By Felix Thau

Editor’s Note: This is Part 2 of a two-part story detailing historical accounts and personal history of Nadia Frey during the Holocaust. Part 1 appeared in the previous Community Review issue; Part 1 provides a historical perspective of pertinent Holocaust events with which Nadia Frey’s personal history (Part 2) may be blended. The reader may wish to match Parts 1 and 2 for a more meaningful context.

 

On October 18, 1916, Nadia Frey (nee Tomaszek) was born in the Ukraine to Ukrainian Catholic parents. She was the oldest of three girls. Her sister, Daria, was born in 1926.  Her second sister was born somewhat later.  She was so young that she was neither privy to nor a participant in the unfolding events.

Nadia’s father was an elementary school teacher. However, when Nadia was ten years old, her parents sent her to live with her grandparents, in Stari-Sambor for educational purposes. During holidays and summer break, Nadia returned to her mother and father.  Their home was one of tolerance and kindness without distinction to ethnic or religious differences.

The larger Ukrainian community was not so inclined. One Sunday, while the family was in church, the priest’s sermon was rife with anti-Jewish vitriol. Nadia freely played with Jewish and Polish children. For that, Ukrainian children rarely engaged her.

At fourteen, Nadia entered Seminarium. At twenty, she received a Diploma in teaching. She was offered a teaching position in a village. As her goal was to teach in a metropolitan area, Nadia refused the position. She chose employment as a bank teller instead. At twenty-two, she married a fellow Ukrainian.

Nadia was twenty-four when she accepted a secretarial position in Sambor’s municipal courthouse.  It was there that she met Adolf Frey, a Jewish lawyer. Mr. Frey frequented the courthouse for business, often having to communicate with Nadia. She came to know him as “Dolek”, the Polish endearing version of Adolf.

During Sambor’s first Soviet occupation, Nadia’s husband joined an underground, anti-Soviet movement. He was discovered. Soviet authorities arrested him. Nadia never saw him again. Soviet authorities viewed Nadia and her family as no threat because they associated with Poles and Jews.

After the German attack on the Jewish cemetery of Sambor during Passover 1943, word spread that Dolek was murdered.  Though Nadia thought him dead, Dolek was alive. Ukrainians did beat and bloody him, but a Ukrainian police officer recognized Dolek. The officer intervened. Dolek was helped to a house where he hid for two weeks. He came to Nadia’s home soon after. She was asleep. He woke her with a kiss.

Dolek attained a special position among Jews in the ghetto likely a Judenrat (Jewish Council) member. He wore a special Magen David. He was part of a committee whose task was to assign housing within the ghetto. He was privileged to leave the ghetto, often visiting Nadia as she went back to working as a bank teller.

Eventually, Dolek was one of a group selected for transport to the Belzec death camp.  As the train made its way, he punched a hole in the cattle car’s side.  Through that hole he jumped from the moving train, landing in a ditch. He dared not move from there for two weeks. When safe, Dolek went back to the ghetto.

While the Germans were looking for Jews hiding in the ghetto, Nadia and Daria hid Dolek and his family outside the ghetto. When the two-days ghetto assault ended, Dolek and his family again returned to the ghetto. Dolek recognized the ghetto’s liquidation was inevitable. He asked Nadia for help, although he had little to offer her in return.

The sisters took on the task of aiding the Frey family.  They rented a rural cottage near Stari-Sambor.  In order to avoid suspicion, they expressed their intention to live there. It was a long walk from Sambor to the cottage.

Every late afternoon, Nadia led one member of Dolek’s family from the ghetto to the cottage. She took routes to avoid being seen. There were seven in all now hiding in the cottage. They were: Dolek’s mother, father, brother, brother’s wife and her sister, Dolek’s teenage niece (his brother’s child, Amelia, whose importance to this account will be later revealed), and Dolek. Dolek was the last to leave the ghetto, just one day before it was liquidated.

They hid in the cottage with curtains drawn. The constant fear of discovery gnawed at them. The threat of detection was palpably ever-present.

Nadia regularly furnished bread and milk. With wagon and horse, her father brought potatoes. Nadia removed bodily waste in a bucket. She drew water from the property’s well. Bucket by bucket, she carried water into the cottage. A Jewish family of seven relied entirely on Nadia, Daria, and family for daily sustenance.

While Nadia was filling buckets with well water, she was once interrupted by a nosy neighbor.  The neighbor observed that Nadia was drawing more water than was needed for two.  Nadia improvised a response which soothed the neighbor’s interest. Nadia was then careful to draw less from then on.

On another occasion, Nadia answered a knock at the cottage door. A peasant-garbed woman with a pail of milk greeted her. She beseeched   Nadia to purchase the milk. She would otherwise have gone to the market in Sambor. This day, she was afraid. She heard Jews were massacred there; Jewish blood was openly running in the streets.

On yet another occasion, a neighbor approached Nadia telling her she knew Nadia was hiding Jews.  The woman said or did nothing more about it.

There came a time when a contingent of German soldiers on their way to the Russian front intended to use the cottage as an ammunition storage facility. Quick-thinking Nadia lamented the loss of her husband to the Bolsheviks as a plea to avoid using her assumed cottage home.  The Germans relented, opting for another location.

While in hiding, the Frey’s used eating utensils to carve a pit under the cottage’s floor boards. They were careful to place the diggings in the cottage’s cellar. They descended to the pit whenever exposure menaced.

Dolek’s mother died while the family hid in the cottage. She was wrapped in cloth. She lay in temporary repose in the pit. It was necessary to sit on her body when hiding. Speedily after securing liberation, Dolek buried his mother in Sambor’s Jewish cemetery.

From time to time, Nadia feared for her safety. Harboring Jews was punished by hanging in the town center. For the most part though, Nadia sparingly thought of the consequences.

For about eighteen months they remained in hiding. One day, a stranger came to the cottage.  It seemed like the end.  Speaking Russian, the stranger implored: “My dear brother, have you any bread?”  He was a Soviet soldier. German occupation was over.

Though it appeared as if their hiding was then at an end, Dolek cautioned all to stay just a few days more lest the killing continue.  His decision was correct.  Jews who revealed themselves right away were murdered. After a degree of safety was established, the family returned to Sambor, finally enjoying some semblance of freedom. 

Ukrainian residents were angry. They now had to leave the former Jewish homes they took for their own.  Ukrainians actively shunned Nadia and Daria. Daria remained in Sambor until her passing. She never married. No “upstanding” Ukrainian fellow would dare take her hand.

Nadia and Dolek married.  Nadia did not engage in any long term, formal Jewish conversion study, of course hampered by circumstance. Through intermittent formal study and experience, Nadia was accepted as a Jew. 

The couple left Sambor in December 1944. They registered as Polish citizens, making their way to Krakow. There, they lived about one year, surviving on black market trading.  A pogrom convinced them to leave.

They settled in Breslau, a German city ceded to Poland after World War II. Their intent was to settle in Israel or the United States.  These choices required entry into Germany. Nadia was pregnant.

Nadia and Dolek attempted to enter Germany. At the border, British guards denied entry to anyone not a German citizen. Nadia and Dolek were revealed to be Polish citizens. Off to jail the British took them. They were released and permitted entry in less than a day. 

Conjecture has it the Haganah, the Jewish Zionist military organization assisting displaced Jews throughout Europe, likely aided the Freys’ prison release and border crossing into Germany.

They arrived in Bad Reichenhall, a Displaced Persons Camp in Bavaria. It   was there that their first child was born on July 20, 1946. Through the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society (HIAS), Nadia, Dolek, and son entered the United States.