Born in 1884, Georg Fröhlich studied at the University of Freiburg and of Breslau, graduating in 1905. He served in the German Army as soldier during the First World War and afterward began work in 1918-1919 in Berlin as a member of the Commission for Compensation (Kommission für Reichsentschädigung).

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Georg established himself as a successful attorney in Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland), where he and his wife Edith (Nissen) lived with their two children, Andreas (1921-1941), and Sabine (1927- 2017).

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Both Georg or Edith had Jewish ancestry. Georg’s parents were observant Jews, but as an adult he was not. Edith’s parents were both Jewish but not observant. Edith had been raised as a Protestant, but converted to Catholicsm and raised her children in that faith.

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By the mid-1930s, the Third Reich often sent apparently mixed signals through the sheer enormity of its diverse activities. For example, even as the Reich stamped identity cards and travel visas for non-Aryans–such as the Fröhlichs–with a large “J” for “Jude” (Jew), the Reich awarded Georg Fröhlich in the name of Hitler (“Im Namen des Führers und Reichskanzlers”) the Honor Cross for War Participants (“Ehrenkreuss für Kriegsteilnehmer”) for Georg’s honorable service as a loyal soldier in the “Weltkrieg 1914-1918” (World War I.)

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By 1937, as anti-Semitism spread, many members of the extended Fröhlich-Nissen family had begun to emigrate. After the Kristallnacht in 1938, the Fröhlichs made plans to leave Breslau and Germany altogether and sent their children ahead to safety, eventually to England.

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The drums of war were beating ever louder with the Third Reich’s aggressive land grabs in 1938, including the annexation (der Anschluss) of Austria and of the German speaking Sudetenland areas of the Czechoslovak Republic.

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Even if you considered Hitler an “extremist nut,” as Sabine reported her father did, at what point can you no longer count on good citizens to step up and put an end to all the resulting aggression, suppression, repression and depravity?

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In early 1939, the Fröhlichs decided it was time to leave. They hastily sold off many possessions and travelled west from Breslau to Aachen, where they had friends, and then went into exile in Vaals, a Dutch city just across the border. Along with many colleagues, Georg and Edith believed that in the coming war the Netherlands would remain neutral, as it had during the World War of 1914-1918. 

The couple eventually made their way to Amsterdam in 1940 and called back their two children from England. Unfortunately, Dutch neutrality became irrelevant when Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940. In June 1941, the Gestapo picked up 300 young male Jewish refuges aged 18 to 21 during a three day razzia (round up raids) in Amsterdam. Andreas was among those arrested, first sent to Schoorl for deportation and then to an infamous slave labor camp, Mauthausen in Austria, never to return.

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For the next three years, the surviving family members remained in hiding, always on the move from one flat or house to another, from the city out to the villages. The resistance workers helping to hide refugees and downed Allied airmen faced ever-more severe countermeasures meted out by the occupying German forces or their Dutch collaborators. The landscape of North Holland’s flat, open farm land, with lack of forests and abundant canals created choke points at each bridge or train stop. 

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In this terrain, hiding (onderduiken, “diving under” or “going underground”) often meant hiding in plain sight with forged identity cards and stolen ration cards. Hiding meant memorizing fabricated life stories to explain non-local accents or appearances and keeping to a strict routine of whom you could trust when the knock on the front or back door announced a visitor. Most often Sabine was kept in separate accommodations miles away from her parents. A teenage girl could pass as domestic help, whereas a newly arriving family of three was harder to explain to neighbors or the authorities.

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As you shall read in the pages that follow, this backdrop makes the reunion of the Fröhlichs with their teenage daughter at the Elders home in Bovenkarspel in the late fall of 1944 all the more emotional.

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In 1947 Sabine (a.k.a. “Fietje” throughout this book) married one of the resistance members, Cornelis (Cor) Schipper, nephew of the Oom (Uncle) Cor Schipper mentioned early in the diary. The couple emigrated from the Netherlands to the United States soon after marrying, and raised five children in Harrison, New York. Cor and Sabine opened a successful flower bulb import business to serve the North American market, importing from many of the same bulb growers whose families had coordinated resistance efforts during the war. That firm is now in its third generation of family operation based in Bridgeport, Connecticut (www.colorblends.com).