Andreas Fröhlich 1921 - 1941

Born 14.10.1921 in Breslau / Wrocław
Died 28.10.1941 in Mauthausen

Biography

Andreas Fröhlich was the only son of Edith (Nissen) Fröhlich and Georg Fröhlich. He spent most of his childhood in Breslau, where Georg had a law practice. Andreas was gentle soul, sensitive and very protective of his younger sister, Sabine. Raised as a Catholic, Andreas first learned of his Jewish ancestry when he was not allowed to join the Hitler Youth in the 1930s. After “Kristallnacht”, his parents evacuated him to stay at a Camillian monastery in Vaals, Netherlands. The head abbot there arranged for Andreas to transfer to a Catholic pre-seminary school, St. Edmund’s College, in Ware, England. The college’s headmaster described Andreas as a “well-behaved and industrious young man.” Andreas’s sister, then 11, was evacuated to England via the Kindertransport. After the Fröhlich parents relocated to Vaals, they had their children join them for the summer. When war broke out, the parents did not want to send their children back to England, afraid they would be interned there as “enemy aliens.” The Fröhlichs moved to an Amsterdam pension while they awaited visas to join Nissen relatives in the United States. Andreas was enrolled in a Jesuit School, St. Ignatius College, in Amsterdam. He made friends easily. He was very religious, became an acolyte and hoped to become a priest.

The family became trapped in Holland when the Nazis invaded the neutral country. On 11 June 1941, the Gestapo initiated a “razzia,” a round-up of innocent young men, mostly German Jewish refugees, in retaliation for a Dutch act of sabotage. The Gestapo sent young men in plain clothes to make the arrests. Sabine thought the young men were from a youth group of acolytes to which her brother belonged. She unwittingly assisted the young men in finding Andreas before he could escape over rooftops. He was arrested anyway. Edith went to the Gestapo chiefs in Amsterdam and pleaded with them to release her son, giving them jewels and cash, and they promised to get Andreas out of Mauthausen. In his second and last letter to his family from Mauthausen, Andreas wrote, “Sabine wird ihre Schularbeiten allein machen müssen.” (Sabine will have to do her homework herself.) The family understood this meant that Andreas knew he was going to die. Andreas’s friends helped his parents and sister survive the war by placing them in contact with the Dutch underground where they were hidden in the North Holland countryside. Sabine married Cor Schipper, a member of the Dutch Resistance who helped hide her family, and emigrated to the United States. Andreas’s parents returned to Germany. Georg Fröhlich helped rebuild the German legal system and became a judge on the Bundesverfassungsgericht, the German supreme court for constitutional matters.

Dave Gooderson, an English playwright, wrote a play about Andreas’s life, titled “Quarry.” www.david-gooderson.co.uk. St. Edmund’s College commissioned the play. A video of “Quarry” and documentary about the play are at: https://vimeo.com/235164787.

 

Agnes Schipper, niece

Location In room