Frommel Wolfgang

Frommel, Wolfgang Wolfgang Frommel was born in Germany into a religious Protestant family. He himself was a spiritual man and a humanist. In 1932, he published a book against National Socialism called Der Dritte Humanismus. The third edition, which was scheduled to appear in 1935, was banned. For about a year he lived with the Hildesheimers, a Jewish family in Berlin. In 1936, he left Germany and moved to Basel, Switzerland, and from there to Florence and finally to Paris. In 1939, he visited Holland and was there when the war broke out and consequently could not return to France. He stayed in Holland and in 1942 joined the effort to save Jews in Amsterdam. In 1934, English Quakers established an institute for the children of refugees from Europe in Holland. During the war, this institute took in around 50 Jewish children. In 1941, after the Germans took over the institute, the children were dispersed. Only a few of them survived, thanks to Wolfgang Frommel. One of them was Claus Victor Bock, whose parents were from Chechnya and who had fled to Turkey in 1938. Through Wolfgang’s efforts, the boy was brought to the brothers Jan and Chris Dekker*, who hid him at their mother’s, Mrs. Dekker-Maathuis, in Bergen, North Holland. When the Germans ordered the population to evacuate their homes along the North Sea shore, it was Wolfgang who took Claus through the German checkpoints to Amsterdam. From 1943 until the end of the war, Wolfgang looked after Claus, who hid with Gisele d’Ailly-van Waterschoot van der Gracht*, who had originally taken in Wolfgang when he arrived from France. Wolfgang hid Jews in his home for various periods of time, among them two brothers, R. and P. Goldschmidt, from the Eerde boarding school. He also took in a schizophrenic Jewish boy a short while before the Germans evacuated the mentally ill from the hospital, thereby saving his life. Wolfgang also found a hiding place for the renowned Dutch Jewish writer Victor van Vriesland, andpersonally accompanied him there. The artist and poet Buri-Wongtschowski knew Wolfgang from Germany. Buri came to Holland in 1937 and the two met again in 1942. Wolfgang found a relatively safe hiding place for him. The painter faked a suicide in Limburg in order to decieve his pursuers and then traveled with Wolfgang by train to Amsterdam. Once there, he hid in an apartment where a hiding place had been devised for him inside a piano. Buri survived the war. On November 6, 1973, Yad Vashem recognized Wolfgang Frommel as Righteous Among the Nations.