Louis Frydman was called Lolak [Annotator's Note: unsure of spelling] during the war. It was a nickname his brother had given him. That was the same nickname given to the Polish pope. Frydman was born in Lodz in July 1930. His father was an accountant. His mother was a homemaker and part time accountant. He had one brother and many relatives who practiced their Jewish faith to varying levels. He was taught multiple languages as a youth. In September 1939, the Nazis moved into Lodz. The Frydman family remained in their apartment until March or April 1940 when the edict came down that all Jews were to move to the ghetto. Avoiding it at first, the family soon learned they would be forced to do so if they did not comply. They could only bring what they could carry. Frydman was only nine years old. His enterprising family tried to remain one step ahead of the Nazis. They were able to flee Lodz and reach family in Piotrkow. They remained there until August 1942. Frydman was shielded from the horror of what was going on by being with his family. His father left the accounting trade and began dealing in old gold coins so the family had steady income. They were frequently raided by the Gestapo. The German authorities were bought off to leave the family in place. [Annotator's Note: Frydman has a hardy laugh.] In May 1941, Frydman's family attempted to place him with a Polish family in a village. Money was exchanged and Frydman remained there for weeks. When war with the Soviet Union broke out [Annotator's Note: in June 1941], the Polish family disavowed their commitment to the Frydman family. During his stay with them, Frydman had to learn religious rites and traditions of the Catholic faith. He returned to Piotrkow. In August 1942, the word came that the Piotrkow ghetto would be closed. Frydman's father went to Warsaw because of his Jewish physical features, but the remainder of Frydman's family continued to live as Christians for three or four months. When the Gestapo found the family, they were ordered to follow them. Frydman's mother negotiated with the authorities at length and a deal was made. The family was given 15 minutes to disappear. They managed to enter the Warsaw ghetto by replacing workers who toiled outside the ghetto. Frydman was 12 years old at this time. He remained illegally in the ghetto for four or five months. If apprehended, he would have been shot on the spot. The Nazis in the ghetto were doing business with the Jews. They even dated Jewish girls. [Annotator's Note: Frydman continuously laughs at the irony of the incidents he experienced during this period.] When an outsider came to the ghetto, an informal alarm would be sounded for everyone to go into hiding. The inhabitants had hiding spaces. They would read and play games. A child who made noise risked having everyone killed.

Louis Frydman felt the Warsaw ghetto uprising was just a matter of choosing how to die. [Annotator's Note: Frydman laughs.] There was little hope of success against the Germans. The leadership of the uprising committed suicide when they were surrounded. Frydman was in an underground bunker. The inhabitants were protected an possessed food. The relative safety ended when the entrance was sealed. The only exit was through the sewer system. As the days passed, explosions got closer to the bunker. Nine days later on 28 April 1943, Germans told the people in the bunker that they had half an hour to decide to surrender or fight. There were two revolvers for the 400 people in the bunker. [Annotator's Note: Frydman continually laughs at the drama.] Some people decided to commit suicide. Frydman was 12 years old at the time. He and others surrendered to the Germans. They left the bunker to discover the ghetto in rubble. The Germans had faced off with the uprising with vastly superior forces. The Jews had no chance to defeat the Nazis. The Germans seemed to have fun during the operation. Many of them received decorations for their actions. The bunker survivors were separated from their belongings and searched for any valuables by the Germans. Men were executed on the spot. Women and children were marched to the death camp through the burning ghetto. The ghetto was totally destroyed. By contrast, during the September 1944 uprising, only 90 percent of Warsaw was destroyed.

Louis Frydman was removed from the Warsaw ghetto. A train took the surviving ghetto uprising participants to Majdanek which was a death camp and work camp combination [Annotator's Note: Majdanek is in a suburb of Lublin, Poland]. He was sent to a sub-camp called Lipowa. POWs [Annotator's Note: prisoners of war] were also there from the 1939 campaign. Frydman was there with his mother and brother and a few relatives. An announcement was made that 807 skilled male metal workers were required. Frydman and his brother stepped forward and were accepted. The reason was that all the men had been killed in the Warsaw ghetto uprising [Annotator's Note: the women and children who survived the Warsaw ghetto uprising of April 1943 were sent to death camps]. They were then sent to one of the deadliest of the Majdanek sub-camps, Budzyn. The commandant raged at the new arrivals for standing up to the German Army. Frydman finds many of the horrid events to be comical. He was in the horrible camp for 13 months. He does not know how he survived. He and his brother were allowed to peel potatoes. They would have been shot for stealing any of the peels. Himmler [Annotator's Note: German SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler] ordered his troops to eat the potatoes with skins because he thought there was nutritional value in the peels. In addition to kitchen work, Frydman performed meaningless tasks directed by the Germans. In May 1944, the camp was to be closed because the Russians were approaching. The Germans were fearful of the Russians. Some SS troops shot themselves to avoid going to the front to face the Soviets. Frydman was next sent to Radom [Annotator's Note: Radom, Poland]. He worked on metal there for a couple of months. He made revolvers for the German armed forces. The conditions were better. There were no killings or shootings, only forced labor. The inhabitants of the camp were less than ten percent of the Radom ghetto. Orders came to execute all the camp inhabitants. Berlin countered the order and the healthy Jews were to be sent to Germany. Labor was needed as factories were being destroyed by the Allied air forces. All Jews had to go through Auschwitz to be screened to go to Germany. There was a three day march to reach a destination prior to Auschwitz. Frydman and his brother survived a week in a building with virtually no food under harsh weather conditions. They were told they were to be gassed. Frydman's mother stayed in Lipowa while this was going on. He never saw her again. She could not have lasted more than six months. Everyone in the Majdanek complex was executed in an around the clock operation that killed a total of 42,000 in early November 1944. Frydman and his brother are the only survivors of his family. He remembers being on the train to Auschwitz.

Louis Frydman reached Auschwitz by train. While only there for five hours, it was his worst experience of the war. He was lined up as if for selection. He observed others going through the selection process to determine their life or death. Women and children were separated from men and older boys. The process was orderly and systematic. Frydman has developed a severe aversion to standing in lines since that occurrence. [Annotator's Note: Frydman laughs.] There were 1,200 people from France who were in the selection. Of those, 800 were killed that day. Frydman had arrived with others from a work camp at Radom [Annotator's Note: Radom, Poland]. He was examined by a Nazi officer and questioned about his ability to help Germany if he survived. Frydman had survived the terrible conditions at Budzyn for 13 months and knew he would be alright. The officer finally told him to go to the line beside the train. A German guard then told him to go to another line, but Frydman replied in German that he would not. Frydman had been told by an SS officer to be where he was. Frydman then told the guard to ask the officer if he wanted to change the directions given to him. The guard did not bother. Frydman knew that was how to survive the situation. [Annotator's Note: Frydman laughs.] When a whistle blew indicating that the selection process had ended, Frydman ran to the train, leaving the guard standing behind. There was no hitting or shooting going on during the selection ritual. The French Jews who had just suffered through the process were middle class. The Nazis kept a sense of civility for their sake. Some of the French men who had been chosen to work decided to join their families on the way to death. Those men were heroes. The guards did not care if Jews decided to be executed rather than work. The doomed individual had no choice about saving their life. Frydman had a ten day train trip from Auschwitz to the French border. The trip was not too bad. Overcrowding was not an issue because the Germans were counting on those in the train to aid them in their war efforts. [Annotator's Note: Frydman laughs.] There was no cruelty by the Germans. The prisoners had sufficient food for the journey.

Louis Frydman reached the border between France and Germany after being in Auschwitz. [Annotator's Note: Frydman had been selected for work during his four hour stay in the death camp.] He was forced to work on excavation of a mine. It was to be an underground assembly factory for a jet bomber. It was being constructed in a mine to avoid allied bombing raids. The work was so difficult that Frydman doubted his ability to survive. He and his brother went to another work group. The two boys boldly said they were told to do so. They obtained easier work as a result. Both the boys got away with it because they were older. The brothers were at the camp at Vaihingen for three months. After six weeks, the work had to be stopped because they were unable to perform efficiently. There was so much sad humor about happened during those years. Frydman feels that someone should write a comedy on the Holocaust. Food was meager and the work was tremendously demanding at Vaihingen. After the work ceased on the mine, the camp was turned into a hospital camp. Prisoners were not tended so the camp went from a hospital to a death camp. An SS camp was near Vaihingen. Prisoners were forced to bring food to them. The prisoners were forced to clear wetlands and pour concrete for runways. The strips were to be used by the bombers to be built at Vaihingen. It was miserable and strenuous work. Frydman worked hard there for four months. After the Warsaw uprising in 1944, the camp was flooded with Christian men. They had been captured after the fighting and were to be treated as prisoners of war. The city of Warsaw was destroyed and many people off the streets were shipped to Auschwitz. The fighters were allowed to live, but their families were killed. [Annotator's Note: Frydman laughs at the irony.] Frydman felt very sorry for the Poles who had been grabbed and separated from their families. Frydman considers himself a survivor of 13 months of basic training at Budzyn. After four months at Vaihingen, the work was stopped and the workers shipped out. The Germans transported the workers to Kochendorf in the Natzweiler complex of concentration camps. Frydman was surprised to see no Poles being transited with him. The Germans were hoping for a new type concentration camp to support a new factory to be built in the mountains. At Kochendorf, Jews were a small minority. The prisoners were under "night and fog" which dealt with the resistors against the Nazi regime. Frydman did not have to dig in the mountains. He performed other tasks. Frydman remembers that the trip from Auschwitz to Vaihingen gave him a good feeling when he looked out of the windows and saw that Germany was almost totally destroyed. [Annotator's Note: Frydman laughs.] He was glad the roar of planes that he heard had resulted in horrible situations in Germany. The camp at Kochendorf had no religious distinctions. Prisoners in the camp were viewed as criminals. The camp was run by criminals also. Frydman witnessed this first hand when his prized shoes were stolen as he slept. He needed the shoes to go to work. He found the shoes and begged the thief to give him his shoes back. The culprit did not speak any of Frydman's languages. Frydman went to the camp authorities and told them of the situation. He got his shoes back but never saw the thief again.

Louis Frydman and the inmates of the Kochendorf concentration camp were forced marched to avoid discovery by the approaching American forces. It was 1 April [Annotator's Note: 1945] when the camp was closed and the prisoners exited. There were five days of forced marching with no food. There was food available, however, the Germans kept it to themselves. The Nazis had no conscience. After the fifth day of marching, Frydman was ready to give up. He told his brother to leave him. Frydman expected to be killed. His brother had the energy for one more day of the march. The prisoners were told to dig a trench. An argument ensued between the leader of the march and a German infantry officer. The prisoners were going to be shot in front of the infantry. The officer said it would demoralize his troops. He provided a truck to move the unfit prisoners to another concentration camp. All the camps in western Germany were being moved eastward at this time. The prisoners were force to board a train. They heard the sound of airplane engines overhead. The Allied planes did not know prisoners were onboard the train. They strafed and bombed the train. The rail trip to Dachau was over. The unfit were shot and the rest forced to march. Frydman had built up his strength after miraculously getting an apple. The guards along the way assumed a better attitude toward the marchers. The prisoners marched three days and met up with a train that took them to Dachau.

Louis Frydman ended up in Allach, which was a sub-camp in the Dachau complex of camps. The prisoners were being sent out to various locations to be shot or to die on the trains. Frydman was told by the Germans to clean up the barracks prior to the arrival of the Americans. When he woke up, he had missed the liberation but two people in military uniforms were smiling at him. He was placed in Dachau to prevent the spread of disease. Food was not a problem. American guards surrounded the prison. His first impression of the Americans surprised Frydman. He found it hard to believe that they were able to defeat Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler]. [Annotator's Note: Frydman laughs.] Frydman was able to leave the camp and find his brother who also survived. His brother had assumed that Frydman was dead. Soon the two brothers were contacted by a United Nations Refugee and Rehabilitation Administration, or UNRRA, official. A school was being established for war orphans, and he wanted the Frydman boys to attend. They stayed there for nine months. It was a wonderful bunch of people. The American Army ran it. The rule was established that the survivors would not talk about their wartime experiences. It would be too depressing. The school was fun. There was food, arts, music, and sports to engage the students. Jewish G.I.s in Heidelberg invited the students to come and visit on Friday evenings for service. They could have all the Coke they wanted. [Annotator's Note: Frydman laughs.] After he reached the United States, UNRRA followed up on him. Frydman would not have gone to Germany or Poland, he rejected both locations. He went to Palestine first, but the British resisted. He was not allowed into England. He was accepted in June 1946 to enter the United States with the aid of the United Nations Committee for the Care of European Children. After arriving, he had to master English to continue his education. He eventually received his PhD. His life in America has been wonderful. His survival is attributed to luck and a certain amount of readiness to die which led him to gamble in some situations. He put up with a lot. He was not afraid, not even when confronting a guard at Auschwitz. He knew what was happening there. He could smell burning flesh and see the chimneys belching smoke. It did not take long to figure it out what was happening.

Louis Frydman took advantage of situations and made the best of them. Upon arriving in the United States, he and his brother planned their independent life together. Instead, they were forced into foster homes where the people who watched them were only in it for the money. When he reached the right age, he found a place on his own, even though some dangers existed in New York City. Frydman has five wonderful grandchildren living close to him. That is God's way of paying him back. His three sons are very successful and have families. Frydman is anxiously awaiting his great-grandchildren. [Annotator's Note: Frydman laughs.] When he was liberated by the Americans, he thought he was in a dream. He could not speak English but was happy. He was delirious that all his wartime travails had come to an end. He could eat all he wanted after he was freed. All he could find to wear was a Hitlerjugend [Annotator's Note: Hitler Youth] uniform. Someone told him he should put that away. [Annotator's Note: Frydman laughs.]