Frieda grew up in a crowded one-room house in Sokolow Podlaski, a small manufacturing center in central Poland. Frieda's father had died when she was two years old, and her mother had then moved back to her hometown of Sokolow Podlaski, where she opened a poultry shop. The Altmans were a Yiddish-speaking, religious Jewish family, and Frieda was the youngest of four children.

1933-39: German troops entered our town on September 20, 1939. I was huddling, frightened, with family and friends in a shelter when three soldiers came in and forced me and two girlfriends to go out to the back of the building. There they raped me at gunpoint. I didn't think my fiance would still want to marry me after that. But Mendel understood. Together, we fled to Soviet-occupied Bialystok, where we married on November 14.

1940-44: In January 1940 the Soviets sent us, along with many other Jewish refugees in Bialystok, east to work camps in Siberia. There Mendel was put to work cutting trees, and I gave birth to my son Abraham. Then we were sent to work on a collective farm in the Crimea. The invading Germans reached the Crimea by September 1941, and knowing what the Germans were doing to Jews, the Soviets evacuated the Jews to the Caucasus, first to Azerbaijan and then to Armenia. It was in the Caucasus that my Abraham died from diptheria.

Frieda and her family returned to the Crimea after the Germans retreated in 1944. After the war, the Felmans returned to Poland and in 1949 they emigrated to the United States.

Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. Citations

Frieda Altman Felman