Notizen zu dieser Person
{geni:about_me} From the Jewish Museum in Fürth, via a relative. Lightly edited:
Alfred Davidsohn and his fiancée Frieda Waldmann were arrested in 1938 and charged with “racial defilement”. Frieda was Protestant and Alfred Jewish - their relationship violated National Socialistic racial ideology. After the “Nuremburg Racial Laws”, were passed in 1935, forbidding love relationships between unmarried Jewish and non-Jewish partners, Frieda and Alfred continued their relationship in secret– until their denouncement in Fürth in 1938.
Both were arrested on October 20, 1938, and taken into custody. Frieda was released the same day but her passport was confiscated and she was forbidden any contact with Alfred Davidsohn under threat of imprisonment.
Frieda Waldmann and Alfred Davidsohn saw each other for the last time on May 10, 1939, the day she was called to the witness stand to testify against him. Alfred was found guilty and sentenced to seven years in prison in Zweibrücken. On December 13th, 1942, he was deported to Auschwitz where he was murdered.
Shortly before the war ended, Frieda received an envelope in the mail, sent to her by a non-Jewish cellmate of Alfred Davidsohn. The envelope contained technical drawings for a new type of vending machine. Alfred had made these drawings secretly for Frieda to protect her financially: Among the technical data she found a tiny, almost invisible greeting and a request to have the drawings patented.
Alfred Davidsohn’s family, too, were deported and murdered. Frieda survived and was posthumously married to Alfred in 1956/1945 [2 different sources], with the assistance of a Jewish attorney, Max Stern, who represented Alfred in court in 1939.
With the amendment of the federal laws dealing with compensation for the victims of Nazi persecution, Frieda Davidsohn was declared widow and sole heir to Alfred in 1960, thus receiving the support that Alfred had always wanted for her. Frieda never entered another relationship after 1945 and never had the drawings patented.
By some detours Frieda received Fredy’s last letter written before his deportation to friends in Marktredwitz. It is dated December 13, 1942:
'' “Yes, my dear friends, will this regrettably be my last letter you are holding in your hands, for the rest of my life? God alone can tell. I am wearing civil clothing for the first time in four years, unfortunately only because I am leaving. Where I am taken – I do not know! We are nine comrades altogether starting a journey into the unknown. We neither know whether the final destination is located in the old country or in Poland or in the protectorate nor do we know if we will end up in a prison or a camp. We also do not know reason and purpose of this transport. In other words the future lies in the dark and only one thing is certain, nowhere will conditions be anywhere near as good as here, and that I most likely will not be allowed to write to you from where ever it is I am going. Censorship rarely is tolerant enough to allow written communication with friends. We all know that our fate will not be kind to us. The thoughts moving us these days are not rosy, but be assured that as long as humanely possible I will keep hoping, to once be with the people that are the core of my life, in distant happy years..., hoping to live to see those times.
I give you my unconditional promise that I will hold on to life with all my energy and that I will never throw it away voluntarily. As long as I know or may at least hope, that there are people out there waiting for me, to whom I mean something, to whom I may perhaps speak again or in whose life I have a place.”''
See "About" for the story of Fredy and Frieda.
Jens Aaron
Guttstein
