Frieda Roos-van Hessen's testimony is one of nearly 52,000 visual history testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust which have been archived by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. Shoah, meaning catastrophe, is the Jewish word for Holocaust.
Director Steven Spielberg was the impetus behind the Shoah Foundation's video archive
in 1994 after filming Schindler's List the previous year in Poland.
His mission was to preserve the testimony of Holocaust survivors for
future generations. Many of the interviews are with Holocaust
survivors, including Jews, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah's
Witnesses and political prisoners. The archive also includes interviews
with rescuers, liberators, members of aid organizations, eyewitnesses,
and participants in war crimes trials. In all, about 52,000 testimonies from 52 countries and 32 languages.
Frieda van Hessen has a captivating story. She was one of Holland's foremost concert and opera singers. At 19, she sang the lead for the Dutch version of Walt Disney's Snow White. At 24, she was the soloist in a performance of Verdi's Requiem for the Dutch Royal Family. Frieda van Hessen won the Grande Diplome at the World Contest in Geneva, Switzerland where she was judged one of the eight best female singers in the world. The future could not have seemed brighter until she was forced into hiding when the Nazis invaded Holland during World War II.
Today, this 92-plus-year-old woman lives to tell about her hiding, mircaculous escapes, and determination to survive some of the worst horrors this world has ever seen.
Publisher, Thomas White, of Harvest Day Books calls Frieda's book Life in the Shadow of the Swastika amazing! "It chronicles her four-and-a-half years of hiding including her eight incredible escapes from the hands of the Nazis. When I first read her manuscript, I was numb for two days. Incredible."
