The Life and Times of Frieda E.

In 1966 Frieda, Leopold and Hans moved back to Chicago. This would be the final time they relocate and would spend their remaining years in Chicago. Gaby had just graduated from high school and she decided to stay behind in Florida with her friends. Hans completed his final high school years in Chicago.

Gaby’s decision to remain in Florida turned out to be ill-advised. Within a few months she called her parents in tears, begging for money to take a bus back to Chicago. The details about what may have happened to Gaby in Florida are sketchy, but she came home a changed person. 

She was no longer the sweet daughter that Frieda remembered. Gaby had begun smoking and drinking and seemed utterly lost. Within a few months of returning home Gaby met and became engaged to a young man. Frieda and Leopold encouraged the marriage, thinking it would help their daughter find some direction in her life again. 

Unfortunately that wasn’t to be. Gaby divorced her new husband within months of the marriage and moved back in with her parents. Still seeming lost she tried finding solace in the arms of other young men, and soon found herself engaged again. It was It was now early 1968 and Gaby was getting married for the second time. Before the year was out, Gaby was also once again divorced. 

After the second divorce she initially drifted, living with her parents, still seeming lost. She finally found a job as a secretary and found that she excelled at that. Her life seemed to stabilize, much to the relief of her parents.

Meanwhile Hans had graduated from high school and joined the Air Force. He was lucky to not get sent to Vietnam. Instead he was stationed in Libya until Gaddfi took power and kicked out all US military forces stationed in Libya. After that, Hans was stationed in Germany until the end of his tour of duty. 

Hans also came back a changed man from his life in the military. He had started to drift away from his parents since early in 1966, when he found out about his parentage, and the fact that Leopold was not his biological father. Being in the military seemed to add to that rift.

Frieda and Leopold had not been the most loving parents - stuck in their own personal traumas of the past. While they did their best to provide a home, food and clothes for their children, they provided little else. Hans realized this early and learned how to fend for himself. However this led to resentment, especially towards his mother. Finding out about her betrayal to the man he thought was his father caused a deep emotional wound that would never properly heal.

After coming back from the Air Force, Hans joined the flower power revolution and for a time became a hippy - complete with long hair. He slept on couches and even spent a brief period in a commune. 

He eventually met and married a young woman who was also into the hippy lifestyle at the time. They settled down into an apartment with a couple of dogs. 

At the time Gaby was still emotionally drifting, despite finding some stability in having a steady job and an apartment of her own. She was still smoking and drinking heavily, going out for one-night-stands with men she’d meet in bars. One a fateful night in early 1971, one of those encounters led to pregnancy. 

The stigma of an unwed mother was not quite the same as it once had been in Frieda’s youth, and Gaby didn’t have to be sent away to attend a special “school.” Also it would have been impossible for Frieda to try and pass off Gaby’s baby as her own, as she was already in her early 60s. 

So after the baby was born, Frieda and Leopold welcomed their daughter back into their home to help her raise their new granddaughter, Gigi.

Life in America ultimately did not turn out to be what Frieda and her family had hoped for. When they first arrived they were full of hope for the future. However, work was difficult to find, even here. Leopold had to move around, looking for work where he could find it.

He had been a trained mechanical engineer in Poland before the war, with a university degree. However all those records were destroyed in the war, and he had no credentials to prove his educational background. This made finding work in his chosen profession nearly impossible. 

To help make ends meet Frieda took on housekeeping jobs wherever they lived. From Chicago they migrated around the country to North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Florida, although always ending up back in Chicago one way or another. While they lived in Florida, Frieda took a job as a hotel maid at a local high-end hotel. She did such a good job she was eventually promoted to housekeeping manager and then hostess for the hotel restaurant. Unfortunately this did not last as Leopold eventually pulled the family back to Chicago again after only a few years.

In the mean time the children were growing up and trying to find their way in the world. Hans had a good head on his shoulders and was soon managing his own paper route and saving money. Gaby, on the other hand, was slightly more flighty and not any better with money and finances than her parents were. Often money was spent as quickly as was earned in this household. Hans was the only one with enough sense to save his money.

It was because of this lack of financial sense, always moving around looking for better work, and the loss of educational credentials, that kept the family fairly poor, or lower-middle-class in the best of times. Frieda became adept at purchasing items on lay-away, and seeking bargains in second-hand shops so that the family always looked better off than they were.

The appearance of wealth, or being well-to-do, was always very important to Frieda. Her parents had never tried to appear more wealthy than they were, and were treated accordingly. This scarred Frieda greatly in her childhood and she wanted to break the cycle of poverty. When she found herself unable to do so, she focused on ways to appear more well-off so that her children would not suffer the same fate of being stigmatized for being poor.

After nearly 10 years in Belgium, Frieda and her small family were still struggling. They heard of the wealth to be made in the North America and she and Leopold decided to uproot their family to try and make a go of it overseas. They originally wanted to emigrate to Canada, but Leopold was too close to 40 to be accepted. In 1956, they found a sponsor family that helped them emigrate to America. At the time the children were 9 and 7 years old.

Frieda honestly believed the stories that the streets in America were paved in gold, and that money was just lying in the streets. She recalls being sorely disappointed when this was very far from the truth. 

They were flown over from Brussels to New York City in a military cargo plane. It had no seats - all the immigrants had to huddle on the floor of the aircraft, swaddled in blankets. There was no meal service, bathroom facility or other such comforts on the long flight. From New York City they took a train to Chicago, where they were greeted by their sponsor family.

They spent their first years in America in Evanston, Illinois, where their sponsor family lived. They found a small apartment and Leopold set out to find work. He had a background in mechanical engineering, music, and musical conducting. He also fluently spoke 4 languages, and set out to add English to that list. He mostly tried to find work using his mechanical engineering skills.

Frieda recalled her early years in America with amusement - being confused over all the “gift” shops (in German, “gift” means poison), and what were Americans doing with all those may flowers (she thought the trucks from the Mayflower Moving Company were filled with actual may flowers and did not know that they were named after a ship named the “Mayflower”). 

Settling into life in America was overall not that different than Belgium. There was again a new language and customs to learn, and struggling to make it here was not that different than struggling to make it in Europe. However they made their choice and they were not going back. They hoped with enough time they could also achieve the success that other Americans seemed to have.

The details of Frieda’s life are a little more sketchy in the years immediately following World War II. She escaped the POW camp and remained with the Polish POW she met, and who saved her life, Leopold.

He had to travel throughout Europe to look for work, so once they made it back to Frankfurt am Main and were married, he had to take off to find work. Whatever money he earned in his travels he sent back to Frieda to help her. After returning to Frankfurt she discovered her mother had died of throat cancer the year before the war ended. During these years she remained estranged from her family and had little contact with her father or siblings. Leopold returned on occasion, but there was little work to be had in Germany at the time, so he never remained for long.

Near the end of 1946, Frieda gave birth to a daughter she named Gabriele. She finally had a baby she was able to keep and love, but by this time she was so badly broken she did not do a good job of it. 

In 1947 she spent more time alone, surviving the best she could on the little money Leopold was able to send back for her and little Gaby. It was during this time she met a kind, handsome man, whose name she could never remember. He brought her food for herself and for her small child. Leopold was gone so long, and Frieda was so lonely, she found herself taking comfort in this kind man’s arms, and later that year, a little baby boy was born as the result. 

Leopold was an intelligent man and he knew the child was not his. However he decided not to abandon Frieda and the 2 children, the same way he had abandoned his first wife and daughter back in Poland. He finally found steady work in Belgium and relocated the entire family there. They spent the next 9 years living modestly, but surviving, in Eupen, Belgium.

In the POW camp, one of the POWs Frieda met was a Russian artist, who painted her portrait, using the burlap from one of her skirts as a canvas. She can’t recall where he got his paint or brushes from - he may have been carrying them his pack when he was captured, or some kindly SS soldier provided them. In either case he had paint and brushes and managed to paint the portrait of Frieda. This portrait is now a cherished family treasure. The buttons of the sweater she wore in the painting have even been preserved with the portrait.

There was also a Polish POW named Leopold who also befriended her. He had a wife and daughter back in Poland, and he had been a reluctant recruit into the Polish army. He was a quiet, gentle man, with a background in mechanical engineering. He was a tinker, who loved to spend hours building and designing new tools/devices. He was not cut out for war, and hence found himself captured fairly early.

In the final months of the war they found themselves together in this camp, Frieda and Leopold. She was drawn to his quiet intelligence, he was drawn by her indomitable spirit.

When the war finally ended, they found themselves on the Russian side of Germany. Russian soldiers liberated their camp and initially wanted to kill Frieda (she was German, she was the enemy). Leopold saved her life, claiming she was his wife. Thankfully he was fluent in Russian.

From the camp they made their way to a small town on the German/Poland border and continued to play husband/wife so they could get a room together. It would take time to pick up the pieces of their fractured lives, but they had to start somewhere. Leopold had no desire to return to Warsaw and his wife and daughter, so he stayed with Frieda. She was still frail from her ordeal in the concentration camp and he set it upon himself to help her get back on her feet.