Their efforts were successful. On March 29, 2000, Gertrud Fruhlich was honored as a Righteous Among the Nations in a ceremony in her home, in Streganz, Germany (she was not well enough to travel to Israel). The Israeli ambassador presented Gertrud with a medal and certificate, and her name was added to the Wall of Honor in the Garden of the Righteous in Jerusalem. The event was widely covered in the German press. Gertrud, the articles said, did not know whether Abraham was still alive—it seemed no one had told her that he had died more than twenty years earlier.
Gertrud Fruhlich died less than six weeks later, on May 9, 2000.
Now the story turns, for a few pages anyway, from Abraham to the woman who saved Abraham, Gertrud Fruhlich, although Abraham never calls her anything more specific than “my savior.” This is a shift of protagonists. It is also a loosening of the story, Abraham’s salvation story, which up until now has been constrained to a few harrowing but undetailed paragraphs in his memoir, terse as a myth, perspective limited to the inside of a potato box; now we get to flip Abraham’s story over, pry it open, glimpse the mass of understories thrumming inside.
I was able to contact Alexander Fruhlich easily enough—the phone number he’d listed on his letter to Yad Vashem twenty years earlier was still active. He said he would be very happy to speak with me. He also put me in touch with his two older sisters, Rita and Helga.
On New Year’s Eve—exactly one year after I’d flown to Israel to speak with Abraham’s family—I flew to Germany to speak with the family of the woman who’d saved him. Alexander, Rita, and Helga were each in their eighties, in good health, had outlived their respective spouses and now lived alone. Over the course of three days I traveled to each of their homes and asked about their mother, the war, and Abraham. Alexander was formal, proper, if very friendly and kind. Rita and Helga were loud, colorful, excitable, funny. They had each prepared cookies and cake and tea for my visit. They were all very proud of their mother, and excited to talk about Herr Kaiser.
What I learned cleared up some mysteries, and introduced new ones. The myth got tweaked, became altogether more tragic, but also more affecting. It became a love story of sorts. I am getting ahead of myself. Let us begin at the onset of World War II, in 1939.
Gertrud and her husband, also named Alexander, had five children: Dieter, Rita, Helga, Alexander, and Adolf. They lived in Breslau. They were not rich, Alexander told me, but they had what they needed. When the war broke out, Alexander Sr. was drafted into the Wehrmacht and sent to the front in Italy. He was killed in Padua on April 27, 1945, one day before British forces liberated the city. The family, however, was not informed that he had died: something had gone wrong with the death notice, it was sent but for some reason never arrived. For years they lived with the ever-dimming hope he might still be alive. Not until 1992 did they receive an official notification.
So when Alexander left his family in 1939, that was it, he never came back. Helga and Alexander Jr., who were five and four years old, respectively, in 1939, told me they had no memories of their father. Rita, seven at the time, did; she told me, repeatedly, even kind of insistently, that she was her father’s favorite. She showed me a letter he had written her from the front. It is heartbreakingly ordinary, full of a father’s soft questions and promises of gifts and references to minor family rituals. On some level, Rita told me, she understood or intuited even then that he wasn’t coming back.
The war raged on; the situation in Breslau grew dire—there were severe shortages of food, medicine, supplies. At one point all five children came down with scarlet fever; all five had to be hospitalized. Adolf, the youngest, Gertrud’s baby, died.
In January 1945, Gertrud and her children fled the city—part of or just prior to the civilian evacuation mandated in preparation for the Soviet siege (what would come to be known as the Battle of Breslau). The children remembered and described to me the steady stream of Breslavians, mostly on foot, in the freezing cold, their possessions strapped to their backs or stacked on wagons they pulled, soldiers everywhere.
The family went to the village of Dörnhau, to live with Gertrud’s father in his apartment in a large guesthouse. Two other refugee families were also living in the guesthouse, and perhaps two dozen Polish women, forced laborers, were interned on the top floor.
Alexander, Rita, and Helga told me about their grandfather, their Opa. He was proud, they said. Fearless. He was a patriot, and had been a World War I hero—there was a medallion of some sort on the wall, celebrating his valor—but he was, they insisted, opposed to the Nazis.
They told me about their lives in wartime Dörnhau, how they lived in such close proximity to concentration camps—there was one just up the road, and at least two more within walking distance. This is a perspective you don’t often hear, of German children living and playing near the camps, children who are not at all blind to what’s going on but are living their lives regardless. They told me they saw Jewish prisoners all the time, marching to work, marching back to the camp. They saw, often, transports of corpses; all the kids in the village, they said, knew where the mass
