Fred Friedman

Alfred Friedmann (later on Fred Friedman; born 5 October 1926 in Salzburg; died 16 January 2008) was a successful refugee from the persecution of Jews. Equipped with a fake ID, he managed to take flight to Switzerland together with his sister in 1938 in order to escape from the Nazis. From Switzerland, he traveled to France and later on into the USA, where he worked as jurist in the state of New York.
Life
In 1923, Otto and Hildegard Friedmann moved from Vienna to Salzburg, where they bought a house in Haunsperger street 25. His father worked as wood trader. Four years after Alfred's birth, Grete was born. Alfred was the only Jewish in his class and felt the effects of anti-semitism, espacially after the Anschluss Österreichs (the annexation of Austria into Greater Germany) in 1938. At that point of time, Albert Falk, a friend of the family who lived in Switzerland, helped Alfred's father to leave Austria. According to the Nuremberg Laws, Alfred had to leave school. His sister was accommodated by the cloister Nonntal.
On the Kristallnacht in 1938, the synagogue of Salzburg was devastated, Jewish men arrested, shops destroyed and outlays depredated. Living in the suburbs, however, Alfred and his family were initially untroubled by the events. In the end of 1938, Alfred, his sister and his mother went to Fribourg by train, where they spent the night at a university professor's place who had been helping many refugees. After that, Alfred and his sister were handed over to a woman from Basel. Mr. Falk had organised a fake ID for her, in which Alfred and his sister were registered as her own kids. Having lived in Salzburg, the border guard recognized the kids, but let the three of them pass.
Alfred's mother was further living in Salzburg, however she had to leave her flat soon. Thanks to the support of the police commandant of St. Gallen Paul Grüninger - who was fired by the government and convicted because of breach of official duty and forgery of documents in 1939 - she managed to travel to Switzerland over the Rhine.
The re-united family Friedmann traveled over France and Spain finally with one of the last refugee ships to New Jersey in 1941, where they were picked up by relatives. Alfred attended school in the US and later on joined the army, where he unsuccessfully asked several times to be sent to Europe in order to help rescue Germany and Austria. After military service, Alfred obtained US cititzenship as "Fred Friedman" on 12 April 1945.
During the Nazi regime, Otto Begus (probably a participant at the Dollfuß assassination in 1934) lived in the flat of the family Friedman in Salzburg. After he vanished in 1945, the Czech actress Lida Baarova, who had been a concubine of Joseph Goebbels in the 1930s, moved into the flat and lived there until her death in 2000.
Fred Friedman graduated in 1950 at the university of New York in accounting and completed his law studies at the Brooklyn Law University in 1954. In 1955, he founded his own juridical company. In the 1980s, he started to interest himself in the fate of his grandparents - all the more because the latter had never been discussed at home. At the "Dokumentationszentrum des Bundes Jüdischer Verfolgter des Naziregimes" in Vienna (a documentation centre of the association of persecuted Jews), Fred Friedman found out that his maternal grandmother had died in 1944 in Vienna, while his paternal grandmother was deported to the concentration camp Theresienstadt and murdered.
In 2004, he got involved with the Holocaust - enlightenment in the program "A Letter To The Stars", in which more than 15000 pupils participated. On invitation of Andreas Maislinger, he was a guest at the reception in Braunau am Inn on the occasion of the celebration of the 10 year anniversary of the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service in 2002.
From 2002 to 2006, he was the Austrian consul for Buffalo and Western New York. He left behind a wife and three sons.
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