A Family’s JDC Connection Revealed in the Archives

You could say that Victor Friedmann’s discovery of JDC’s role in his family’s history was purely accidental.

In 1941, Victor’s parents, Otto and Lenka, left their apartment in Zagreb, Croatia, never to return. They first escaped into the mountains of Croatia to avoid the Nazi-allied regime and then into Italy with the help of the Croatian partisan militia, settling in Bari, then Merano, and finally Rome. It was in Bari, in 1944, that Victor was born.

Victor’s family called Italy their home for 12 years, and for a long time Victor wondered how they all managed to survive there as refugees, making a living in a country devastated by the war. There’s no doubt that Victor’s immediate family was a lucky one, as others in his family were not%mdash;Victor’s grandmother was likely killed at the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia and his grandfather and uncle were also imprisoned there. So, when his father was 96, Victor decided to record his story to learn more about the family’s harrowing journey during and after the war. And a few years after his father passed away, Victor began digging into archival documents to uncover the whole story.

That’s where JDC entered the picture.

In an interview conducted for this article, Victor explained that he began randomly looking into and reaching out to different Jewish aid organizations that helped refugees in Italy after the war in the hopes that records of his family existed. The last website that he came upon? The JDC Archives.

Victor wrote to the JDC Archives and JDC Archives Senior Research Archivist Misha Mitsel sent him a reply along with approximately 100 documents from case files in the JDC Archives that revealed the vital support both of his parents and his uncle Giacomo received from JDC.

With these enlightening documents in hand, Victor began to understand the true breadth of JDC’s help for his family. The records shared with him exemplify JDC’s vital assistance to refugees in Italy in the immediate postwar period. During this time, JDC supported both the physical and mental health of refugees throughout Italy. Emigration services, various vocational training programs, and basic necessities were provided for refugees, including the members of Victor’s family. Before the war, Victor’s father, Otto, established his own tricotage (knitwear) and underwear shop. As a refugee, Otto was unable to work in Italy—but because army bases and foreign aid organizations were exempt from this, he initially got a job as a watchman on night duty at a British army base in Bari. Once the family moved to Merano to be closer to Victor’s uncle Giacomo in 1950, JDC hired Otto as a reception clerk at a local sanatorium and provided additional financial assistance to the family from that point until they left Italy.

Among other documents were records related to his sister Anna’s birth in Rome in 1956, showing how JDC increased its assistance for the family. All this assistance from JDC from 1950 onward allowed Victor and his family to live in Italy for 12 years until 1962, when they made it to the United States. They settled in Denver, where his mother, Lenka, had relatives. Victor made it abundantly clear that he would never have known the extent of the help JDC provided to his family had he not reached out to the Archives.

Once he gathered all the information he gleaned from JDC Archives, other resources, and various family members, Victor decided to write a book about his family’s journey from Croatia to the United States%mdash;the objective of which was to record his family’s story for his family and his sister Anna’s family. According to Victor, sharing this story with his sister was a real awakening. Anna had absolutely no idea of the research Victor was conducting and it was truly an eye-opener for her, as she was only a young child when the family left Rome for the United States, unaware of the struggles they had encountered along their journey.

After three months of work, Victor self-published his book entitled A Promise Kept: My Family’s Journey to Freedom. It was, without a doubt, an educational experience%mdash;not only did he learn more about the history of the time, such as the severity of conditions at the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia, but he also came to be aware of the wide reach of JDC’s wartime and postwar assistance to Jews in need. Victor emphasized that he would not have been able to write his book without the JDC Archives and the documents shared with him.

Reflecting on everything he learned in his research, Victor recognized the importance of JDC’s role in his family’s survival. “Basically, JDC saved our lives,” he said, “I don’t know what would have happened to my family without them.”