The Jew who got a job offer
from the Nazis
By Lucy Wallis
BBC News
20 January 2015 Magazine
Before World War Two 170,000 Jews
lived in Vienna - by the end there
were just 6,000. One of those who
fled the Nazis was Freddie Knoller -
now 93, he survived a Gestapo
interrogation, Auschwitz and a death
march in sub-zero temperatures.
"I saw two civilians coming towards me.
Each one had a hat on and a long black
leather coat, and I recognised them
immediately, this must be two people
from the Gestapo," says Freddie Knoller.
It was July 1943. Twenty-two-year-old
Knoller, had managed to obtain false
papers and get work in occupied Paris
introducing Nazi soldiers to the
nightclubs and brothels of the red light
district. But that day he was arrested and
taken to Gestapo headquarters.
In a large room with a portrait of Adolf
Hitler hanging on the wall, one of the
officers interrogated him.
"While he was talking, I saw on his desk
a plaster head of a human being and he
saw me looking at it and he said, 'Oh this
plaster head, that's the head of a Jew,
because we were taught how to
recognise Jews by the structure of their
head,'" says Knoller.
"With that he got up from his desk, went
behind me and he took my head
between his two hands, tracing it. I'm
not ashamed to say I wet my pants
because I was so sure I would now be
recognised as a Jew.
"He said, 'Oh yes, I can see you come
from a good German background and I
think you should be joining our
organisation as an interpreter, you will
be earning a lot of money and finally you
will be working with your own people.'
"I felt so amazed, laughing [to] myself…
'Wow what an adventure to be able to
get away from the Gestapo, and they
want me to work with them.'"
But it was a job offer that Knoller had no
intention of accepting. He quickly made
himself scarce.
This was the third time he had found
himself under Nazi occupation. The first,
he had to leave his home in Vienna as a
17-year-old in 1938 when Austria was
annexed by Germany in the Anschluss.
His parents sent him to stay with friends
in Belgium where they thought he would
be safe, but when Hitler invaded the
country in 1940, Knoller had to flee for a
second time.
He chose to go to France. "I read in
these naughty books all about Paris,
about Montmartre, about the Moulin
Rouge with the half-naked dancers on
the stage and this is where I wanted to
go," he says.
But things went wrong almost
immediately. He was arrested at the
French border for having a German
passport and was interned in a camp for
France's enemies in May 1940. After the
Nazis invaded France a month later, he
managed to escape and finally made his
way to the bright lights of Paris.
But his run-in with the Gestapo made
him realise it was too dangerous for him
to stay there.
Instead of taking up their job offer, he
turned to a friend for help and was
introduced to the leader of the French
Resistance. He went to live in the
mountains near the town of Figeac in
southern France, fighting the occupying
German soldiers.
"It was a great joy for me to fight my
enemies instead of earning money from
them," says Knoller.
He learned how to shoot a gun and wire
up explosives to derail an enemy troop
train.
"Our leader… made sure that whenever
we put explosives on to the railway line,
we hid it with leaves, grass, so it
shouldn't be noticed immediately. Then
he told us that we should go and
observe, but quite far away, what is
going to happen, up in the hills.
"The train came, we heard the explosion,
we saw the first engine topple over on
the side and the whole thing just
collapsed, but we ran away immediately
back to our resistance group. I must say
it was wonderful."
Knoller (far left) with his brothers and
parents - he did not learn the fate of
his mother and father until 1995
He soon fell in love with a beautiful local
girl called Jacqueline. But after an
argument, she betrayed him to the
Gendarmes.
They burned his body with cigarettes to
find out more about his resistance group
and when he could not stand the pain
any more, Knoller revealed his true
identity and was handed over to the
Gestapo.
It was September 1943 and the Nazis
had finally caught up with him. Knoller
was sent to Auschwitz where he was
imprisoned until the war was nearly
over. He worked in temperatures as low
as -25C carrying four stone (25kg)
cement bags in the camp and was forced
to run with them - he was whipped if he
was too slow.
"From time to time we were told to line
up in front of the SS and told to walk,"
says Knoller.
"The SS either said to us go left or go
right. I put my chest out and I smiled at
them, more or less to say, 'I'm OK to
continue working.' I wasn't meek at all
about it because I knew if you were ever
taken on the left hand side they would
gas us."
In January 1945, as Russian troops
approached, Auschwitz was evacuated.
Knoller and most of the other prisoners
were sent on a 31-mile (50km) death
march in the freezing cold to the town of
Gleiwitz.
"We walked on that big road on ice and
snow and some people just collapsed of
the freezing cold in our thin clothes,"
says Knoller.
"As soon as people could not walk any
more the Germans, who surrounded us,
shot them. Some people ran away into
the woods, the Germans killed them."
Almost 60,000 prisoners from Auschwitz
were forced on death marches and more
than 15,000 people died.
"I walked and walked without caring
what happened to anybody else. We saw
people being killed, but it didn't affect
me. I'm still walking and I'm still alive,
that's the only thought that I had," says
Knoller.
As the German army retreated,
camps near the eastern front were
evacuated and prisoners sent
westwards
Those who survived were loaded on to
trains and sent to Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp in northern
Germany, where Knoller remained until
liberation by British troops on 15 April
1945. By the end of the war he weighed
just over six stone (41kg).
Afterwards, Knoller travelled to the US
and was reunited with his two brothers.
He met his British wife Freda there and
the couple moved to London.
For 30 years Knoller was unable to speak
about his experience of the Holocaust,
but he was finally persuaded to do so by
his children.
It was not until 1995 that Knoller learned
the fate of his parents. They had been
deported from Vienna in 1942, and by a
strange coincidence were in Auschwitz at
the same time as he was, but they were
killed in 1944.
"I'm proud to have fought for my life,
and proud to be able to tell the world
what has happened," says Knoller.

dark past

Nigeria is plagued by nepotism and tribalism

in 2015, we still hear, the man from the North, the man from the South.

the blessing in disguise is,.. we have so many tribes and languages.. so there can't be a fully-fledged ethnic war.

strength in our diversity