used. But in the foreground, you see logs of wood. Now, these, this particular bunch, if I remember correctly, came from an estate that was owned by a Baroness. They came into my office and begged me not to cut down the forest. But my hands were tied. There wasn't anything we could do. We had to get them to the call.

It is Tuesday, the 9th of June, 1998. We are talking with Dr. Joe Friedman. We are in St. Joseph, Missouri, in the United States, and the interview is in English.

What we're looking at here is the UNRRA team that was attached to my camp in Coburg, and they did excellent work. I don't know what I would have done without them. They helped in every phase. As a matter of fact, they came from every part of Europe also. The man on the left, Philip Lippins, was from Belgium, and he was part of royalty in Belgium. The lady kneeling in front of him was married or is married to the controller of Macy's department store in New York, and she was a white Russian. During the Russian Revolution, her family was helped to be spirited out of Russia and into Paris, and she felt that she owed a debt of gratitude to her country and volunteered for work in the UNRRA, the UNRRA committee. We also have two doctors there. I don't recall their names, but you can see two doctors, two chauffeurs, and kneeling on the right-hand side is a nutritionist that was attached to the camp and took a picture with the UNRRA team.

In the upper photo, we see one of the wards of the camp hospital. As you can see, it's very complete with everything that was necessary for medical service to the displaced persons. Now, they had their own personnel, nurses and some of the doctors, and also it was supplemented by the Polish Army personnel. In the lower photo, we see a newborn baby.

In this photo, we have the birth of a child in camp. As you know, life went on, and we did everything we could to make it as comfortable as possible for the displaced persons. Everything in the hospital, even though we used, took advantage of the personnel of the displaced persons to help out, the overall supervision of the hospital and the medical facilities were under the auspices of our own medical department in the United States Army. We were constantly getting requisitions from the hospital personnel for various things that were necessary for hospitals for them to carry out their duties. It seemed like we got them daily. It wasn't that often, but we did whatever we could to supply them with whatever was necessary in the way of instruments and bandages and medical supplies in general.

Here we see a wedding that was held in camp. This wasn't in Coburg, this was in Bamberg, the camp that I had worked in before going to Coburg, and they invited me to come up for the wedding. The bride, the bride's name was Hedy, and she was from the Baltic countries. It was either Lithuania or S, no she was Latvian, she was Latvian, as was her matron of honor. The groom, his name was Robert, and I just can't remember his last name now, but they met in camp and fell in love, and he got permission from the government to marry. Many many years later I visited them in San Francisco, and they were just settled into being a very happy married couple. Both of them had gone back to school, they had gone to college, and were pursuing their respective careers. I'm standing in the back of the matron of honor, you can barely see my head there, but it was a beautiful ceremony. As in the previous picture, we saw the birth of a baby. Here we see a wedding, and it's all the more evident that life went on as the river flows.

Here we have the bride and groom at the wedding reception. It was a very happy occasion, and I was just really privileged to be there and to take part in it. It made us feel that we were doing something right by keeping this life flowing.

This is one of the kitchens, as you can see, these are the tremendous cauldrons. In a previous photo, you saw all the wood that we had to have to build fires under them. We had two kitchens, actually, and it took a lot of food to feed the 15,000 people in camp, the 11,000 to 15,000 people. Of course, the rations were supplemented by packages from UNRRA and from the Red Cross and various charitable organizations, and the German economy. We would requisition fresh meat and vegetables from the Germans. The thing that was in short supply was fruit. We couldn't always get fresh fruit. Well, it just wasn't available for anyone, our own army personnel as well. But we did what we could, and the camp nutritionist had the daily caloric intake that each person should have, and it was also broken down into fats, carbohydrates, and protein, and we tried to stick to it as much as we could.

Here we see the camp theater. They had their own entertainment, and it was very good. I must say, I attended as many of the concerts and stage productions as I possibly could. In fact, I thought I would be an expert in the kazatska and the polka by the time I got through. But it was good for their morale, too, to see some of the army personnel in the audience. It really gave them a lift, and believe me, it gave me a lift to watch them going through all these beautiful musical numbers. We don't see it here, but they somehow or other, they had the balalikas and accordions. Mostly accordions. I think everybody in Middle Eastern Europe played the accordion. I should have taken it up, but I didn't.

This is a very interesting photo because of the story behind it. This young man that's holding the dog, it came into my office the first day that I was in camp, and he brought me a gift of what he said was a ceremonial dagger that belonged to the forest meister, the Black Forest, near Trier. What I didn't know and later learned was that he had been a sort of a collaborationist. Not that he collaborated with the Germans, but he would sort of ingratiate himself with the administration of every camp that he was in. He was running a black market. He was getting U.S. rations. He was exchanging clothing and food for money, everything that a black market racketeer would do. Now, I was quite innocent of all this. I didn't know, but the people in camp knew, and that evening, he was murdered by members of the camp. I don't know who did it. I didn't want to know, but he was never seen again, and the story got back to me that he had disappeared, but then they told me what had happened.

If you recall, I spoke about the orphanage that I set up at the Struth Sanatorium and the little girl that carved this emblem out of wood and presented it to me. I, again, I apologize that I haven't been able to find the letter, but at least I have a photo of this. It's now in the archives at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, but I cherish that, and I'm happy that it found a permanent home. Anyone going to the Holocaust Museum in Washington might request viewing this, and it really brings back many, many memories, and I hope that all of the orphans found their destination in Israel and are leading happy lives. Of course, it's been 50 years ago. They're probably grandparents by now.

A few moments ago, you saw a photo of my Mercedes. You saw me sitting in the driver's seat, and I told you that we were very up and up about buying things, and this is my, the bill of sale for the Mercedes. We were very careful not to offend anyone, overly careful. I had just hoped that people occupying Germany in the other three sections, the British and the Russian and the French section, were as meticulous about paying the Germans for whatever we got from them.

I talked about making a rubber stamp to requisition things that I needed. Well, that sounds a little contradictory after telling you that we paid for everything, but there were things that we needed, and instead of going through channels, we always worked out different ways of acquiring what we needed. And you'll see this is a pass that I had made for the German battalion that was attached to our company, and I put a few rubber stamps on it. This is a model of it, and I put a few rubber stamps on it, and it was sort of like open sesame to wherever they wanted to go, and this is a pass that they used along with a requisition that I typed out requesting the leather pants that had belonged to the German motorcycle Panzer outfit in a town that was just inside the border of the Russian occupied zone of Germany. Now, we were able to get those, if you recall, and they were taken to a shoe factory near Lichtenfels where they made six pairs of shoes out of each pair of pants, at least six pair, but this is to give you an idea of some of the ingenuity that we had to depend upon in order to get what we wanted.

When I went to the shoe factory near Lichtenfels searching for shoes, I met this major Parum, and also found out at the time that they didn't have shoes, but all they had were the ersatz soles, and I think they were made out of sawdust with some epoxy glue, and molded into soles, but they didn't have the uppers, and that's when I heard ab- got the idea to send my German members of the German truck battalion up to Sonneberg, which wasn't very far from there, but was in the Russian occupied zone, to get the leather pants, and the letter of commendation tells the story.

This is a letter of commendation that I fortunately received from Major General Robertson. Now, earlier in my oral history, I told you about General Robertson coming into camp with about 14 other inspectors, none of them below the rank of a major, I believe, and spending the day in my camp, and this is what led to my vacation on the Riviera, and I won't go through that again, you've heard it already in the body of my oral history, but this came several weeks after I returned, and along with my promotion from First Lieutenant to Captain, Major General or above can give you what's called a battlefield promotion, and I received my captaincy through him, and also my Army commendation medal. There's a directive that if you receive a letter of commendation from a Major General or above, you're entitled to the Army commendation medal, and I referred to this medal. As you recall, when I was separated from the service at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis, I was called out on the parade ground and given this medal.

This is, well, it's a Lodz rally for the United Jewish Welfare Fund Dinner. When I got to Los Angeles, I volunteered to entertain for any of the charitable organizations in Los Angeles. Now, those of you who know Los Angeles, you know that the Jewish, well, the headquarters for the Jewish Welfare Board of the Jewish Association was at 6505 Wilshire Boulevard, and I was registered with them and told them that I would entertain if they needed anyone for any of their, any of the occasions. Well, I was called for this Lodz rally, and they have it annually. The people, the survivors of the Lodz ghetto, and they have this, as I said, every year to raise money for survivors or people who are now living in various parts of the world and need money.

Now, the reason I'm showing this, I very rarely talked about my experiences in the DP camps. As a matter of fact, it began with my residents in Los Angeles. And because of the occasion, and when the main speaker finished his talk, and it was this Sabi Shabtai who is an expert on terrorism, he's an Israeli that teaches how to combat terrorism, and his photo is just above and to the side of mine in this, the organ of the Jewish Welfare Board. And I thought that I would tell them a little bit, now that I think of it, I think it was the first, my first introduction really to speaking about my experiences in the displaced person camps. And I really opened up. I told them what had happened, where I was, and so on, because for years, as you know, as I told you previously, I just couldn't talk about it. So I started telling them about the various camps that I was in. And with that, one of the Lodzers, one of the women, rushed up to me and threw her arms around me and started screaming. She said, you saved my life. You saved my It turned out that she had been in Camp Coburg with a group, and she told me how strange it was to be transported from Coburg to Augsburg in a German truck, the sweet irony of it. And we both had a good cry, and I just wanted to bring it to your attention. And it sort of validated, for me, what I had been doing in the DP camps.

Now, you'll notice the name on this is Joel Frederick. That was my professional name, and I received this in Los Angeles, where they knew me as an actor. It seems that the, when I spoke at the Lodz fundraiser, it just opened up a floodgate for me, and I just, I couldn't be stopped. Whenever I could, I would talk to various groups about the Holocaust, and this is a Memorial Day. It's the International Liberators Conference, October the 26th through the 28th in 1981 and we had Vice President Mondale at the time at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, and there were about eight of us who had been camp liberators or connected with the liberation of the DP camps. And it was quite an impressive day. We were given these certificates. I'm sorry that I don't have a photo of receiving it from Vice President Mondale, but at least the certificate survived.

It is Tuesday, the 9th of June, 1998. We are talking with Dr. Joe Friedman. We are in St. Louis, Missouri.

St. Joseph.

I'm sorry. St. Joseph, Missouri. That's the second time. And the interview is in English. Dr. Friedman, we had left off last time when you were talking about making your way to Los Angeles. Why don't you just start there and tell us what happened.

Right. Well, I'm glad we had this little respite in between of photos instead of watching a talking head for so long.

But my really involvement with the Holocaust began in Los Angeles. Up until that time, I was, I just hadn't let loose. I hadn't allowed myself to have all those thoughts again. And also, I was busy, busy trying to make a living in the theater, which is probably one of the most difficult professions that anyone could have. Nevertheless, when I got to Los Angeles and realized that there were so many socially conscious people there, especially in the Jewish community, who were intent on setting the record straight or telling the record even for the first time, it was the beginning of the building of the Wiesenthal Center and the museum.

What year was this again?

I went to, my wife and I went to Los Angeles in 1973, and oddly enough, my big connection came through my optometrist, who had been a survivor, an émigré. That's another thing I want to correct. I think I kept referring to the displaced persons previously as inmates. It wasn't a prison, and I'm sorry, I want to correct that. They were displaced persons or survivors. Well, my optometrist was a survivor, and I told him the story, or some parts of my story and my involvement in the displaced persons camps and, of course, in liberation of Ohrdruf. Well he was very active in the federation.

Perhaps that's another correction I should make. The building on Wilshire Boulevard is the Jewish Federation, not the Jewish Welfare Board, although I think that was in one of the offices there, but the Jewish Federation. And he came to me one time and asked me if I would take part in a round robin. By that I mean he had two other survivors, other than himself, and Henry Winkler, the Fonz, who was very popular at the time. His folks had come over, I believe, in the late 30s. They weren't actually survivors, they were émigrés, and myself. We would bus high school children into this Sunday school. The Sunday school was a part of a Presbyterian church on Olympic Boulevard. And as they would come in, whoever they would come into one classroom and the optometrist would tell his story, they'd go to the next one, the survivor would tell their story, they'd move to the next one, and it would keep moving like that. Of course, I think the Fonz was the big hook. Now the reason all this was started at this time, there was a schoolteacher, a high school teacher in the valley, who claimed that this didn't happen, that all these emaciated bodies that you see, came from central casting. Skinny people . . .

Was this widely reported in the newspaper?

Oh yes, yes. As a matter of fact, there's a very prominent Jewish, member of the Jewish community who eventually challenged him. I think he said that he would give him a million dollars if he could prove that what he was saying was correct. But this wasn't until after, you know, people wanted to hear this. We have a bunch of revisionists when it comes to history, especially the Jewish history. And they're more than willing to say this didn't happen. The Jews were at fault, the Jews were liars, the Jews told the big lie, and the big lie became the truth to them, whatever. And so there was this massive effort to refute all of this. And where does it have to start? It had to start with the children, and I must say today, they're still doing this, except they're busing them in now to the Wiesenthal, to the museum, to the Shoah Museum in, on West Pico in Los Angeles. Now. . . And this further caused me to do more. And every opportunity that I had to speak to various groups, or even one-on-one to people, if it ever came up, I would try to set the record straight. And as you saw in one of the photos at the Lodz fundraiser when I talked about my involvement in the DP camp and had this wonderful lady tell me that I saved her life, well, it was a small part, but it made me feel good to know that at least I had contributed that much.

My Los Angeles, we lived in Los Angeles until 1994, and during that time, I worked quite a bit. Fortunately, I had a mentor in Jack Haley, Jr. He was the son of the original Tin Woodsman, a dear friend of mine with whom I'd studied acting in New York, was now a producer in Los Angeles. And he encouraged me to come out and to seek my fortune there and help me. And fortunately, he was one of the co-producers of Ripley's Believe It or Not, the television series with Jack Palance. And I started working on that as an actor, doing some of the reenactments. They later went to stock footage, and I asked to stay on and do research. Well, this one thing led to another. After five years, it was canceled, and about that time, my wife became ill with breast cancer and had a mastectomy in 1985. One of the line producers on Ripley's came to me and asked me if I would help him on a project that National Geographic wanted him to work on. He had been a producer for National Geographic prior to coming to Ripley's. It seems that Dr. Ballard had just found the Titanic. He'd found the Titanic in 86, and this was 87, the latter part of 87. And National Geographic asked Nick Noxon if he would do a documentary, if he would produce a documentary with Dr. Ballard, and they would send him a research person from Washington. Well, he asked if he could use the one that he had worked with on Ripley, and they said it didn't make any difference as long as he was happy with me. When Mr. Noxon asked me to do this, I was deeply involved in taking care of my wife. She had just had surgery, and I told him that I really couldn't, but he was so nice about it. He asked me if I would work at home until the last three or four weeks and then come into the office when the actual documentation had to be done, and that's how it was. And lo and behold, as you see in my lapel, here we are. This is the lapel pin. I received an Emmy, and it was the first year in 1988 that Emmys were given for research, and I'm very proud of it. As a matter of fact, it's in the other room. Maybe that's one of the things we should show, but people know, especially the Hollywood Los Angeles contingent, well, everyone knows what an Emmy looks like. I did have a photo of it, and I presented my Emmy to my alma mater. Things started, as I said, things started happening. I did a lot of the soaps, and I did some sitcoms.

As an actor?

As an actor, I was an All In the Family, Maud, but mainly after I started working on research, then I was called to do that, and I researched a documentary for Ted Turner for the 50th anniversary of the Wizard of Oz.

Now since my return to St. Joe, my wife, the doctor told us that her illness was terminal. This is in 1980. We thought we had it licked, but in 1992 it came back, had metastasized, and the doctor told me that if we didn't want to bring Gladys here in an ambulance, and he knew that I wanted to come back to St. Joseph where we are now, that we'd better go, and we did. We came here in the latter part of 1994, and my dear wife died in 1995.

Now since that time, I have been giving lectures on the Holocaust, the service clubs. I gave one for an Upward Bound group, and it's comprised of six high schools in the area. And it's a part of an extension project from Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas. I've talked to, I've talked to various, well as I said, service clubs. I talked to a group in Denver. I happened to be out there for Passover holidays, to spend it with my family, and there was a guest at the Seder table that heard me talking about the Holocaust. Sometimes they can't shut me up. I've become such a speaker on the Holocaust, and not that I'm an expert on it, but I'm learning. I'm still in the learning process, and the next day I got a call from her teacher. She's a little girl in middle school, in Cherry Hills Middle School. And I spoke to them the next day, just off the cuff. Well, two weeks later, and I have it here, and I cherish it, I received 83 letters from the students. It was a combined science classes at Cherry Hills Middle School. 83 letters, and the letters are priceless. Someday I hope to have them published. And what I learned from those is that their parents, now this is this, it was their grandparents who fought in the Second World War. And these are the children of this next generation. And many of them, although they thought they knew about the Holocaust, really didn't know it as intimately and as extensively as the children did now. And I'm very happy to report that they are studying it quite a lot in the high schools.

I've helped many students here who chose, well, one chose Anne Frank, the story of Anne Frank, and I helped her with that because I had been in Amsterdam at the end. My wife and I visited there. But many of them have chosen the Holocaust as their term paper, and I've helped them. Now we're in the process of sort of condensing or just doing the pertinent parts of my oral histories. And the school board would like to put that on tape. I just did an oral history about three weeks ago at my alma mater in the communications department. And in the audience, I know I'm jumping around here as these thoughts come to me, and in the audience was the seventh grade of St. Patrick's grade school here. And they're bright kids, and they ask very good questions, and they're hungry for this knowledge. It's as though they'd just heard about this for the first time. And what most of them think and what I dispel that the first time at the top of my lecture, at the top of my talk, it wasn't just six million Jews. I want them to know that there were 11 million and even more. I read recently that because of the Holocaust and the aftermath that some statistics show that there could have been 18 million who were killed or died as a result of this terrible blight on humanity. I want them to know that, and I want them to know that if they don't speak up when they hear anything about racial hatred, that they're going to be guilty of the same thing that the Nazis were guilty of.

And this is ongoing. I have a few more things scheduled. Oh, before I was, when I was sidetracked, the superintendent of schools for the city of St. Joseph is getting all my tapes with permission from the museum and just giving the part that deals with the Holocaust, not my personal history. But the part that deals with the Holocaust. And they're going to have a whole learning project set up with that. And there will be a verbal accompaniment and photo accompaniment. And this will go out to all the high schools next semester, the beginning of the fall term. And I'm very happy about that and very proud of the fact that I was able to get them to do this. Now that about sums it up.

There are a few things that I do want to bring up though. You remember I talked about going to the Riviera and going to the home of my barber, who was in the DP camp and invited his sister to come down to Cannes and have dinner. And she brought this little bottle of perfume. And as you recall, this bottle of perfume and that bottle of Three Feathers, bourbon, that I had the first two drinks with my dad, were the only two things that really survived from my, tangible things that survived from my army career. And I cherish this. It's a little bottle of perfume, gardenia, forest, Paris. It isn't even, of course it isn't even one of the big ones, but to me it's better than all of them put together. This is one thing. And the other thing that I'm very proud of, when I went into the army, I thought, I want to come out a captain somehow. I don't know how I'm going to do it. But I think that a captain will be the best thing that could happen to me. And my wish was granted. I was made a captain by Major General Robertson. And as a result of the army commendation, letter of commendation that you saw, I was able to get this army commendation medal. As you know, I was sort of cashiered out of the army. Ah, a la Dreyfus, you know, I thought that they would cut off the take of the sword, the saber, and cut off my bars when I was being separated from the service at Jefferson Barracks. But that isn't what happened. I was given this medal, and I'm very proud of it. And I hope to continue, as long as the good Lord allows me to do whatever I can... to foster brotherhood. That's it in a nutshell.

Dr. Friedman, you had mentioned your work with children, and you had also mentioned before that the St. Joseph community had a very small Jewish population. Now, what has been the reaction of your community involvement in talking about the Holocaust as far as the adult population that you've encountered?

Well, it's been very positive. I've, you know, once they heard that I was giving a talk on the Holocaust, I got calls from, again, the service clubs, Kiwanis, Lions Club, Sertoma, Optimist and . . . of course, it's a difficult subject to talk about. So I try to interpolate little light things within the talk, within the lecture, various things that happened in camps, things that might have happened in my career, maybe in my theatrical career. I will say this, that being in the camps, and especially going into Ohrdruf and witnessing the bodies still burning in the ovens, changed my whole life. And I have lived my life to try to make up for all those who really died for me. So that I could go on living. And when I found that life was so tenuous that it could be wiped out just like that in a second, just to the whim of a madman; that whenever I came to a crossroads in my life and had to make a decision, I just made it and did it and did what I thought was right so that I wouldn't have any regrets and look back on it and say, why didn't I do this and why didn't I do that? I know that I feel that you have to just grasp life with both hands and make the most of what you feel that you can contribute to humankind. And I hope that I've done that.

And we do have a small Jewish community here. And I must say I have rather an enviable place in the community. When I lived here before, there were restrictions. We couldn't go to the country club. There were some other, we couldn't join various service clubs. But that's all changed now. And I just did a fundraiser for the college called A Night at the Ritz. And we did a tribute to George M. Cohan. And in the lyrics of one of the songs, Harrigan said, proud of all the Irish blood that's in me. Well, of course, the whole audience just collapsed. And there's a part of it where you're supposed to whistle, where the conductor wanted me to whistle. And I said, look, they know that I'm not Irish. So why don't you let me do something else? He said, well you're the one that's going to have egg on your face if it doesn't work. So there's also in the lyrics, Harrigan, that's me. the lyrics, Harrigan, that's me. That's me? (sings Hava Nagila). Well, they were on the floor. The reason I bring that up, I'm not ashamed of the fact. They don't. They know that I'm Jewish. We haven't tried to assimilate. There's a lot of intermarriage. My family could be a United Nations. But it is because of a small community and small Jewish community from a population of 4,500. Now, St. Joe's has around 70,000.

Total population?

Whole entire population, from the 70,000 before the war, about 4,500 were Jewish. And they were merchants, professional people. Now we have about 180 man, woman, and child.

To what do you attribute the attrition of the Jewish community here?

Well, the army to begin with. We had an air base, air transport command base near here. And all the Jewish soldiers who came in started dating the Jewish girls that were here. And many of them married. And then went back after the war, they went back to the home of their spouse. Also, getting out into the world, so to speak, and the army, the Jewish boys here saw that there was something beyond St. Joseph, Missouri. And went to various towns, larger cities. Then the, most of the, of course, most of the Jewish children went to college. And what could they come back to here unless their parents had a business or were in one of the professions? They came back to take up law, or medicine, or to go into the grocery store, or dry goods store, or whatever. And there was a place for them. Otherwise, they were an engineering, architect, research, whatever. They had to go to larger cities where they could find employment. And little by little, we became a Jewish community of very old people. Not very many youngsters here. And when they do, we do have maybe a couple dozen youngsters. We have a Sunday school. But when they go away to college, they do not come back to St. Joe.

Do you, I get, in talking with you, I get from you that you don't necessarily see that as a tragedy for St. Joe, but as a gain for those other communities. Is that indeed the way you see it?

Let me tell you this. St. Joe suffered, like all other cities, of this size, the core of St. Joe, of the city itself, when they started building shopping centers. And there wasn't enough to support the stores that were in the core of the city, and also to open up a second store in the outlying areas. I keep pointing to the outlying areas, because we do have some very fine shopping centers. But we have a blighted, or did have a blighted downtown area. Now, when I came back here, and I bought this home.

That was 19-

That was 1994. And I bought this home, and I wanted everything checked over. And I called the furnace man. Now, I had gone to school with his dad. And he came here, and he checked my furnace, because I wanted to have everything, you know, in proper working order, and the air conditioner, and so on. And he talked to me. He said, Joe, you know what happened to St. Joe? He said, all the Jews left. And the town really went down the tubes. He said, you go down Felix, Edmund, Francis, these are the streets in the downtown area. Go into the office buildings. There are no Jews. He said, this is what happened to St. Joe. Well, that's not exactly true. But there's a little bit of truth to it. When you ask me whether it was good or bad, I worry about it. I worry about the three cemeteries, the three Jewish cemeteries that we have here. Eventually, we'll die off, the old folks. It's a fact of life. Death is a fact of life. And we have already appointed a trustee officer for our cemetery. That is one of the Jewish cemeteries. We have two synagogues, typical Jewish fashion, we can't get together. If we had to, we'd build a third one that no one would go to, like the old joke. There's some that wouldn't step inside of them. I belong to both, because I have friends in both, and I feel that both should be supported. But they'll eventually have to merge, just for economic reasons, because the small community can't support two synagogues or two temples. And eventually, I just don't know how long it'll take or what the future of St. Joe will be. But they're going to know that there's some Jews who lived here.

Now, Dr. Friedman, you have given an oral testimony to both the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and you are now doing it for the Shoah foundation. So you've spent a lot of time talking with other people about the Holocaust, a lot of time talking on tape about your personal experiences there. What would be the message for someone who doesn't have any knowledge about the Holocaust but is viewing this tape for the first time? What would you say to them about your experiences and the meaning of those experiences?

Well, I tried to express it in the fact that it has governed my whole life, that there isn't a day, I think, that goes by that I don't think about something that happened either while I was in the Army or the result of what happened then. It's always before me, and especially now, that I verbalized so much of it and relived so much of it with the oral histories that I've given at both the Shoah foundation and the museum and also out at the college. And it's made a great difference in my life. And I want people to know, I want people to know that it just, it could happen the nucleus of what happened in Germany. It just started with one man and his cohorts. When these white supremacist groups, these little cells, and we have them around here in Missouri too, all they have to do is coalesce and have people believe what they're saying, if its about the Jews, about the blacks, about any minority group, that it'll build and it'll build. And I want everyone to know that it has to be stopped right at the source no matter what.

Dr. Friedman, thank you so much for your time on this.

Well,

I appreciate it. Thank you again.

Thank you and thank all the viewers who have suffered through this. I hope I've made it worthwhile.

Thank you.