ALONGSIDE ANNE FRANK

Neighborhood Holocaust survivor shares memories from the concentration camps

Story by ELISSA CHUDWIN | Photos by DANNY FULGENCIO

Irma Freudenreich never believed she would die in Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen.

“I had guts,” she says. “I had more guts than anybody.”

At 100 years, Freudenreich is the oldest Holocaust survivor living in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The Preston Hollow resident is proud that she has remained healthy since she contracted typhus in a concentration camp 72 years ago, although arthritis has limited her ability to walk.

Born in 1917, Freudenreich was raised in Lobsens, Germany, the youngest of six children. Her father didn’t take the threat of the rising Nazi regime seriously at first, even though his children were banned from school because of their faith.

“When Hitler came to power, my father was the first one to get to the concentration camp,” she says. “In the synagogue, he was the top man … They took off the cross from the Magen David, put his head through and marched him to the concentration camp.”

Freudenreich never saw her father walk through their hometown, humiliated. Her parents instructed her to run away with her siblings Ruth and Ernst, to hide

Nazis boarding into first class. If she was caught riding the train, she’d likely be killed. She waited until the soldiers boarded before she snuck into the last cabin.

“We went about 30 or 40 miles away from home. I jumped out of the train to keep myself alive,” she says, explaining that she worried the Nazis would search the train. “I would like to know if anybody else would have done that.”

She hid in a barn before walking the long journey to her hometown. Her family had already vacated her childhood home. A neighbor told her to empty the silver and other family valulables into the suitcase, and she snuck onto another train back to Lodz.

The contents of that suitcase saved her brother’s life. She used the silver to bribe Russians officials and smuggle Ernst out of Germany.

It wouldn’t be the only time Freudenreich put her siblings’ safety before her own. She met a man named Izy in Lodz, who proposed marriage despite their dire situation in a war-torn land. He discovered a safe place where the Jewish couple could hide underground until the conflict ended.

She refused to leave the ghetto without Ruth.

“I said, ‘No. I’m not married. When the war’s over and you find me, we’ll get married.’ I stayed with my sister. It was the last words from my mother: ‘Girls, keep together.’ I never forgot it.”

The Nazis eventually set their sights on liquidating the ghetto, forcing its occupants into cattle cars headed to Auschwitz. With barely any room to stand and no water, Freudenreich didn’t have enough room to cough on the arduous journey.

When they arrived at the concentration camp, they were divided into groups based on gender and age. Their heads were shaved and clothes were stripped. Completely bald, they couldn’t recognize one another anymore.

But the two sisters found a way to survive their months in Auschwitz. The barracks were crowded and filthy, so they slept outside in the cold until people inside died, making room for the others. Starvation became a familiar feeling.

“We finally got some soup,” she says. “But what they put in the soup — something, I don’t know what it was — none of the women menstruated for four to five years.”