5 min read
There are many astonishing tales of survival under the Third Reich, but Freddie Knoller's story is in a class of its own. Not many Jewish fugitives made a living by showing Wehrmacht soldiers around the night clubs, cabarets and brothels of occupied Paris, mingling with scantily-clad dancing girls, jazz musicians, tarts and Nazis. This was Freddie's adventurous lifestyle for two-and-a-half years until the horrors of the Holocaust finally caught up with him.
At 93, he is still elegantly turned out, lively and fluent. He seems a calm, contented man - a husband, father and grandfather - enjoying a comfortable old age in his North London home. But his memories of the 1930s and '40s are still searingly vivid and the youth he recalls was ruptured by suffering and loss.
The Knollers were a cultured Viennese family. Freddie's accountant father was the disciplinarian, while his warm and nurturing mother imbued Freddie and his two older brothers with a love of music. "In the evening, we brothers played our musical instruments together as a trio - Viennese music, the Blue Danube. The atmosphere in our house was wonderful. I was a happy-go-lucky boy who enjoyed life."
But of course the Anschluss, soon followed by Kristallnacht, put an end to all that. Freddie's parents decided to send their sons abroad to escape Nazi persecution. One of his brothers went to England, the other to America. Freddie himself was sent to stay with friends in Belgium. He was just 17. When the Nazis invaded Belgium in May 1940, Freddie was forced to move on. He joined desperate refugees fleeing from the jackboots, into France. "I read in these naughty books all about Paris, about Montmartre, the Moulin Rouge with the half-naked dancers on the stage, and this is where I wanted to go." But, at the French border, his German passport (despite being stamped with a red J to indicate he was a Jew) got him interned as an enemy alien.
A month later ,the Blitzkrieg struck again with the German invasion of France. At Freddie's internment camp, the Nazis were released, while the Jews remained behind. When the terrible conditions at the camp led to an outbreak of cholera and the internees began to die, Freddie dug his way out from under the barbed wire and fled to relatives in unoccupied France. There he worked on a farm and was safe enough, but couldn't resist the lure of Paris.
With 100 francs, he obtained false identity papers and turned himself into the gentile Robert Metzner of Alsace Lorraine. Now "quite cocky and self-assured", he headed for the City of Lights: "With the false documents, I can do whatever I want. I am not a Jew. I am Robert Metzner. And I want to go to Paris!" His horrified relatives told him he was "meshuggah" to return to Nazi-occupied territory.
He arrived in Paris in December 1940, aged 20, and found a city swarming with Nazi soldiers. Making a beeline for the Place Pigalle, he stood before the Folies Bergère and admired the pictures of bare-breasted dancers. When he observed a young man chatting to German soldiers and selling them his services as a guide to the dives of the red-light district, he befriended the stranger and got taken on as a partner, earning commissions from the night-spots and brothels to which he ushered soldiers.
And so he began his life on the streets of Paris, "in the lion's den", fraternising with his lethal enemy, but enjoying the company of his bohemian, racy new friends, and the unrivalled nightlife. "In reality, I was a pimp. But I didn't consider it a situation I should be ashamed of. Because it saved my life."
Then, in July 1943, while hawking his services in the Pigalle as usual, he aroused the interest of two Gestapo agents and at a stroke the good life was over. They bundled him away for interrogation, and although "Robert Metzner" managed to convince them that he was of good German stock, the Gestapo men advised him to stop his dubious line of work and join them instead, like a loyal citizen of the Reich. As that would have been far too dangerous, Freddie fled Paris to join the Resistance in the mountains around the town of Figeac, in southern France. Taught to use guns and make explosives, he says "it was a great joy for me to fight my enemies instead of earning money from them."
In Figeac he met and fell in love with a local girl, in whom he confided that he belonged to the Resistance. When they fell out, she denounced him to the gendarmerie and he was arrested. Under torture, rather than give away his Resistance group, he confessed to being a Jew living with false papers. It was his ticket to Auschwitz, and he arrived there in October 1943.
His instinct for survival was now tested to the extreme. He knew that to stay alive he had to focus solely on his own needs and couldn't afford feelings for anyone else. So he felt no guilt in stealing someone else's piece of bread from their bunk (although he admits to being ashamed of it now). Nevertheless, he would doubtless have died on the starvation diet and doing the hard manual labour he had been assigned, had not a doctor friend who worked in the camp hospital given him extra food and found him easier work. So he did stay alive, just, in Auschwitz, and through the death march in January 1945 when the camp was evacuated, then for a final few weeks in the unspeakable hell of Belsen.
His brother Eric, a soldier in the US Army, tracked him down after the war, recuperating in France. That was when Freddie learned that his parents had been gassed at Auschwitz while he was there.
In 1947, Freddie, too, emigrated to America, where he met and married his English wife Freda. They came back to live in London in 1952, had two daughters and he became a successful businessman with a chain of north London fashion stores.
For 35 years, following the end of the war, Freddie didn't speak at all about his experiences. "I had created a new life and wanted to forget," he explains. "Then one evening my daughter pressed me to open up about it, saying: 'What can I tell my children about their grandfather?' So we talked until 4am. And I found that it helped me tremendously. Before, I would have loads of nightmares. But as soon as I began talking about it, no more nightmares!"
In 1995, he sold his business and since then has made it his mission to tell the world what he saw and experienced during the Holocaust. He lectures in schools all over the UK and has written two books on the subject. "What I went through made me believe in myself. I'm proud to have fought for my life. And I'm proud to be able to tell the world what happened."
What comes across most markedly about Freddie is his cheerful nature and lack of bitterness. "I am the eternal optimist," he says. "I inherited my optimism from my mother, and it was what kept me alive. In the camp it was the pessimists who died, the ones who gave up hope."