September 23, 2023 • 32 mins
This 2019 episode covers Frieda Belinfante who broke gender barriers in becoming a conductor. She was also a member of the Dutch resistance, who risked her life during WWII in defiance of the German occupation of the Netherlands.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. The other day, I was talking to a
friend of mine who said he had just seen some
videos about a lesbian couple, one of whom was Jewish
and was a resistance fighter during World War Two, And
I immediately said, was it frieda Belle? And Fonto It
was not, But that conversation made me want to rerun
our episode on her because she was awesome. I concur
(00:24):
and this episode originally came out on November twenty fifth,
twenty nineteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and Welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So regular
(00:48):
listeners to the podcast might recall a while back when
we talked in one of our listener mail segments about
a fantastic gift that we got, which was a set
of the Chutzpau comic books that were produced by the
Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh. Well, that listener segment led to
us talking with the Holocaust Center about their upcoming volume
of the comic, which focuses on women upstanders, real life
(01:09):
superheroes who stood up against wrong, and we decided to
do an episode on one of the women featured in
that comic, and we're also going to have interviews with
some of the team behind the Chutzpau comic on an
upcoming episode. But today we are covering Frida Belinfante, a
woman who is inspiring both as a musician and as
a member of the Dutch Resistance who risked her life
(01:31):
again and again during World War Two in defiance of
the German occupation of the Netherlands. She was born on
May tenth, nineteen oh four, in Amsterdam, the third daughter
in her family. Her older sisters were Dorothea who went
by Dolly, and Renee. The fourth Belinfanta child was a
boy named Robert Paul. Frida would later say that her
(01:51):
mother had wanted a boy when she was born and quote,
I have a lot of qualities that could have been
a boy, but I was a girl. Frida learned around
age ten that she had another brother as well. This
was a child of her father's that he had before
marrying their mother, and this half brother was named Hugo. Yeah,
Hugo was not a constant part of their lives, but
(02:12):
kind of came in and out as their their half brother,
and she knew him for the rest of his life.
Freda's family is very large. Her father, Aaron Bellnfanta, had
nine siblings and her mother, Georgine Antoinette Hess had either
eight or nine siblings. Freda could not recall for sure
in the interview she gave where she relaid that although
the two sides of the family didn't really have much
(02:34):
in common and so they weren't particularly close like, they
didn't all gather together. Though her father had initially been
on track for a career in medicine, he decided at
twenty one that music was actually his life's path, and
by the time Frida was born, her father headed an
Amsterdam music school and was a very prominent pianist. According
to her account, her parents didn't raise their children in
(02:56):
any particularly religious manner, although her father was Jewish. When
she asked her father about religion, he told her that
she should read up on all kinds of religions and
see if there was something that appealed to her and
that she could believe in. And from an early age,
all of the Bell and Fonta children played music. Aaron
decided that Frieda should play the cello, and Frida's sister
(03:17):
Renee once noted in an interview that this was kind
of a strange choice to give Frida a cello, because
Frida's hands were fairly small and she had to wrestle
with that instrument. But Dolly played violin already and Renee
played the pianos, their father wanted Frida to play a
different instrument. In nineteen fifteen, when Frida was eleven, her
sister Dolly died of peritonidis, and Dolly was just fourteen
(03:40):
at that time. Naturally, as their parents mourned, this put
a lot of strain on the family, and they really
didn't speak about their loss very much. Within a year, though,
Frida's parents divorced, although the two of them had a
cordial relationship from this point. As a teenager, Frida, according
to her sister Renee, grew up very fast. Renee also
(04:01):
noted that her sister was very popular and that both
boys and girls were crazy about her. Frida was her
father's favorite child, but when her naughty behavior put her
in peril of being kicked out of public school, he
gave her a stern talking to because he could not
afford a private school as a music teacher, so if
she got kicked out there were no other options for
(04:21):
her education. In nineteen twenty three, Frida's father, Aaron, died
of colon cancer. He had been sick for several years
and at first he had let his abdominal pain go untreated.
After an emergency surgery in nineteen twenty, he recovered for
a time, and during that brief reprieve, he insisted that
he and Frida give a concert together. That was actually
her first concert. Yeah, she did not feel ready for it,
(04:44):
but he kind of pressed the issue and they went
ahead with it. Frida studied cello, not that much with
her father, but with a number of other teachers, and
it was through one of them in nineteen twenty that
she met a woman named Aureete Bosman's. Frida had been
at the teacher's house when she met Arie, who was
romantically involved with the teacher. That teacher was the first
cellist of the Holland Orchestra, and when Henriette and the
(05:07):
man had a falling out because he had been cheating
on her and she feared at the time that she
was pregnant, Frida was then left alone with Arite and
told the obviously upset woman that she could tell her everything.
Frieda and Henriette were soon romantically involved, and they lived
together for seven years. Henriette was already a well known composer.
(05:27):
She was in her twenties when the two women met,
so she was older than the sixteen year old Bill
and Fonta was. Their relationship wasn't exclusive, though Henriette had
relationships with men, which Frida said she wasn't jealous of,
and then Frida later said that their relationship wasn't particularly sexual.
It seemed to be really founded more than anything else,
on a very deep emotional bond and on Frida's fulfillment
(05:48):
in the role of caretaker to the composer. She later
said of Henriette quote, I loved her for a long time,
many many years. She was a person who took more
than she gave, which was fine with me because I
had an abundance of devotion to give. Henrietta Bozman's second
Concerto was dedicated to Frida as Aaron Bellnfonta's illness had progressed,
(06:09):
he had become unable to work, so Frida started working
in those years between nineteen twenty and nineteen twenty three
professionally as a cellist with the Holland Orchestra, and she
and Bozmuns had a wide range of friends who were
also musicians, and it was through this circle that Freeda
met a floutist named Johann Feldkamff, who also went by Joe.
(06:30):
Feldkamff was quite taken with Frida and with her musicianship.
Initially their story sounds kind of sweet. Frida had always
been the type to look out for other people, but
Joe wanted her to have the same benefit in her career.
But then his affection for her really became obsessive. He
wanted to get married, and she explained that wasn't really
for her, and then at one point he brought a
(06:52):
revolver into the room with him and put up on
the mantle. Frida asked him, what are you trying to do,
and he said, quote, I don't want to live without you.
Her response to him at this point was I'm not
the marrying type. I don't think that I can love
a man that way. But he responded, I want to
be where you are, and so she agreed to the marriage,
(07:13):
feeling like there was really no other choice in the matter.
She later told an interviewer, like what was I supposed
to do when faced with the possibility that this man
would kill himself or I could marry him, I wasn't
going to be responsible for that. She's a horrible position
to put someone in. Surprisingly, in many ways, they initially
actually appeared to be a fairly happy couple together. They
(07:35):
were kind of like these two chic musicians, and they
were both very popular, and Frieda legitimately did like Joe
as a person, and she enjoyed his company. But she
also noticed that almost as soon as they got married,
Joe Joi de vivre seemed to vanish. He had been
very fun and kind of boisterous and a little bit
of a trickster, and that all went away, and he
only grew more withdrawn as time went on. They had
(07:58):
been married in nineteen thirty one, and they divorced five
years later in nineteen thirty six, and in the meantime,
Frida and Henriette had also grown apart. Yeah and Frida
had married Joe. Henriette was still very much in their lives,
but she and Frida started drifting apart. Freda speculated that
Henriette just wasn't able to manage the idea of not
(08:18):
having Freda entirely to herself, even though the rules were
different for Henrietta's own additional romances. Frida took a job
teaching high school music. She had actually not been the
school's first choice. A friend of hers had been who
was a man. But after working in the position for
a brief time, that first choice candidate found that he
could not handle the kids and he quit, and Frida
(08:41):
was called and asked if she still wanted the job,
and she took it. Conducting a high school orchestra actually
changed everything. She had found her passion in conducting, and
she also reported that she had no problem handling the kids.
After the school kids put on a performance that Freda conducted,
the Amsterdam University quiet asked her to conduct them, and
(09:01):
she did that. Also. As she kept working with kids,
they also felt like they wanted to work with her
even more, and so soon she assembled this amateur orchestra,
not just with the students that she was teaching, but
also with adults who were trying to pursue music as
a hobby. This amateur orchestra put on a concert and
that was attended by a booking agent who arranged larger performances,
(09:24):
and that agent approached Belenfonta and said, quote, if you
can do that with an amateur orchestra, can you imagine
what you can do with professionals? And Freda balked at
this idea. She didn't think that any professional musician would
play for her, and also Amsterdam had actually seen two
other professional orchestra's form and fall apart in a pretty
short period of time. But after she was promised bookings,
(09:47):
if she could just get a successful professional concert together, Frida,
always up for the challenge, did exactly that. She had
her attractors with this. Even among her close friends, there
were concerns that she would kill her career as a
cellist if she tried to become a conductor as a woman.
Her best friend pointed out that she had never been
trained as a conductor, and Freeda responded quote, I have
(10:10):
had my eyes and ears open. I think I can
do it. Freda's Klina Orchestra, her little orchestra, got good reviews,
and so in nineteen thirty eight she had become a
professional conductor. And coming up, we're going to talk about
the next phase of Frida's life, which unfortunately detoured away
from music by necessity, but first, we're going to pause
for a word from one of our sponsors. In nineteen
(10:41):
thirty nine, Frida took a drive to Switzerland, and she
was going there to take a series of lessons in
conducting that ended with the twelve yearrolled students in the
program competing as their final exam, and the winner of
that competition would get to conduct a professional Swiss orchestra.
Frida was the top student and she won. She never
got to claim her prize because World War II put
(11:04):
an end to her conducting. German troops occupied Holland on
May tenth. Frida's brother, Robert, who was a doctor, went
silent after this invasion, and with no communication from him,
the family understandably became very concerned. It turned out that
Robert and his wife had died by suicide. The family
found out when a stranger told them Robert had left
(11:25):
his mother a note explaining that they had made the
choice to die rather than to live in the world
as it was. Frida said in an interview late in
her life that if she had been there, she would
have told her brother that the world hadn't changed quote.
The bad part just came too close, and while the
family reeled understandably, Frida was pretty quick to tell them
(11:45):
that she was not ever going to handle things the
way that her brother had, but that she was going
to resist. She told her sister Renee quote, if the
Germans catch me, they can chop me into little pieces
if they want, but I'm fighting. As part of the occupation,
all artists required to join the National Socialist Culture Chamber,
but Jews were forbidden to join. The orchestra that Frieda
(12:07):
was conducting had a lot of Jewish musicians in it,
so she gathered them together and said, boys, there's no orchestra.
We have never existed. She preferred to give up her
dream job as a conductor than to risk the safety
of her musicians. They weren't working artists in an orchestra,
they weren't artists by professions, so she could hopefully avoid
registration in the Culture Chamber that would have had to
(12:30):
identify which of the members were Jewish. Playing music written
by Jewish composers was also forbidden, and then Jewish musicians
were forced out of music schools and conservatories and orchestras,
which was what Frieda had foreseen. Yeah, she was very
quick to see the path that lay ahead of them.
Faster than a lot of other people because there were
(12:53):
other people in the music scene. They were like, no,
we can all just register. It'll be fine. We just
had to register, and she's like, nope, this is how
it starts, and that culture chamber had existed before the
occupation but became a mandatory thing. She later spoke about
her shift in focus during this time by saying, quote,
I completely disappeared from the musical life and immediately started
(13:15):
to prepare myself to do other things that needed doing.
In October nineteen forty a law requiring identification to be
carried at all times was enacted. Jews had a jay
stamped on their papers, and this is when Frida started
forging papers. This was actually not her first time forging documents.
When she was much younger, she had forged papers for
(13:35):
a close friend who was Russian to get back into
the Soviet Union to meet up with her betrothed. Freda
learned to carefully switch out parts of the documents to
create new ones. By May of nineteen forty one, there
were no Jews left in the Amsterdam music community. Freda
had started distributing forged passports from her home and she
helped a lot of people flee and then as time
(13:57):
went on, her methods became more and more refined, and
she was able to print entire fake identification. Yeah, prior
to that, they had kind of been cutting and pasting,
you know, cutting apart some identification and making new ones,
but they basically had a whole system going on by
nineteen forty one. But all of this defiance and all
of her work in the resistance eventually caught up with Frieda.
(14:20):
After a passport pick up appointment was missed by a
couple that she had agreed to give forged documents, she
wanted to check on them. They lived in her neighborhood
and she knew who they were, and when she went
to their home, the Gestapo was waiting and Frida was arrested.
She purposely talked to this officer who had taken her
into custody, like she didn't know what he was talking about.
She asked him to explain the laws around who was
(14:41):
and wasn't considered Jewish. For example, Frida's father, as we
explained earlier, was Jewish, but her mother wasn't. So Frieda
wasn't considered Jewish, but her brother, who had married a
Jewish woman was considered Jewish. She peppered the officer with
all these questions, asking him to explain all the rules
about who could and couldn't interact with each other. She
(15:02):
claimed to just not understand any of them. She acted
very innocent and confused by the whole situation until he
got so tired of trying to answer her questions that
he pulled the car over and told her to get
out and go home. In nineteen forty two, Frida performed
her last concert as a conductor in Amsterdam. This was
held in a Jewish community center and it was performed
(15:22):
by a mix of Jewish and non Jewish students, and
this was really a huge act of defiance on Frida's part,
as she was not legally allowed to conduct Jewish musicians.
During all of this, one of Frida's best friends, Ellen Schwartz,
trusted the wrong people who had promised to get Ellen
and her Jewish husband out of Amsterdam for a price,
but it turned out this whole thing was a scam.
(15:44):
The couple was taken instead to a concentration camp. Knowing
that her friends had been betrayed in this way and
sent to be murdered. Infuriated, Freda for the rest of
her life. She would later say quote that is so low,
so far down in the depths of evil, that I
hate to talk talk about it. I hate to think
about it myself. Frieda realized that she and some of
(16:05):
her colleagues in the resistance could keep forging documents, but
the problem was that there couldn't be duplicate documents in
City Hall. The IDs were all enumerated, and that number
series made it easier to check for fake ID So
she decided that the solution was to destroy the files
in City Hall. And the logic was that if one
(16:26):
duplicate was discovered and identified as fake, it would make
clear to German authorities that there were a lot of
fakes probably in circulation, and it would up the chances
of people getting caught and of course all of the
horrible ramifications of that. So in March of nineteen forty three,
the Dutch Resistance made their move to resolve this. They
attacked City Hall and destroyed the ID records. This was
(16:49):
really no small feat. The building was guarded. Freda's team
did all kinds of research to find out how the
whole operation worked, including the names of all the guards
and the shifts schedules. They also had a tailor make
two replica police uniforms to pull off the mission. They
found a leak on the police force who could give
them details, and then Frieda watched the whole thing from
(17:11):
a nearby roof. But even though they were able to
set fire at City Hall and that plan ultimately was
a success in destroying records, there was fallout because someone
betrayed the group. Because of all of the preparation and
information gathering that had been involved, there were just too
many people who had been talked to, and thus too
many people who knew about it, So everyone had to
(17:32):
go into hiding, and Freda learned of her co conspirators
being arrested one by one and sentenced to death for
their part in the attack. One man, in particular, Rudolph
Rudy Bloomgarten, had been Frida's right hand man in planning
the sabotage, and his death in particular was an especially
hard blow. After the destruction of the population register at
City Hall, the Germans were really intent on capturing all
(17:55):
of the conspirators, but Frieda was always determined to keep going.
She stayed on the move. She never stayed in one
place for too long. She also disguised herself as a man,
pitching her voice lower to complete this illusion whenever she
tried to move around in the open. Frida had some
wealthy contexts, partly through her career in the arts and
partly through family connections, and so that offered her an
(18:18):
avenue to secure additional funding for the Resistance as things
got more and more difficult and times got leaner. One
of the things that she talked about later in her
life was that she went to the head of the
Heineken family, who was running their successful beer business, to
ask for help, and this was a huge risk. She
didn't know for certain if he was sympathetic to the Resistance.
She talked a lot over the years about how she
(18:39):
felt like she got really really good at being able
to read a person just by looking in their eyes,
and in this case her instinct had been correct. He
was sympathetic. But still there were obstacles. So the Germans
were tracking the company's finances, checking to see where all
the money came from into the business and how that
money was being spent. So finally he asked Freda, do
(19:00):
you have an idea? And she actually did. She said,
by my cello, they're pretty costly, you know. So they
were able to have this completely above board transaction where
she gave him her cello in exchange for the money
that the resistance needed. She also got that cello back
when the war ended with no problems whatsoever. Even as
her efforts were leading to really meaningful actions and successes
(19:22):
for the Dutch Resistance, Freda also recognized that she was
soon going to run out of luck. She also knew
that anyone that was even suspected of an association with
her would be in danger. To further complicate matters, while
lifting a heavy iron bed that concealed a trapdoor in
one of the houses that she sheltered in, Freda got
a hernia and needed to have it operated on, which
(19:42):
just made all of this very delicate time of being
nearly discovered all the time even more complicated. She used
a false name, and she went to a doctor that
had been recommended that she later described as being quote
on the right side. But fewer than ten days after
the surgery, the plan for her to flee had to
be put into motion. It was time for her to move,
(20:03):
and she did. She was supposed to go from Brussels
to Paris to Switzerland and her escape. And this was
not an easy trip. This was in winter, a lot
was on foot. She had to follow contacts at various
points who couldn't actually acknowledge her. So there was this
just a lot of guesswork and risk in the whole plan. Yeah,
there was one section where she's describing this plan where
(20:26):
she said she had to go to a train station
wait for two men to get off the train. They
wouldn't look at her, but they would go off in
a direction and she would have to follow them. But
I was just singing, this could be any two dudes
that get off a train. She doesn't know necessarily that
she's following the right men. Like, every single step of
this had huge question marks around it. And by the
(20:47):
time Frida reached Brussels, the planned Brussels Paris Switzerland path
of moving refugees out of the Netherlands had been discovered
by the Nazis and it was no longer useful, so
Freda traveled instead to Lele, France, where she had the
contact information for another safe house. When she got there, though,
there was a huge and terrifying coincidence that same Gestapo
(21:08):
officer that she had duped in Amsterdam by pretending she
didn't know all the laws. That was the very same
person who opened the door of this safe house and
told her to enter. She put it very plainly when
she was telling this story later, quote, I ran for
my life. She ran into a nearby store and hid there.
Once she was convinced that the coast was clear, she
(21:30):
left and she made her way to Paris. After several
weeks in Paris, she traveled with a contact in the
resistance she had made there named Tony, to the Swiss border,
and this was in February of nineteen forty four. Tony
was pretty open with her that he was fearful because
he looked obviously Jewish and he thought he might put
her in jeopardy as a consequence, But she responded to
(21:50):
his concern with quote Tony, by the time they see us,
it doesn't matter whether you look Jewish or not. And
when they reached the Swiss border, despite being unable to swim,
she and Tony had to cross a river carrying their
clothes over their heads. And then when they got to
the Swiss side of the river and regrouped, they realized
that they were at the base of a steep mountain
that there was no way they were going to be
(22:11):
able to climb, and so they didn't have anywhere to hide.
They had to walk along the river with no cover.
Their long walk through the snow was though, in Frida's
own words, gorgeous, and it was something she never forgot.
But they were discovered when they stopped at an end
to try to call the Dutch consulate. They were arrested
by Swiss border police and taken once again on foot
(22:33):
to chow Defont to be imprisoned. Frieda gave a Swiss
reference to prove that she was Dutch and that checked out,
but Tony, on the other hand, was sent back into
the cold on the French side of the border. When
she was asked if she and Tony were a couple,
Frida answered truthfully that they were just friends, and she
realized only later that if she had just lied and
said that they were together, that she might have saved him.
(22:56):
Frida was moved to a Dutch refugee hotel camp, and
this was actually a very diffulticult time for her. She
didn't really have any sense of connection or camaraderie with
her fellow refugees. Some of them gossiped about her, largely
around speculation about whether she was a lesbian, and she
felt like a complete outsider. She later said that she
felt dead inside when she was there with the other
(23:16):
refugees at Montreux, and thought that she would never be
able to make music again. When the war ended, Freda
returned to Amsterdam. She went by convoy in a journey
that she described as misery. When she got there, she
found that her apartment had been sealed up by the Gestapo,
but everything inside it was as she had left it.
As the city of Amsterdam tried to resume a life
(23:38):
that was something like normal, there was really a lot
of difficulty and strife. Because there were a lot of
people who had worked with the Germans and were still
part of the city, they seemed to face no repercussions.
The conductor Edward von Binen was one such person, and
he went right back to work free. To describe seeing
the people who had collaborated with the Germans in such
(23:59):
good standing in the city as quote a very cold shower.
Frida Belinfanta made a significant change in her life after
the war, and we're going to talk about that. Right
after we take a quick sponsor break. Frida understandably did
(24:21):
not really feel like herself after the war ended and
she returned to her home. She described this period as
a time when she felt no joy and she didn't
want to build anything, and for a woman who had
been so driven all of her life, this was a
very sharp contrast, and as time went on, she knew
that she just she needed a change. So in nineteen
forty seven, she decided to make her way to New York,
(24:43):
which she did with the help of a sponsor, but
when she got there, she found she didn't really like
New York all that much. She had tried to make
connections to get a job as a cellist, but after
an agent told her that the cellis she already represented
couldn't get enough work, that woman then asked Frida what
else she could do, and Belinfante offered up a headshot
that listed her as a conductor, and the agent said,
(25:03):
that's worse, and so Freda said goodbye and she left
the office. After that, she decided to travel the United
States and to see where felt like the right place
to make a new home. She was staying with the
sister of one of her friends from school. This was
a woman named Minnie. Minnie bought a little car and
took some vacation time, and the two of them set
out to see the United States together. Frida found these
(25:25):
travels incredibly refreshing and restorative. As they traveled, no one
knew who she was or what she had been through,
so she didn't feel the oppressive shadow of the war
in the same way that she had back in Europe.
When Freda and Minnie got to California, Minnie sold freed
to the car. This was a crossley that Freda described
as being like a sewing machine. Many went back to
New York, and Freda stayed with a friend that she
(25:47):
had made when she was crossing over from Europe. This
was a woman named Ivy Fraser. Freda and Ivy bought
a house together, and, similarly to her relationship with Henriette Beauseman,
she said that her relationship with Ivy was quote low
gear sexually, but the two of them were very close.
Frida worked for a while at a university as an
assistant conductor and a music teacher, but soon she realized
(26:09):
she could make better money playing for movie studio orchestras,
and during this time, while she was taking a lot
of freelance work. Someone recognized her name and asked if
she was related to the famous woman conductor from Amsterdam.
When she told him no, she was not a relative.
She was that woman conductor. He was at first incredulous
because she was taking these little, piecemeal, cheap jobs in
(26:30):
Hollywood and it just didn't match up in his head.
Then he offered Freda the chance to conduct again, although
he was clear that it would not be for pay.
She didn't entirely believe him. But then he told her
that there were a lot of musicians in Hollywood who
were making a living playing fully and doing accent sound
for film, but they never got to play in concert.
(26:50):
And he said that he could pull an orchestra together
from these folks, and he was true to his word.
He put together an orchestra and they all met for
the first time in the Highland Avenue High School auditorium.
And just as Frida had found her passion for conducting
in a high school initially, that spark was reignited in
another high school, this time in Los Angeles. And when
(27:10):
the first session ended with these new musicians, Freda asked
all of them if they would like to come back
the next week, and they all said yes. Soon their
little orchestra was booked at the Redlands ball in Redlands, California.
Freda called it quote the most poetical concert that I remember.
She gave twelve curtain calls. After this triumph, people in
Orange County started asking why they didn't have events like
(27:33):
this one that had hosted Frida and her orchestra, and
that was the catalyst for the formation of the Orange
County Philharmonic, which named Frida Belinfante, who was fifty at
the time, as conductor. She was the first woman principal
conductor of a professional symphony orchestra, and by her account,
she initiated every program that they ever had. She also
(27:53):
had to educate the community about music, and one year
she gave seventy five speeches trying to do so to
drum up support for the orchestra. They had really rave
reviews and well attended shows, but when Frida's first five
year contract was up, she was told it was not
going to be renewed and that the symphony was being disbanded.
There are different versions of exactly how things played out.
(28:16):
Freda believe that gossip about her lesbianism was part of it.
She said of this time, quote, I've always been approached
by the women. I never had to go after anyone
because they were always after me. I was plagued by
it in Orange County. These people I didn't ask for.
I wasn't after people. They were after me all the time.
But then, of course when I didn't follow through, they
became nasty. Arts advocate and Orange County Philharmonic founder Elaine
(28:40):
Redfield told a different version of the story, one that
had more to do with community politics in the arts
in the Los Angeles area. She said in a documentary
interview years later that the director of the La Philharmonic
had been threatened by the Orange County Philharmonic and that
he had simply used his influence to push the OCP
out of existence. This was the time with a lot
(29:01):
of changes for Freda. In addition to her job in
Orange County ending, she also split up with Ivy Fraser
and the house that they bought together was sold. Frida
moved into her own place in Laguna Beach. Freda gave
her last concert as a conductor in the late eighties
in Laguna Beach, and soon after that it became apparent
that her hearing was failing. She started to think that
(29:22):
the musicians were playing out of tune, specifically the strings,
but it was actually her hearing that had changed, and
that was a painful realization for someone who so deeply
loved music. Frida and her partner at the time, Bobby Chambers,
moved to Santa Fe when Frida retired from conducting, but
then she was diagnosed with cancer not long after that,
and that coshed Frida's plan for a languid and quiet retirement.
(29:45):
On May thirty first, nineteen ninety four, at the age
of ninety, Freda gave a long form interview to Klaus
Mueller for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and in
that interview she told her entire life story. That interview
was a significant part of the research for this episode,
and you can see videos of it online as well
as read a full transcript, and we're going to link
to that in the show notes. A few days before
(30:08):
her death, Freda told Bobby that she had a beautiful
dream that she was in a pool and that people
from all the various times of her life got into
the pool and came to her and told her good job.
Frida Belanfanta died nine months after her interview for the
Holocaust Museum, and after her death, Elaine Redfield said of
her quote, she was an excellent conductor by any standard,
(30:28):
but the world wasn't ready at that point in time
for a lady conductor. It was a shame. She was
enormously able. Eric Volmer, former Orange County Philharmonic Society executive director,
said of Freda quote, she was really a trailblazer in
the arts for Orange County. She was feisty, indefatigable, single minded,
but more than anything, she really cared about music and
(30:49):
she wanted to share the art with a broad based community.
Freda was a very quotable woman. If you watch those
videos of her read that transcript, you realize she whipped
out a lot of zingers. Not only was she a
resistance fighter and a top notch musician, she also had
a way of seeing the world with great personal confidence
and clarity about her position in it. As an illustrative example,
(31:11):
I wanted to close out with a quote of hers
that I absolutely love. She said, quote, if people have
a conceived idea why they don't want to have anything
to do with me, I'm not inquiring of trying to
find out why, because if people don't want to have
anything to do with me, then it's not my kind
of people. I love her so much. Yeah, yeah, it's
pretty great. I found myself just down a rabbit hole
(31:33):
of like gazing at her and watching her do interviews.
And there are some great clips in a documentary that
was made about her in the late nineties where you
see her teaching music and realize just how she can
be so straightforward and blunt with people but also very
warm and encouraging at the same time, and like, it's
just it's beautiful. Thanks so much for joining us on
(31:59):
this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL
or something similar over the course of the show, that
could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History
Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all
over social media at missed Inhistory, and you can subscribe
(32:19):
to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app,
and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you missed
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio, app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. The other day, I was talking to a
friend of mine who said he had just seen some
videos about a lesbian couple, one of whom was Jewish
and was a resistance fighter during World War Two, And
I immediately said, was it frieda Belle? And Fonto It
was not, But that conversation made me want to rerun
our episode on her because she was awesome. I concur
(00:24):
and this episode originally came out on November twenty fifth,
twenty nineteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and Welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So regular
(00:48):
listeners to the podcast might recall a while back when
we talked in one of our listener mail segments about
a fantastic gift that we got, which was a set
of the Chutzpau comic books that were produced by the
Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh. Well, that listener segment led to
us talking with the Holocaust Center about their upcoming volume
of the comic, which focuses on women upstanders, real life
(01:09):
superheroes who stood up against wrong, and we decided to
do an episode on one of the women featured in
that comic, and we're also going to have interviews with
some of the team behind the Chutzpau comic on an
upcoming episode. But today we are covering Frida Belinfante, a
woman who is inspiring both as a musician and as
a member of the Dutch Resistance who risked her life
(01:31):
again and again during World War Two in defiance of
the German occupation of the Netherlands. She was born on
May tenth, nineteen oh four, in Amsterdam, the third daughter
in her family. Her older sisters were Dorothea who went
by Dolly, and Renee. The fourth Belinfanta child was a
boy named Robert Paul. Frida would later say that her
(01:51):
mother had wanted a boy when she was born and quote,
I have a lot of qualities that could have been
a boy, but I was a girl. Frida learned around
age ten that she had another brother as well. This
was a child of her father's that he had before
marrying their mother, and this half brother was named Hugo. Yeah,
Hugo was not a constant part of their lives, but
(02:12):
kind of came in and out as their their half brother,
and she knew him for the rest of his life.
Freda's family is very large. Her father, Aaron Bellnfanta, had
nine siblings and her mother, Georgine Antoinette Hess had either
eight or nine siblings. Freda could not recall for sure
in the interview she gave where she relaid that although
the two sides of the family didn't really have much
(02:34):
in common and so they weren't particularly close like, they
didn't all gather together. Though her father had initially been
on track for a career in medicine, he decided at
twenty one that music was actually his life's path, and
by the time Frida was born, her father headed an
Amsterdam music school and was a very prominent pianist. According
to her account, her parents didn't raise their children in
(02:56):
any particularly religious manner, although her father was Jewish. When
she asked her father about religion, he told her that
she should read up on all kinds of religions and
see if there was something that appealed to her and
that she could believe in. And from an early age,
all of the Bell and Fonta children played music. Aaron
decided that Frieda should play the cello, and Frida's sister
(03:17):
Renee once noted in an interview that this was kind
of a strange choice to give Frida a cello, because
Frida's hands were fairly small and she had to wrestle
with that instrument. But Dolly played violin already and Renee
played the pianos, their father wanted Frida to play a
different instrument. In nineteen fifteen, when Frida was eleven, her
sister Dolly died of peritonidis, and Dolly was just fourteen
(03:40):
at that time. Naturally, as their parents mourned, this put
a lot of strain on the family, and they really
didn't speak about their loss very much. Within a year, though,
Frida's parents divorced, although the two of them had a
cordial relationship from this point. As a teenager, Frida, according
to her sister Renee, grew up very fast. Renee also
(04:01):
noted that her sister was very popular and that both
boys and girls were crazy about her. Frida was her
father's favorite child, but when her naughty behavior put her
in peril of being kicked out of public school, he
gave her a stern talking to because he could not
afford a private school as a music teacher, so if
she got kicked out there were no other options for
(04:21):
her education. In nineteen twenty three, Frida's father, Aaron, died
of colon cancer. He had been sick for several years
and at first he had let his abdominal pain go untreated.
After an emergency surgery in nineteen twenty, he recovered for
a time, and during that brief reprieve, he insisted that
he and Frida give a concert together. That was actually
her first concert. Yeah, she did not feel ready for it,
(04:44):
but he kind of pressed the issue and they went
ahead with it. Frida studied cello, not that much with
her father, but with a number of other teachers, and
it was through one of them in nineteen twenty that
she met a woman named Aureete Bosman's. Frida had been
at the teacher's house when she met Arie, who was
romantically involved with the teacher. That teacher was the first
cellist of the Holland Orchestra, and when Henriette and the
(05:07):
man had a falling out because he had been cheating
on her and she feared at the time that she
was pregnant, Frida was then left alone with Arite and
told the obviously upset woman that she could tell her everything.
Frieda and Henriette were soon romantically involved, and they lived
together for seven years. Henriette was already a well known composer.
(05:27):
She was in her twenties when the two women met,
so she was older than the sixteen year old Bill
and Fonta was. Their relationship wasn't exclusive, though Henriette had
relationships with men, which Frida said she wasn't jealous of,
and then Frida later said that their relationship wasn't particularly sexual.
It seemed to be really founded more than anything else,
on a very deep emotional bond and on Frida's fulfillment
(05:48):
in the role of caretaker to the composer. She later
said of Henriette quote, I loved her for a long time,
many many years. She was a person who took more
than she gave, which was fine with me because I
had an abundance of devotion to give. Henrietta Bozman's second
Concerto was dedicated to Frida as Aaron Bellnfonta's illness had progressed,
(06:09):
he had become unable to work, so Frida started working
in those years between nineteen twenty and nineteen twenty three
professionally as a cellist with the Holland Orchestra, and she
and Bozmuns had a wide range of friends who were
also musicians, and it was through this circle that Freeda
met a floutist named Johann Feldkamff, who also went by Joe.
(06:30):
Feldkamff was quite taken with Frida and with her musicianship.
Initially their story sounds kind of sweet. Frida had always
been the type to look out for other people, but
Joe wanted her to have the same benefit in her career.
But then his affection for her really became obsessive. He
wanted to get married, and she explained that wasn't really
for her, and then at one point he brought a
(06:52):
revolver into the room with him and put up on
the mantle. Frida asked him, what are you trying to do,
and he said, quote, I don't want to live without you.
Her response to him at this point was I'm not
the marrying type. I don't think that I can love
a man that way. But he responded, I want to
be where you are, and so she agreed to the marriage,
(07:13):
feeling like there was really no other choice in the matter.
She later told an interviewer, like what was I supposed
to do when faced with the possibility that this man
would kill himself or I could marry him, I wasn't
going to be responsible for that. She's a horrible position
to put someone in. Surprisingly, in many ways, they initially
actually appeared to be a fairly happy couple together. They
(07:35):
were kind of like these two chic musicians, and they
were both very popular, and Frieda legitimately did like Joe
as a person, and she enjoyed his company. But she
also noticed that almost as soon as they got married,
Joe Joi de vivre seemed to vanish. He had been
very fun and kind of boisterous and a little bit
of a trickster, and that all went away, and he
only grew more withdrawn as time went on. They had
(07:58):
been married in nineteen thirty one, and they divorced five
years later in nineteen thirty six, and in the meantime,
Frida and Henriette had also grown apart. Yeah and Frida
had married Joe. Henriette was still very much in their lives,
but she and Frida started drifting apart. Freda speculated that
Henriette just wasn't able to manage the idea of not
(08:18):
having Freda entirely to herself, even though the rules were
different for Henrietta's own additional romances. Frida took a job
teaching high school music. She had actually not been the
school's first choice. A friend of hers had been who
was a man. But after working in the position for
a brief time, that first choice candidate found that he
could not handle the kids and he quit, and Frida
(08:41):
was called and asked if she still wanted the job,
and she took it. Conducting a high school orchestra actually
changed everything. She had found her passion in conducting, and
she also reported that she had no problem handling the kids.
After the school kids put on a performance that Freda conducted,
the Amsterdam University quiet asked her to conduct them, and
(09:01):
she did that. Also. As she kept working with kids,
they also felt like they wanted to work with her
even more, and so soon she assembled this amateur orchestra,
not just with the students that she was teaching, but
also with adults who were trying to pursue music as
a hobby. This amateur orchestra put on a concert and
that was attended by a booking agent who arranged larger performances,
(09:24):
and that agent approached Belenfonta and said, quote, if you
can do that with an amateur orchestra, can you imagine
what you can do with professionals? And Freda balked at
this idea. She didn't think that any professional musician would
play for her, and also Amsterdam had actually seen two
other professional orchestra's form and fall apart in a pretty
short period of time. But after she was promised bookings,
(09:47):
if she could just get a successful professional concert together, Frida,
always up for the challenge, did exactly that. She had
her attractors with this. Even among her close friends, there
were concerns that she would kill her career as a
cellist if she tried to become a conductor as a woman.
Her best friend pointed out that she had never been
trained as a conductor, and Freeda responded quote, I have
(10:10):
had my eyes and ears open. I think I can
do it. Freda's Klina Orchestra, her little orchestra, got good reviews,
and so in nineteen thirty eight she had become a
professional conductor. And coming up, we're going to talk about
the next phase of Frida's life, which unfortunately detoured away
from music by necessity, but first, we're going to pause
for a word from one of our sponsors. In nineteen
(10:41):
thirty nine, Frida took a drive to Switzerland, and she
was going there to take a series of lessons in
conducting that ended with the twelve yearrolled students in the
program competing as their final exam, and the winner of
that competition would get to conduct a professional Swiss orchestra.
Frida was the top student and she won. She never
got to claim her prize because World War II put
(11:04):
an end to her conducting. German troops occupied Holland on
May tenth. Frida's brother, Robert, who was a doctor, went
silent after this invasion, and with no communication from him,
the family understandably became very concerned. It turned out that
Robert and his wife had died by suicide. The family
found out when a stranger told them Robert had left
(11:25):
his mother a note explaining that they had made the
choice to die rather than to live in the world
as it was. Frida said in an interview late in
her life that if she had been there, she would
have told her brother that the world hadn't changed quote.
The bad part just came too close, and while the
family reeled understandably, Frida was pretty quick to tell them
(11:45):
that she was not ever going to handle things the
way that her brother had, but that she was going
to resist. She told her sister Renee quote, if the
Germans catch me, they can chop me into little pieces
if they want, but I'm fighting. As part of the occupation,
all artists required to join the National Socialist Culture Chamber,
but Jews were forbidden to join. The orchestra that Frieda
(12:07):
was conducting had a lot of Jewish musicians in it,
so she gathered them together and said, boys, there's no orchestra.
We have never existed. She preferred to give up her
dream job as a conductor than to risk the safety
of her musicians. They weren't working artists in an orchestra,
they weren't artists by professions, so she could hopefully avoid
registration in the Culture Chamber that would have had to
(12:30):
identify which of the members were Jewish. Playing music written
by Jewish composers was also forbidden, and then Jewish musicians
were forced out of music schools and conservatories and orchestras,
which was what Frieda had foreseen. Yeah, she was very
quick to see the path that lay ahead of them.
Faster than a lot of other people because there were
(12:53):
other people in the music scene. They were like, no,
we can all just register. It'll be fine. We just
had to register, and she's like, nope, this is how
it starts, and that culture chamber had existed before the
occupation but became a mandatory thing. She later spoke about
her shift in focus during this time by saying, quote,
I completely disappeared from the musical life and immediately started
(13:15):
to prepare myself to do other things that needed doing.
In October nineteen forty a law requiring identification to be
carried at all times was enacted. Jews had a jay
stamped on their papers, and this is when Frida started
forging papers. This was actually not her first time forging documents.
When she was much younger, she had forged papers for
(13:35):
a close friend who was Russian to get back into
the Soviet Union to meet up with her betrothed. Freda
learned to carefully switch out parts of the documents to
create new ones. By May of nineteen forty one, there
were no Jews left in the Amsterdam music community. Freda
had started distributing forged passports from her home and she
helped a lot of people flee and then as time
(13:57):
went on, her methods became more and more refined, and
she was able to print entire fake identification. Yeah, prior
to that, they had kind of been cutting and pasting,
you know, cutting apart some identification and making new ones,
but they basically had a whole system going on by
nineteen forty one. But all of this defiance and all
of her work in the resistance eventually caught up with Frieda.
(14:20):
After a passport pick up appointment was missed by a
couple that she had agreed to give forged documents, she
wanted to check on them. They lived in her neighborhood
and she knew who they were, and when she went
to their home, the Gestapo was waiting and Frida was arrested.
She purposely talked to this officer who had taken her
into custody, like she didn't know what he was talking about.
She asked him to explain the laws around who was
(14:41):
and wasn't considered Jewish. For example, Frida's father, as we
explained earlier, was Jewish, but her mother wasn't. So Frieda
wasn't considered Jewish, but her brother, who had married a
Jewish woman was considered Jewish. She peppered the officer with
all these questions, asking him to explain all the rules
about who could and couldn't interact with each other. She
(15:02):
claimed to just not understand any of them. She acted
very innocent and confused by the whole situation until he
got so tired of trying to answer her questions that
he pulled the car over and told her to get
out and go home. In nineteen forty two, Frida performed
her last concert as a conductor in Amsterdam. This was
held in a Jewish community center and it was performed
(15:22):
by a mix of Jewish and non Jewish students, and
this was really a huge act of defiance on Frida's part,
as she was not legally allowed to conduct Jewish musicians.
During all of this, one of Frida's best friends, Ellen Schwartz,
trusted the wrong people who had promised to get Ellen
and her Jewish husband out of Amsterdam for a price,
but it turned out this whole thing was a scam.
(15:44):
The couple was taken instead to a concentration camp. Knowing
that her friends had been betrayed in this way and
sent to be murdered. Infuriated, Freda for the rest of
her life. She would later say quote that is so low,
so far down in the depths of evil, that I
hate to talk talk about it. I hate to think
about it myself. Frieda realized that she and some of
(16:05):
her colleagues in the resistance could keep forging documents, but
the problem was that there couldn't be duplicate documents in
City Hall. The IDs were all enumerated, and that number
series made it easier to check for fake ID So
she decided that the solution was to destroy the files
in City Hall. And the logic was that if one
(16:26):
duplicate was discovered and identified as fake, it would make
clear to German authorities that there were a lot of
fakes probably in circulation, and it would up the chances
of people getting caught and of course all of the
horrible ramifications of that. So in March of nineteen forty three,
the Dutch Resistance made their move to resolve this. They
attacked City Hall and destroyed the ID records. This was
(16:49):
really no small feat. The building was guarded. Freda's team
did all kinds of research to find out how the
whole operation worked, including the names of all the guards
and the shifts schedules. They also had a tailor make
two replica police uniforms to pull off the mission. They
found a leak on the police force who could give
them details, and then Frieda watched the whole thing from
(17:11):
a nearby roof. But even though they were able to
set fire at City Hall and that plan ultimately was
a success in destroying records, there was fallout because someone
betrayed the group. Because of all of the preparation and
information gathering that had been involved, there were just too
many people who had been talked to, and thus too
many people who knew about it, So everyone had to
(17:32):
go into hiding, and Freda learned of her co conspirators
being arrested one by one and sentenced to death for
their part in the attack. One man, in particular, Rudolph
Rudy Bloomgarten, had been Frida's right hand man in planning
the sabotage, and his death in particular was an especially
hard blow. After the destruction of the population register at
City Hall, the Germans were really intent on capturing all
(17:55):
of the conspirators, but Frieda was always determined to keep going.
She stayed on the move. She never stayed in one
place for too long. She also disguised herself as a man,
pitching her voice lower to complete this illusion whenever she
tried to move around in the open. Frida had some
wealthy contexts, partly through her career in the arts and
partly through family connections, and so that offered her an
(18:18):
avenue to secure additional funding for the Resistance as things
got more and more difficult and times got leaner. One
of the things that she talked about later in her
life was that she went to the head of the
Heineken family, who was running their successful beer business, to
ask for help, and this was a huge risk. She
didn't know for certain if he was sympathetic to the Resistance.
She talked a lot over the years about how she
(18:39):
felt like she got really really good at being able
to read a person just by looking in their eyes,
and in this case her instinct had been correct. He
was sympathetic. But still there were obstacles. So the Germans
were tracking the company's finances, checking to see where all
the money came from into the business and how that
money was being spent. So finally he asked Freda, do
(19:00):
you have an idea? And she actually did. She said,
by my cello, they're pretty costly, you know. So they
were able to have this completely above board transaction where
she gave him her cello in exchange for the money
that the resistance needed. She also got that cello back
when the war ended with no problems whatsoever. Even as
her efforts were leading to really meaningful actions and successes
(19:22):
for the Dutch Resistance, Freda also recognized that she was
soon going to run out of luck. She also knew
that anyone that was even suspected of an association with
her would be in danger. To further complicate matters, while
lifting a heavy iron bed that concealed a trapdoor in
one of the houses that she sheltered in, Freda got
a hernia and needed to have it operated on, which
(19:42):
just made all of this very delicate time of being
nearly discovered all the time even more complicated. She used
a false name, and she went to a doctor that
had been recommended that she later described as being quote
on the right side. But fewer than ten days after
the surgery, the plan for her to flee had to
be put into motion. It was time for her to move,
(20:03):
and she did. She was supposed to go from Brussels
to Paris to Switzerland and her escape. And this was
not an easy trip. This was in winter, a lot
was on foot. She had to follow contacts at various
points who couldn't actually acknowledge her. So there was this
just a lot of guesswork and risk in the whole plan. Yeah,
there was one section where she's describing this plan where
(20:26):
she said she had to go to a train station
wait for two men to get off the train. They
wouldn't look at her, but they would go off in
a direction and she would have to follow them. But
I was just singing, this could be any two dudes
that get off a train. She doesn't know necessarily that
she's following the right men. Like, every single step of
this had huge question marks around it. And by the
(20:47):
time Frida reached Brussels, the planned Brussels Paris Switzerland path
of moving refugees out of the Netherlands had been discovered
by the Nazis and it was no longer useful, so
Freda traveled instead to Lele, France, where she had the
contact information for another safe house. When she got there, though,
there was a huge and terrifying coincidence that same Gestapo
(21:08):
officer that she had duped in Amsterdam by pretending she
didn't know all the laws. That was the very same
person who opened the door of this safe house and
told her to enter. She put it very plainly when
she was telling this story later, quote, I ran for
my life. She ran into a nearby store and hid there.
Once she was convinced that the coast was clear, she
(21:30):
left and she made her way to Paris. After several
weeks in Paris, she traveled with a contact in the
resistance she had made there named Tony, to the Swiss border,
and this was in February of nineteen forty four. Tony
was pretty open with her that he was fearful because
he looked obviously Jewish and he thought he might put
her in jeopardy as a consequence, But she responded to
(21:50):
his concern with quote Tony, by the time they see us,
it doesn't matter whether you look Jewish or not. And
when they reached the Swiss border, despite being unable to swim,
she and Tony had to cross a river carrying their
clothes over their heads. And then when they got to
the Swiss side of the river and regrouped, they realized
that they were at the base of a steep mountain
that there was no way they were going to be
(22:11):
able to climb, and so they didn't have anywhere to hide.
They had to walk along the river with no cover.
Their long walk through the snow was though, in Frida's
own words, gorgeous, and it was something she never forgot.
But they were discovered when they stopped at an end
to try to call the Dutch consulate. They were arrested
by Swiss border police and taken once again on foot
(22:33):
to chow Defont to be imprisoned. Frieda gave a Swiss
reference to prove that she was Dutch and that checked out,
but Tony, on the other hand, was sent back into
the cold on the French side of the border. When
she was asked if she and Tony were a couple,
Frida answered truthfully that they were just friends, and she
realized only later that if she had just lied and
said that they were together, that she might have saved him.
(22:56):
Frida was moved to a Dutch refugee hotel camp, and
this was actually a very diffulticult time for her. She
didn't really have any sense of connection or camaraderie with
her fellow refugees. Some of them gossiped about her, largely
around speculation about whether she was a lesbian, and she
felt like a complete outsider. She later said that she
felt dead inside when she was there with the other
(23:16):
refugees at Montreux, and thought that she would never be
able to make music again. When the war ended, Freda
returned to Amsterdam. She went by convoy in a journey
that she described as misery. When she got there, she
found that her apartment had been sealed up by the Gestapo,
but everything inside it was as she had left it.
As the city of Amsterdam tried to resume a life
(23:38):
that was something like normal, there was really a lot
of difficulty and strife. Because there were a lot of
people who had worked with the Germans and were still
part of the city, they seemed to face no repercussions.
The conductor Edward von Binen was one such person, and
he went right back to work free. To describe seeing
the people who had collaborated with the Germans in such
(23:59):
good standing in the city as quote a very cold shower.
Frida Belinfanta made a significant change in her life after
the war, and we're going to talk about that. Right
after we take a quick sponsor break. Frida understandably did
(24:21):
not really feel like herself after the war ended and
she returned to her home. She described this period as
a time when she felt no joy and she didn't
want to build anything, and for a woman who had
been so driven all of her life, this was a
very sharp contrast, and as time went on, she knew
that she just she needed a change. So in nineteen
forty seven, she decided to make her way to New York,
(24:43):
which she did with the help of a sponsor, but
when she got there, she found she didn't really like
New York all that much. She had tried to make
connections to get a job as a cellist, but after
an agent told her that the cellis she already represented
couldn't get enough work, that woman then asked Frida what
else she could do, and Belinfante offered up a headshot
that listed her as a conductor, and the agent said,
(25:03):
that's worse, and so Freda said goodbye and she left
the office. After that, she decided to travel the United
States and to see where felt like the right place
to make a new home. She was staying with the
sister of one of her friends from school. This was
a woman named Minnie. Minnie bought a little car and
took some vacation time, and the two of them set
out to see the United States together. Frida found these
(25:25):
travels incredibly refreshing and restorative. As they traveled, no one
knew who she was or what she had been through,
so she didn't feel the oppressive shadow of the war
in the same way that she had back in Europe.
When Freda and Minnie got to California, Minnie sold freed
to the car. This was a crossley that Freda described
as being like a sewing machine. Many went back to
New York, and Freda stayed with a friend that she
(25:47):
had made when she was crossing over from Europe. This
was a woman named Ivy Fraser. Freda and Ivy bought
a house together, and, similarly to her relationship with Henriette Beauseman,
she said that her relationship with Ivy was quote low
gear sexually, but the two of them were very close.
Frida worked for a while at a university as an
assistant conductor and a music teacher, but soon she realized
(26:09):
she could make better money playing for movie studio orchestras,
and during this time, while she was taking a lot
of freelance work. Someone recognized her name and asked if
she was related to the famous woman conductor from Amsterdam.
When she told him no, she was not a relative.
She was that woman conductor. He was at first incredulous
because she was taking these little, piecemeal, cheap jobs in
(26:30):
Hollywood and it just didn't match up in his head.
Then he offered Freda the chance to conduct again, although
he was clear that it would not be for pay.
She didn't entirely believe him. But then he told her
that there were a lot of musicians in Hollywood who
were making a living playing fully and doing accent sound
for film, but they never got to play in concert.
(26:50):
And he said that he could pull an orchestra together
from these folks, and he was true to his word.
He put together an orchestra and they all met for
the first time in the Highland Avenue High School auditorium.
And just as Frida had found her passion for conducting
in a high school initially, that spark was reignited in
another high school, this time in Los Angeles. And when
(27:10):
the first session ended with these new musicians, Freda asked
all of them if they would like to come back
the next week, and they all said yes. Soon their
little orchestra was booked at the Redlands ball in Redlands, California.
Freda called it quote the most poetical concert that I remember.
She gave twelve curtain calls. After this triumph, people in
Orange County started asking why they didn't have events like
(27:33):
this one that had hosted Frida and her orchestra, and
that was the catalyst for the formation of the Orange
County Philharmonic, which named Frida Belinfante, who was fifty at
the time, as conductor. She was the first woman principal
conductor of a professional symphony orchestra, and by her account,
she initiated every program that they ever had. She also
(27:53):
had to educate the community about music, and one year
she gave seventy five speeches trying to do so to
drum up support for the orchestra. They had really rave
reviews and well attended shows, but when Frida's first five
year contract was up, she was told it was not
going to be renewed and that the symphony was being disbanded.
There are different versions of exactly how things played out.
(28:16):
Freda believe that gossip about her lesbianism was part of it.
She said of this time, quote, I've always been approached
by the women. I never had to go after anyone
because they were always after me. I was plagued by
it in Orange County. These people I didn't ask for.
I wasn't after people. They were after me all the time.
But then, of course when I didn't follow through, they
became nasty. Arts advocate and Orange County Philharmonic founder Elaine
(28:40):
Redfield told a different version of the story, one that
had more to do with community politics in the arts
in the Los Angeles area. She said in a documentary
interview years later that the director of the La Philharmonic
had been threatened by the Orange County Philharmonic and that
he had simply used his influence to push the OCP
out of existence. This was the time with a lot
(29:01):
of changes for Freda. In addition to her job in
Orange County ending, she also split up with Ivy Fraser
and the house that they bought together was sold. Frida
moved into her own place in Laguna Beach. Freda gave
her last concert as a conductor in the late eighties
in Laguna Beach, and soon after that it became apparent
that her hearing was failing. She started to think that
(29:22):
the musicians were playing out of tune, specifically the strings,
but it was actually her hearing that had changed, and
that was a painful realization for someone who so deeply
loved music. Frida and her partner at the time, Bobby Chambers,
moved to Santa Fe when Frida retired from conducting, but
then she was diagnosed with cancer not long after that,
and that coshed Frida's plan for a languid and quiet retirement.
(29:45):
On May thirty first, nineteen ninety four, at the age
of ninety, Freda gave a long form interview to Klaus
Mueller for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and in
that interview she told her entire life story. That interview
was a significant part of the research for this episode,
and you can see videos of it online as well
as read a full transcript, and we're going to link
to that in the show notes. A few days before
(30:08):
her death, Freda told Bobby that she had a beautiful
dream that she was in a pool and that people
from all the various times of her life got into
the pool and came to her and told her good job.
Frida Belanfanta died nine months after her interview for the
Holocaust Museum, and after her death, Elaine Redfield said of
her quote, she was an excellent conductor by any standard,
(30:28):
but the world wasn't ready at that point in time
for a lady conductor. It was a shame. She was
enormously able. Eric Volmer, former Orange County Philharmonic Society executive director,
said of Freda quote, she was really a trailblazer in
the arts for Orange County. She was feisty, indefatigable, single minded,
but more than anything, she really cared about music and
(30:49):
she wanted to share the art with a broad based community.
Freda was a very quotable woman. If you watch those
videos of her read that transcript, you realize she whipped
out a lot of zingers. Not only was she a
resistance fighter and a top notch musician, she also had
a way of seeing the world with great personal confidence
and clarity about her position in it. As an illustrative example,
(31:11):
I wanted to close out with a quote of hers
that I absolutely love. She said, quote, if people have
a conceived idea why they don't want to have anything
to do with me, I'm not inquiring of trying to
find out why, because if people don't want to have
anything to do with me, then it's not my kind
of people. I love her so much. Yeah, yeah, it's
pretty great. I found myself just down a rabbit hole
(31:33):
of like gazing at her and watching her do interviews.
And there are some great clips in a documentary that
was made about her in the late nineties where you
see her teaching music and realize just how she can
be so straightforward and blunt with people but also very
warm and encouraging at the same time, and like, it's
just it's beautiful. Thanks so much for joining us on
(31:59):
this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL
or something similar over the course of the show, that
could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History
Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all
over social media at missed Inhistory, and you can subscribe
(32:19):
to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app,
and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you missed
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio, app, Apple podcasts, or
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