Names Not Numbers

Fred Schoenfeld

Kosice, Czechoslovakia

In Hiding

1936

Fred Schoenfeld

Kosice, Czechoslovakia

1936

Alfred “Fred” Schoenfeld is a Holocaust Survivor who survived the Nazi regime as a young boy in Slovakia. During World War II, the citizens in his hometown of Presov turned against their Jewish neighbors, and anyone over the age of 9 was ordered to wear the Star of David on their shirt. Schoenfeld remembered his teacher directing him and a handful of fellow Jewish students to sit in the back of the classroom

and demanding he keep his distance from the other children during recess. In April 1942, his grandfather was put on a train and sent to Auschwitz. It was the last time he saw him.

Once, when police were looking for women to load into the cars, Fred’s father, Simcha ordered his son into bed where he feigned that he was sick.

An officer arrived at the door, and the senior Schoenfeld convinced him that young Fred’s mother, Ilonka, needed to stay and care for her ailing son. “By a sheer miracle, he turned and left.”

By 1943, amid this atmosphere of hatred and betrayal, living in town became untenable. Fred and his parents hid in the attic of a warehouse for seven weeks, communicating in whispers to escape detection by the workers just a floor below.

An employee of Simcha’s would smuggle in food and water beneath a long raincoat. To pass the time, Ilonka murmured stories about her childhood growing up on a farm — anything to keep her fidgety 7-year-old from accidentally revealing their hiding place.

Schoenfeld remembers a night in January 1945 when a band of Russian and Czech troops arrived at the lodge to warn them of an approaching German force.

Before heading off to fight, they reassured the families they would return to evacuate them.“There were lots of Jews in the Czech army, and I will always remember hearing a soldier with a gun speaking Yiddish,” he told the Strassler audience. He also never forgot the kindness of one soldier who gave him a thick slice of bread. “I ate half and put the other half aside for a rainy day,” he recounted with a smile.

As promised, the soldiers returned to liberate the families amid the sounds of nearby explosions and firing rifles. The Schoenfelds eventually escaped into the Tatra mountains, immigrated to the United States in 1948, and settled in Pittsburgh, PA when Fred was 14 years old.

Names Not Numbers

Fred Schoenfeld

Fred Schoenfeld

The End