November 25, 2019 • 33 mins
Frieda Belinfante is inspiring as a musician, breaking gender barriers in becoming a conductor. She was also a member of the Dutch resistance, who risked her life again and again during WWII in defiance of the German occupation of the Netherlands.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
So regular listeners to the podcast might recall a while
back when we talked in one of our listener mail
(00:21):
segments about a fantastic gift that we got, which was
a set of the Rootzpau comic books that were produced
by the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh. Well, uh, 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 superheroes who stood up against wrong, and we
(00:42):
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 Rootzpau comic
on an upcoming episode. But today we are covering frieda Belinfante,
a woman who is inspiring both as a musician and
as a member of the Dutch Resistance who risked her
life again and again during World War Two in defiance
(01:03):
of the German occupation of the Netherlands. She was born
on May tenth, four in Amsterdam, the third daughter in
her family. Her older sisters were Dorothea who went by Dolly,
and Renee. The fourth Belonfanta child was a boy named
Robert Paul. Frieda would later say that her mother had
wanted a boy when she was born and quote, I
(01:23):
have a lot of qualities that could have been a boy,
but I was a girl. Frieda 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 kind of
came in and out as their their half brother, and
(01:45):
she knew him for the rest of his life. Frieda's
family is very large. Her father, Aarin Belonfanta, had nine
siblings and her mother, Georgine Antoinette Hess had either eight
or nine siblings, uh. Frieda could not recall for sure
in the interview she gave where she laid that although
the two sides of the family didn't really have much
in common and so they weren't particularly close, like, they
(02:06):
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 Frieda 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
any particularly religious manner, although her father was Jewish. When
(02:29):
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 Lanfonte children played music. Aarin decided that
Freeda should play the cello, and Freda's sister Renee once
noted in an interview that this was kind of a
strange choice to give Frieda cello because Frieda's hands were
(02:53):
fairly small and she quote had to wrestle with that instrument.
But Dolly played violin already and Renee played the piano.
Their father wanted Frieda to play a different instrument. In
nineteen fifteen, when Frieda was eleven, her sister Dolly died
of paraitonitis, and Dolly was just fourteen at that time naturally,
as their parents mourned. This put a lot of strain
(03:14):
on the family, and they really didn't speak about their
loss very much. Within a year, though, Frieda's parents divorced,
although the two of them had a cordial relationship from
this point. As a teenager, Frieda, according to her sister, Renee,
grew up very fast. Renee also noted that her sister
was very popular and that both boys and girls were
(03:34):
crazy about her. Frieda 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 her education. In nine
Frieda's father, Aaron, died of colon cancer. He had been
(03:56):
sick for several years, and at first he had let
his up die mominal 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 free
to give a concert together. That was actually her first concert. Yeah,
she did not feel ready for it, but he kind
of pressed the issue, and they went ahead with it.
Frieda studied cello, not that much with her father, but
(04:19):
with a number of other teachers, and it was through
one of them in nineteen twenty that she met a
woman named Ariette Boseman's. Frieda had been at the teacher's
house when she met Ariette, who was romantically involved with
the teacher. That teacher was the first cellist of the
Holland Orchestra, and when Henriette and the man had a
falling out because he had been cheating on her and
she feared at the time that she was pregnant. Frieda
(04:42):
was then left alone with Ariette 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. She
was in her twenties when the two women met, so
she was older than the teen year old Bill in
Fonta was. Their relationship wasn't exclusive, though Henriette had relationships
(05:05):
with men, which Frieda said she wasn't jealous of, and
then Frieda 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
in the role of caretaker to the composer. She later
said of Honriette quote, I loved her for a long time,
many many years. She was a person who took more
(05:27):
than she gave, which was fine with me because I
had an abundance of devotion to give. Henrietta Boseman's second
Concerto was dedicated to Frieda. As Aaron belan Fonta's illness
had progressed, he had become unable to work, So Frieda
started working in those years between three professionally as a
cellist with the Holland Orchestra, and she and Bozeman's had
(05:50):
a wide range of friends who were also musicians, and
it was through this circle that freedom meta floutist named
Johann felt Coomp, who also went by Joe Felt Calm,
was quite taken with Frieda and with her musicianship. Initially
their story sounds kind of sweet. Frieda had always been
the type to look out for other people, but Joe
wanted her to have the same benefit in her career.
(06:12):
But then his affection for her really became obsessive. He
wanted to get married, and she explained that that wasn't
really for her. And then at one point he brought
a revolver into the room with him and put up
on the mantel. Frieda 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
(06:32):
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, 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,
(06:54):
which is a horrible position to put someone in. Uh. Surprisingly,
in many ways, they initially actually appeared to be a
fairly happy couple together. They 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
(07:15):
soon as they got married, Joe Jouadeviev seemed to vanish.
He had been very fun and and kind of boisterous
and a little bit of a trickster, and then all
went away, and he only grew more withdrawn as time
went on. They had been married in nineteen thirty one,
and they divorced five years later in nineteen thirty six,
And in the meantime, Frieda and Henriette had also grown apart. Yeah,
(07:36):
when Frieda had married Joe, Anriette was still very much
in their lives, but she and Freda started drifting apart.
Freeda speculated that Henriette just wasn't able to manage the
idea of not having Frieda entirely to herself, even though
the rules were different for Arietta's own additional romances. Freda
took a job teaching high school music. She had actually
(07:59):
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 Freda 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,
(08:20):
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 choir asked her to
conduct them, and 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
(08:42):
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, and that agent approached Melin Fonta
and said, quote, if you can do that with an
amateur orchestra, can you imagine what you can do with professionals?
(09:02):
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, if she could just get a
successful professional concert together, Frieda, always up for the challenge,
(09:23):
did exactly that she added 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
Freda responded, quote, I have had my eyes and ears open.
I think I can do it. Frieda's Klina Orchestra, her
(09:45):
little orchestra got good reviews, and so in ight she
had become a professional conductor. And coming up, we're going
to talk about the next phase of Frieda's life, which
unfortunately detoured away from music by necessity. But first we're
gonna pause for a word from one of our sponsors.
(10:08):
In nine Frieda took a drive to Switzerland and she
was going there to take a series of lessons in
conducting that ended with the twelve enrolled students in the
program competing as their final exam, and the winner of
that competition would get to conduct a professional Swiss orchestra.
Frieda was the top student and she won. She never
(10:29):
got to claim her prize because World War Two put
an end to her conducting. German troops occupied Holland on
May tenth. Frieda'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
(10:49):
found out when a stranger told them Robert had left
his mother a note explaining that they had made the
choice to die rather than to live in the world
as it was. Frieda 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, Frieda was pretty quick to tell them
(11:13):
that she was not ever going to handle things the
way that her brother had. 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
were required to join the National Socialist Culture Chamber, but
Jews were forbidden to join. The orchestra that Frieda was
(11:35):
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 then to risk the safety
of her musicians, and 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
(11:57):
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. Yes, she was very
quick to see the path that lay ahead of them,
faster than a lot of other people, because there there
(12:20):
were 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 um 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
(12:43):
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 J
stamped on their papers, and this is when Frieda started
forging papers. This was actually not her first time forging documents.
When she was much younger, she had forged papers for
(13:03):
a close friend who was Russian to get back into
the Soviet Union to meet up with her betrothed Free
to learn 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.
Frieda had started distributing forged passports from her home and
she helped a lot of people flee. And then as
(13:24):
time 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
But all of this defiance and all of her work
(13:45):
in the resistance eventually caught up with Freedom. 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 for to 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
(14:06):
asked him to explain the laws around who was 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
(14:28):
and couldn't interact with each other. She claimed to do
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 two Freda performed her last concert as a conductor
in Amsterdam. This was held in a Jewish community center
(14:49):
and it was performed by a mix of Jewish and
non Jewish students, and this was really a huge act
of defiance on Freda's part. She was not legally allowed
to conduct Jewish musicians during all of this. One of
Frieda's best friends, Ellen Sports, 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
(15:10):
whole thing was a scamp. 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 about it.
I hate to think about it. Myself free to realize
(15:31):
that she and some of her colleagues in the Resistance
could keep forging documents, but the problem was that there
couldn't be duplicate documents in city Hall. The I D
s were all enumerated, and that number series made it
easier to check for fake i D. So she decided
that the solution was to destroy the files in city Hall,
(15:52):
and the logic was that if one 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
(16:14):
and destroyed the Idea records. This was really no small feet.
The building was guarded. Frieda's team did all kinds of
research to find out how the whole operation worked, including
the names of all the guards and the shift schedules.
They also had a tailor make to replica police uniforms.
To pull off the mission, they found a leak on
the police force. You could give them details and then
(16:37):
free to watch the whole thing from 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
(16:57):
knew about it. So everyone had to go into hiding
and free to learn 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 Frieda'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,
(17:20):
the Germans were really intent on capturing all 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. Frieda had some wealthy contexts,
partly through her career in the arts and partly through
(17:42):
family connections, and so that offered her an 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
(18:02):
certain if he was sympathetic to the resistance. She talked
a lot over the years about how she 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
(18:24):
being spent. So finally he asked Freda, do 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 and 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
(18:47):
to really meaningful actions and successes for the Dutch Resistance,
Frieda 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
day Germ to further complicate matters, While lifting a heavy
iron bed that concealed the trap door in one of
the houses that she sheltered in. Freda got a hernia
(19:08):
and needed to have it operated on. Was 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 this surgery,
the plan for her to flee had to be put
(19:29):
into motion. It was time for her to move, 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,
(19:50):
there was one uh section where she's describing this plan
where 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
(20:11):
this had huge question marks around it, and by the
time Freda 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 Lelle, France, where she had the
contact information for another safe house. When she got there, though,
(20:31):
there was a huge and terrifying coincidence that same Gestapo
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.
(20:55):
Once she was convinced that the coast was clear, she
left and she made her way to Paris. After several
weeks in Paris, she traveled with a contact in the
resistance she had made their named Tony, to the Swiss border,
and this was in February of nine Tony was pretty
open with her that he was fearful because he looked
obviously Jewish and he thought he might put her in
(21:15):
jeopardy as a consequence, but she responded to 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
(21:36):
that they were at the base of a steep mountain
that there was no way they were going to be
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 Frieda'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
(21:57):
by Swiss border police and taken once A in on
foot to show de font 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,
(22:17):
and she realized only later that if she had just
lied and said that they were together, that she might
have saved him. Frida was moved to a Dutch refugee
hotel camp, and this was actually a very difficult 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,
(22:38):
and she felt like a complete outsider. She later said
that she felt dead inside when she was there with
the other refugees at montrou 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
(22:59):
the Gesta bo, but everything inside it was as she
had left it. As the city of Amsterdam tried to
resume a life 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 Bynum was one
(23:20):
such person, and he went right back to work. Freed
To described seeing the people who had collaborated with the
Germans and such good standing in the city as quote
a very cold shower frieda bel and Fonte 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. Freed To understandably did not really feel
(23:48):
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 seven she decided to make
her way to New York, which she did with the
(24:09):
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 Freda what else she could do, and
Belinfanta offered up a headshot that listed her as a conductor,
and the agent said that's worse, and so Freda said
(24:31):
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 is a woman named Many. Many 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 travels incredibly refreshing and restorative. As they traveled,
(24:55):
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 Frieda and Many got to California, Many
sold Free to the car This is a cross ley
that Frieda described as being like a sewing machine. Many
went back to New York and Freeda stayed with a
friend that she had made when she was crossing over
from Europe. This was a woman named Ivy Fraser. Frieda
(25:18):
and Ivy bought a house together, and similarly to her
relationship with Henriette Bosmans, she said that her relationship with
Ivy was quote low gear sexually, but the two of
them were very close. Freda worked for a while at
a university as an assistant conductor and a music teacher,
but soon she realized she could make better money playing
for movie studio orchestras, and during this time, while she
(25:39):
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 Hollywood and it just didn't match up
in his head. Then he offered freed to the chance
(26:00):
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 accents sound for film, but they never got
to play in concert, and he said that he could
pull an orchestra together from these folks, and he was
(26:20):
true to his word. He put together in orchestra and
they all met for the first time in the Highland
Avenue High School auditorium. And just as Frieda 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 the first session ended with these
new musicians, Freda asked all of them if they would
(26:40):
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. Frieda 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 this one that hosted Frieda
(27:00):
and her orchestra, and that was a catalyst for the
formation of the Orange County Philharmonic, which named Frieda Belinfanta,
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 had to educate the community about music,
(27:21):
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
Frieda'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. Free to believe that gossip about
(27:43):
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 an 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 Redfield told a
(28:07):
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 l A Philharmonic had been
threatened by the Orange County Philharmonic and that he had
simply used his influence to push the O c P
out of existence. This was the time with a lot
(28:27):
of changes for Frieda. 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. Freda
moved into her own place in Laguna Beach. Freeda gave
her last concert as a conductor in the late eighties
and Laguna Beach, and soon after that it became apparent
that her hearing was failing. She started to think that
(28:48):
the musicians were playing out of tunes, 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. Frieda and her partner at the time, time
Bobby Chambers, moved to Santa fe when Frieda retired from conducting,
but then she was diagnosed with cancer not long after that,
and that quashed Freda's plan for a languid and quiet retirement.
(29:11):
On May thirty, at the age of ninety, free To
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 gonna link to that in the
(29:32):
show notes. A few days before her death, free To
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. Freda melan
Funta 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, but the
(29:54):
world wasn't ready at that point in time for a
lady conductor. It was a shame. She was enormously able.
Eric Vulmer, former Orange County Philharmonic Society executive director, said
of Frieda 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
(30:15):
she wanted to share the art with a broad based community.
Frieda was a very quotable woman. If you watch those
videos of her read that transcript, you realize she lived
out a lot of singers, and 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
(30:35):
illustrative example, 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,
she's pretty great. Um. I found myself just down a
(30:58):
rabbit hole of like gazing at her, watching her do interviews,
and uh, 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. I have fun listener mail from
(31:21):
our recent travels tell me so as people may know.
We were recently on tour. We did the Texas leg
of our tour this past week, and while we were
traveling UH in Houston, one of our listeners named in
Net brought us a beautiful out false Muka postcard and Uh.
She and her husband were both of the show, and
they were absolutely lovely. And I feel so lucky anytime
(31:44):
we get to do those shows and meet listeners and
spend time with them, and we all laughed together and
have meet and greets and it's super great fun. Uh
and I really like this postcard and wanted to read it,
she writes. Tracy and Holly, we enjoyed listening to the
podcast on the Defenstration of Prague before visiting Prague and
Budapest earlier this year. There is so much we don't
learn in history class about this part of the world.
(32:04):
For instance, I was an art history double major and
never heard of the artist Alfonse Mucha until we planned
our trip. A visit to the Mucha Museum was a highlight.
I bought this postcard for you there and thank you
for missed in history. UM. And then you're so cute
and it was so wonderful to meet you. She and
her husband. As I said, we're absolutely lovely as we're
all of our awesome listeners that came out and saw us. Yes, Um,
(32:28):
we had such a great time on that tour. I
can't even begin to describe what good, fortunate it feels like.
And if folks are wondering, yes, an episode from it
will be an episode of the podcast. It's just not
quite yet. Yeah, it will be out soon ish. Uh.
We have a lot of stuff kind of in the schedule,
so it's maybe a little more delayed sometimes in terms
(32:50):
of when it goes live after when we've recorded it,
but not by much. So it's coming. You two will
hear all of our silly adventures. Uh. If you would
like to reach out to us and can't make it
to a live show to hand us a postcard, you
can email us. We have a new email address, so
that has changed up from anything you've heard on previous episodes.
The new address is History Podcast at I heart radio
(33:11):
dot com. Uh. The old address will work for a
little while, but I don't know how long, and we
are making the transition over fully to the I heart
radio address. So again that is History Podcast at I
heart radio dot com. You can still reach out to
us on social media as missed in History pretty much everywhere,
and you can also visit us on our website at
missed in History dot com. If you would like to
subscribe to the show, we would like you to do
(33:32):
that as well. You can do that on the I
Heart Radio app, at Apple podcast or wherever it is
you listen stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of I heart Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts.
For my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
So regular listeners to the podcast might recall a while
back when we talked in one of our listener mail
(00:21):
segments about a fantastic gift that we got, which was
a set of the Rootzpau comic books that were produced
by the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh. Well, uh, 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 superheroes who stood up against wrong, and we
(00:42):
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 Rootzpau comic
on an upcoming episode. But today we are covering frieda Belinfante,
a woman who is inspiring both as a musician and
as a member of the Dutch Resistance who risked her
life again and again during World War Two in defiance
(01:03):
of the German occupation of the Netherlands. She was born
on May tenth, four in Amsterdam, the third daughter in
her family. Her older sisters were Dorothea who went by Dolly,
and Renee. The fourth Belonfanta child was a boy named
Robert Paul. Frieda would later say that her mother had
wanted a boy when she was born and quote, I
(01:23):
have a lot of qualities that could have been a boy,
but I was a girl. Frieda 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 kind of
came in and out as their their half brother, and
(01:45):
she knew him for the rest of his life. Frieda's
family is very large. Her father, Aarin Belonfanta, had nine
siblings and her mother, Georgine Antoinette Hess had either eight
or nine siblings, uh. Frieda could not recall for sure
in the interview she gave where she laid that although
the two sides of the family didn't really have much
in common and so they weren't particularly close, like, they
(02:06):
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 Frieda 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
any particularly religious manner, although her father was Jewish. When
(02:29):
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 Lanfonte children played music. Aarin decided that
Freeda should play the cello, and Freda's sister Renee once
noted in an interview that this was kind of a
strange choice to give Frieda cello because Frieda's hands were
(02:53):
fairly small and she quote had to wrestle with that instrument.
But Dolly played violin already and Renee played the piano.
Their father wanted Frieda to play a different instrument. In
nineteen fifteen, when Frieda was eleven, her sister Dolly died
of paraitonitis, and Dolly was just fourteen at that time naturally,
as their parents mourned. This put a lot of strain
(03:14):
on the family, and they really didn't speak about their
loss very much. Within a year, though, Frieda's parents divorced,
although the two of them had a cordial relationship from
this point. As a teenager, Frieda, according to her sister, Renee,
grew up very fast. Renee also noted that her sister
was very popular and that both boys and girls were
(03:34):
crazy about her. Frieda 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 her education. In nine
Frieda's father, Aaron, died of colon cancer. He had been
(03:56):
sick for several years, and at first he had let
his up die mominal 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 free
to give a concert together. That was actually her first concert. Yeah,
she did not feel ready for it, but he kind
of pressed the issue, and they went ahead with it.
Frieda studied cello, not that much with her father, but
(04:19):
with a number of other teachers, and it was through
one of them in nineteen twenty that she met a
woman named Ariette Boseman's. Frieda had been at the teacher's
house when she met Ariette, who was romantically involved with
the teacher. That teacher was the first cellist of the
Holland Orchestra, and when Henriette and the man had a
falling out because he had been cheating on her and
she feared at the time that she was pregnant. Frieda
(04:42):
was then left alone with Ariette 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. She
was in her twenties when the two women met, so
she was older than the teen year old Bill in
Fonta was. Their relationship wasn't exclusive, though Henriette had relationships
(05:05):
with men, which Frieda said she wasn't jealous of, and
then Frieda 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
in the role of caretaker to the composer. She later
said of Honriette quote, I loved her for a long time,
many many years. She was a person who took more
(05:27):
than she gave, which was fine with me because I
had an abundance of devotion to give. Henrietta Boseman's second
Concerto was dedicated to Frieda. As Aaron belan Fonta's illness
had progressed, he had become unable to work, So Frieda
started working in those years between three professionally as a
cellist with the Holland Orchestra, and she and Bozeman's had
(05:50):
a wide range of friends who were also musicians, and
it was through this circle that freedom meta floutist named
Johann felt Coomp, who also went by Joe Felt Calm,
was quite taken with Frieda and with her musicianship. Initially
their story sounds kind of sweet. Frieda had always been
the type to look out for other people, but Joe
wanted her to have the same benefit in her career.
(06:12):
But then his affection for her really became obsessive. He
wanted to get married, and she explained that that wasn't
really for her. And then at one point he brought
a revolver into the room with him and put up
on the mantel. Frieda 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
(06:32):
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, 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,
(06:54):
which is a horrible position to put someone in. Uh. Surprisingly,
in many ways, they initially actually appeared to be a
fairly happy couple together. They 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
(07:15):
soon as they got married, Joe Jouadeviev seemed to vanish.
He had been very fun and and kind of boisterous
and a little bit of a trickster, and then all
went away, and he only grew more withdrawn as time
went on. They had been married in nineteen thirty one,
and they divorced five years later in nineteen thirty six,
And in the meantime, Frieda and Henriette had also grown apart. Yeah,
(07:36):
when Frieda had married Joe, Anriette was still very much
in their lives, but she and Freda started drifting apart.
Freeda speculated that Henriette just wasn't able to manage the
idea of not having Frieda entirely to herself, even though
the rules were different for Arietta's own additional romances. Freda
took a job teaching high school music. She had actually
(07:59):
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 Freda 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,
(08:20):
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 choir asked her to
conduct them, and 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
(08:42):
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, and that agent approached Melin Fonta
and said, quote, if you can do that with an
amateur orchestra, can you imagine what you can do with professionals?
(09:02):
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, if she could just get a
successful professional concert together, Frieda, always up for the challenge,
(09:23):
did exactly that she added 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
Freda responded, quote, I have had my eyes and ears open.
I think I can do it. Frieda's Klina Orchestra, her
(09:45):
little orchestra got good reviews, and so in ight she
had become a professional conductor. And coming up, we're going
to talk about the next phase of Frieda's life, which
unfortunately detoured away from music by necessity. But first we're
gonna pause for a word from one of our sponsors.
(10:08):
In nine Frieda took a drive to Switzerland and she
was going there to take a series of lessons in
conducting that ended with the twelve enrolled students in the
program competing as their final exam, and the winner of
that competition would get to conduct a professional Swiss orchestra.
Frieda was the top student and she won. She never
(10:29):
got to claim her prize because World War Two put
an end to her conducting. German troops occupied Holland on
May tenth. Frieda'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
(10:49):
found out when a stranger told them Robert had left
his mother a note explaining that they had made the
choice to die rather than to live in the world
as it was. Frieda 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, Frieda was pretty quick to tell them
(11:13):
that she was not ever going to handle things the
way that her brother had. 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
were required to join the National Socialist Culture Chamber, but
Jews were forbidden to join. The orchestra that Frieda was
(11:35):
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 then to risk the safety
of her musicians, and 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
(11:57):
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. Yes, she was very
quick to see the path that lay ahead of them,
faster than a lot of other people, because there there
(12:20):
were 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 um 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
(12:43):
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 J
stamped on their papers, and this is when Frieda started
forging papers. This was actually not her first time forging documents.
When she was much younger, she had forged papers for
(13:03):
a close friend who was Russian to get back into
the Soviet Union to meet up with her betrothed Free
to learn 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.
Frieda had started distributing forged passports from her home and
she helped a lot of people flee. And then as
(13:24):
time 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
But all of this defiance and all of her work
(13:45):
in the resistance eventually caught up with Freedom. 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 for to 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
(14:06):
asked him to explain the laws around who was 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
(14:28):
and couldn't interact with each other. She claimed to do
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 two Freda performed her last concert as a conductor
in Amsterdam. This was held in a Jewish community center
(14:49):
and it was performed by a mix of Jewish and
non Jewish students, and this was really a huge act
of defiance on Freda's part. She was not legally allowed
to conduct Jewish musicians during all of this. One of
Frieda's best friends, Ellen Sports, 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
(15:10):
whole thing was a scamp. 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 about it.
I hate to think about it. Myself free to realize
(15:31):
that she and some of her colleagues in the Resistance
could keep forging documents, but the problem was that there
couldn't be duplicate documents in city Hall. The I D
s were all enumerated, and that number series made it
easier to check for fake i D. So she decided
that the solution was to destroy the files in city Hall,
(15:52):
and the logic was that if one 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
(16:14):
and destroyed the Idea records. This was really no small feet.
The building was guarded. Frieda's team did all kinds of
research to find out how the whole operation worked, including
the names of all the guards and the shift schedules.
They also had a tailor make to replica police uniforms.
To pull off the mission, they found a leak on
the police force. You could give them details and then
(16:37):
free to watch the whole thing from 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
(16:57):
knew about it. So everyone had to go into hiding
and free to learn 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 Frieda'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,
(17:20):
the Germans were really intent on capturing all 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. Frieda had some wealthy contexts,
partly through her career in the arts and partly through
(17:42):
family connections, and so that offered her an 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
(18:02):
certain if he was sympathetic to the resistance. She talked
a lot over the years about how she 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
(18:24):
being spent. So finally he asked Freda, do 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 and 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
(18:47):
to really meaningful actions and successes for the Dutch Resistance,
Frieda 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
day Germ to further complicate matters, While lifting a heavy
iron bed that concealed the trap door in one of
the houses that she sheltered in. Freda got a hernia
(19:08):
and needed to have it operated on. Was 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 this surgery,
the plan for her to flee had to be put
(19:29):
into motion. It was time for her to move, 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,
(19:50):
there was one uh section where she's describing this plan
where 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
(20:11):
this had huge question marks around it, and by the
time Freda 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 Lelle, France, where she had the
contact information for another safe house. When she got there, though,
(20:31):
there was a huge and terrifying coincidence that same Gestapo
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.
(20:55):
Once she was convinced that the coast was clear, she
left and she made her way to Paris. After several
weeks in Paris, she traveled with a contact in the
resistance she had made their named Tony, to the Swiss border,
and this was in February of nine Tony was pretty
open with her that he was fearful because he looked
obviously Jewish and he thought he might put her in
(21:15):
jeopardy as a consequence, but she responded to 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
(21:36):
that they were at the base of a steep mountain
that there was no way they were going to be
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 Frieda'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
(21:57):
by Swiss border police and taken once A in on
foot to show de font 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,
(22:17):
and she realized only later that if she had just
lied and said that they were together, that she might
have saved him. Frida was moved to a Dutch refugee
hotel camp, and this was actually a very difficult 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,
(22:38):
and she felt like a complete outsider. She later said
that she felt dead inside when she was there with
the other refugees at montrou 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
(22:59):
the Gesta bo, but everything inside it was as she
had left it. As the city of Amsterdam tried to
resume a life 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 Bynum was one
(23:20):
such person, and he went right back to work. Freed
To described seeing the people who had collaborated with the
Germans and such good standing in the city as quote
a very cold shower frieda bel and Fonte 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. Freed To understandably did not really feel
(23:48):
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 seven she decided to make
her way to New York, which she did with the
(24:09):
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 Freda what else she could do, and
Belinfanta offered up a headshot that listed her as a conductor,
and the agent said that's worse, and so Freda said
(24:31):
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 is a woman named Many. Many 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 travels incredibly refreshing and restorative. As they traveled,
(24:55):
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 Frieda and Many got to California, Many
sold Free to the car This is a cross ley
that Frieda described as being like a sewing machine. Many
went back to New York and Freeda stayed with a
friend that she had made when she was crossing over
from Europe. This was a woman named Ivy Fraser. Frieda
(25:18):
and Ivy bought a house together, and similarly to her
relationship with Henriette Bosmans, she said that her relationship with
Ivy was quote low gear sexually, but the two of
them were very close. Freda worked for a while at
a university as an assistant conductor and a music teacher,
but soon she realized she could make better money playing
for movie studio orchestras, and during this time, while she
(25:39):
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 Hollywood and it just didn't match up
in his head. Then he offered freed to the chance
(26:00):
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 accents sound for film, but they never got
to play in concert, and he said that he could
pull an orchestra together from these folks, and he was
(26:20):
true to his word. He put together in orchestra and
they all met for the first time in the Highland
Avenue High School auditorium. And just as Frieda 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 the first session ended with these
new musicians, Freda asked all of them if they would
(26:40):
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. Frieda 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 this one that hosted Frieda
(27:00):
and her orchestra, and that was a catalyst for the
formation of the Orange County Philharmonic, which named Frieda Belinfanta,
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 had to educate the community about music,
(27:21):
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
Frieda'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. Free to believe that gossip about
(27:43):
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 an 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 Redfield told a
(28:07):
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 l A Philharmonic had been
threatened by the Orange County Philharmonic and that he had
simply used his influence to push the O c P
out of existence. This was the time with a lot
(28:27):
of changes for Frieda. 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. Freda
moved into her own place in Laguna Beach. Freeda gave
her last concert as a conductor in the late eighties
and Laguna Beach, and soon after that it became apparent
that her hearing was failing. She started to think that
(28:48):
the musicians were playing out of tunes, 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. Frieda and her partner at the time, time
Bobby Chambers, moved to Santa fe when Frieda retired from conducting,
but then she was diagnosed with cancer not long after that,
and that quashed Freda's plan for a languid and quiet retirement.
(29:11):
On May thirty, at the age of ninety, free To
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 gonna link to that in the
(29:32):
show notes. A few days before her death, free To
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. Freda melan
Funta 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, but the
(29:54):
world wasn't ready at that point in time for a
lady conductor. It was a shame. She was enormously able.
Eric Vulmer, former Orange County Philharmonic Society executive director, said
of Frieda 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
(30:15):
she wanted to share the art with a broad based community.
Frieda was a very quotable woman. If you watch those
videos of her read that transcript, you realize she lived
out a lot of singers, and 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
(30:35):
illustrative example, 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,
she's pretty great. Um. I found myself just down a
(30:58):
rabbit hole of like gazing at her, watching her do interviews,
and uh, 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. I have fun listener mail from
(31:21):
our recent travels tell me so as people may know.
We were recently on tour. We did the Texas leg
of our tour this past week, and while we were
traveling UH in Houston, one of our listeners named in
Net brought us a beautiful out false Muka postcard and Uh.
She and her husband were both of the show, and
they were absolutely lovely. And I feel so lucky anytime
(31:44):
we get to do those shows and meet listeners and
spend time with them, and we all laughed together and
have meet and greets and it's super great fun. Uh
and I really like this postcard and wanted to read it,
she writes. Tracy and Holly, we enjoyed listening to the
podcast on the Defenstration of Prague before visiting Prague and
Budapest earlier this year. There is so much we don't
learn in history class about this part of the world.
(32:04):
For instance, I was an art history double major and
never heard of the artist Alfonse Mucha until we planned
our trip. A visit to the Mucha Museum was a highlight.
I bought this postcard for you there and thank you
for missed in history. UM. And then you're so cute
and it was so wonderful to meet you. She and
her husband. As I said, we're absolutely lovely as we're
all of our awesome listeners that came out and saw us. Yes, Um,
(32:28):
we had such a great time on that tour. I
can't even begin to describe what good, fortunate it feels like.
And if folks are wondering, yes, an episode from it
will be an episode of the podcast. It's just not
quite yet. Yeah, it will be out soon ish. Uh.
We have a lot of stuff kind of in the schedule,
so it's maybe a little more delayed sometimes in terms
(32:50):
of when it goes live after when we've recorded it,
but not by much. So it's coming. You two will
hear all of our silly adventures. Uh. If you would
like to reach out to us and can't make it
to a live show to hand us a postcard, you
can email us. We have a new email address, so
that has changed up from anything you've heard on previous episodes.
The new address is History Podcast at I heart radio
(33:11):
dot com. Uh. The old address will work for a
little while, but I don't know how long, and we
are making the transition over fully to the I heart
radio address. So again that is History Podcast at I
heart radio dot com. You can still reach out to
us on social media as missed in History pretty much everywhere,
and you can also visit us on our website at
missed in History dot com. If you would like to
subscribe to the show, we would like you to do
(33:32):
that as well. You can do that on the I
Heart Radio app, at Apple podcast or wherever it is
you listen stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of I heart Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts.
For my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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