Ithu oru nalla pasu (this is a nice cow)

On the Germans interned in Yercaud 1940-45 and the fascinating story of the Friedmann family

Yercaud is not on the way to anywhere, for you have to go there, and I have not been there. So my description of that magical place comes from the memories and threads woven by so many others who lived there. The image of a misty hill station, once a colonial refuge and home to the Monfort School, a school which boasts of alumni such as Shashi Tharoor, S Muthiah and Nagesh Kuknoor, hides many a mystery. Many an interesting person lived there and went on to do other things with their lives, forgetting this hillock. Some did not.

One such person whom you may have never known was an eminent scientist and professor named Herbert Claus Friedmann, a German Jew and Indian Citizen for a time, a charming gentleman who passed away recently. You would hardly have expected to read that a German, a global authority on matters such as bacterial enzymes, the biosynthesis of vitamin B12 and texts on the history of biology actually completed his bachelors and masters university degrees from the Madras University. Well, he did that and more, rubbing shoulders with the many Iyer’s, Iyengar’s, Chettiar’s and a Malayali or two. 

Without further ado, I will launch into his remarkable story.

My little story starts in an industrial town called Mannheim in South West Germany, once the home of fine arts and many classical music composers, later a city gobbled up by the Industrial revolution to become a base for all kinds of large factories. It was the locale where the Zeppelin’s or airships were once made and where plants producing goods for the German war economy buzzed with frenetic hurry. Many Jews lived and once prospered in Mannheim, and the Friedmann family was one among them.

Herbert explains his birth at Mannheim, that it was “nine years after the end of World War I and 12 years before the beginning of World War II”. As we can see, his mother Lili was a musician and his father Martin, a physician who desired to become an ophthalmologist but ended up a dermatologist after being assigned to care for soldiers suffering from syphilis during the war. Life meandered along for the Friedmann’s (with occasional weekend picnics to Switzerland and Holland) and even though the number of patients at Martin’s clinic declined steadily, life was livable until 1938, after which their world was turned upside down by the Nazi’s.

What started in 1933 as persecution of sorts, became vandalism in 1938 and on Nov 9^th and 10^th 1938, the SS ordered Kristallnacht (night of the broken glass) on all Jewish storefronts.  The Nazi’s arrested Martin and transported him to Dachau, the first of the German concentration camps. That same day, a group of men entered and ransacked the family's apartment, including Lili’s violin and Martin’s medical instruments.

In those early days of the holocaust, Jews were permitted to emigrate overseas if they "voluntarily" gave up their property and had a valid visa to travel. The Friedmann’s had planned to leave and their destination of choice was India. Martin’s friend Ganz taught at the Bombay University and Martin had planned to visit India to study leprosy which was prevalent (at that time) mainly in India.

It was a visa for that move and that disease which ultimately saved him and his family, as Herbert was to state subsequently.

Even though Martin’s postcard posted from Dachau five days later, stating that he was healthy and fine, was comforting, Lili (Erna) Friedmann was frantic and terrified. So was Martin actually, as the horrors of life in a concentration camp slowly started to unfold, changing him forever as inmates died or were murdered, around him.

Lili was quick in action, and applied to the gestapo at Karlsruhe with Martin’s passport showing them the lifesaving Indian visa, and with that, she secured Martin Friedmann’s timely release. The family of four, including Herbert’s brother Gerhart got ready to travel to India, but Herbert’s grandmother refused to move. As the story unfolds, Martin left first, hoping to find a job and a place to live and that he did on a ship bound for Batavia via Genoa, from which he disembarked at Colombo and travelled to Madras reaching there by Dec 1938.

Martin as Herbert recalls, was overjoyed walking amongst the hawkers of Mount road, sensing and feeling the warmth of not only the tropical city, but also the warmth of freedom after the harrowing days in Nazi Germany.

The exodus from Germany had started, but there was also a Nazi group in Bombay watching and working to threaten asylum seekers to India. By 1938, some 50 physicians had come in and were presenting serious competition to the local doctors who were quite alarmed. After the Anglo German visa law became defunct in May 1938, the Jewish relief Association or JRA took over to supporting Jewish Immigration to India. The British gave visas only to those who were ‘not politically undesirable’ and those who had friends or relatives in India. Later the rule was amended to allow the JRA as a visa sponsor and some 300 had already been issued visas by mid-1938. Interestingly there were 550 Germans in Bombay, 195 in Calcutta, and quite a few in other places, totaling to 1500 by then.

A month later, Lili and the children arrived at Madras. They had a house with a mango tree at the rear and "Idu oru nalla Pasu" (This is a nice cow) was the first sentence that the 12-year-old Herbert Friedmann learned in Tamil when he joined up at St. Bede's school in Madras in 1939. It was all so different from his Ivy League school – the Karl Friedrich gymnasium in Mannheim where he had been wrestling with Latin, and now it was tongue twisters in vernacular Tamil.

Life did not remain static for them and as World War 2 was declared in Sept 1939, all German males in India were rounded up, termed as hostile foreigners and interned at Ahmednagar. Rules were put into place even before internment, they were not allowed to possess certain goods such as cameras, phones, binoculars, cars or maps. All males above the age of 16 were to be arrested, nobody was allowed to travel more than 5 miles outside their place of residence, and were required to report daily to the local police. After the internment policy was passed, 850 of these men were arrested and sent to the Ahmednagar camp. Martin was one of them.

Across the oceans, in Nazi Germany, some 3,500 British subjects were in limbo and Germany offered to allow them to depart so long as free departure was provided to the Germans interned in India. Accordingly the Darling committee was appointed to interrogate internees at Ahmednagar. Some 560 were eventually released, but by then these Germans had a bigger problem, for the jobs they held before arrest were no longer available nor were employers recommended to take them in. In addition some of them had to be repatriated to Germany (Germans who were not Jews and who wanted to return). As expected all embassy and consulate staff (173) returned to their motherland.

Provinces such as Madras were not happy and the Governor complained that Darling was not thorough and was perhaps too lenient and humanitarian, letting slip many Nazi sympathizers through the cracks. Some did not want German wives to reside near British troops or locations of strategic interest and as you can imagine, Madras was one of them. And so, remote parole centers were opened in Satara, Nainital, Hazaribagh, Kodaicanal and Yercaud and about 410 Germans were moved to these locales. I will not dwell too much into the details, but as we note, Martin, Lili, Herbert and Gerhart Friedmann were cleared, asked to move with 2 days’ notice and ended up at Yercaud in Aug 1940, with yet another life to start all over again. It proved to be very difficult for them, for Yercaud, as we say here in America, was like the boondocks, for somebody coming from Mannheim.

Our little village in the hills, Yercaud

Yercaud in those days was definitely a sleepy little hillock and decidedly chilly, being at an altitude 5,000 feet above sea level. Part of the Shevaroy hill range, and not too far from the town of Salem, it was a place frequented by Jesuit priests. The place got its name from the lake (Yer meaning lake and caud meaning forest in Tamil), situated amidst the forest and it was popularly considered the poor man’s hill station.

It was in those days an outpost for some 100 or so eccentric British planters still living a quaint Victorian life and toying with coffee plantations. It also home to administrators when the life in the plains and cities proved too hot and humid. As Dane Kennedy wrote - Yercaud, remained a small and sleepy hamlet in the Shevaroy Hills even after the railway came within fourteen miles of it. She adds ”for those who are simply exhausted in mind and body from prolonged exposure to a high temperature in the low country, and who need rest from work and a cooler air to breathe.

It was here that the Friedmann’s and other Germans, totaling to 98 were headed. The government had sequestered some 23 bungalows for their house arrest. Recall now that there are two categories of prisoners, the Germans under care of the German government and the German Jews on their own or under care of the JRA - Bombay. Some like the Friedmann’s obtained very little support. They lived a secluded and withdrawn life, during weekends they listened anxiously to news of the War over a loud speaker in the camp and perused newspapers sent from the JRA, worried about their friends and family.

The gaebler site provides details of the Yercaud parole station. In 1941, 23 bungalows had been rented by the Indian government and all bungalows were surrounded by gardens. The internees were allowed to take their own furniture, pictures and household items at the expense of the German government or to use the furniture provided by the Indian government. Families with children were accommodated in a bungalow, or it was two childless families or perhaps 3 - 4 individuals sharing a home. The bungalows generally had two to three bedrooms, a dining room, a living room, kitchen and 2-3 bathrooms. They usually had electricity and where there was none, "Petromax lanterns" were provided.

Some of them received a modest monthly allowance of Rs120/- per married couple, Rs30/- per child and Rs70/- for individuals. Those who had savings were allowed to employ servants. They were not allowed to leave their houses between eight o'clock in the evening and until six o'clock in the morning, but otherwise they were free to move around Yercaud and not beyond. School going children were enrolled in the Monfort Catholic School. A small hospital was available but more severe cases could be treated in Salem. German doctors were also interned, but were allowed to practice.

Unlike the non-Jewish internees, who received financial support from the German Reich through the Swiss consul, the Friedman’s were more or less on their own. They did manage to employ a cook, but the family managed along in a small house which had neither a toilet nor a running water. The water as I read, had to be drawn from a well and boiled before they could drink it. While it sounds OK to most of us, remember that the Friedmann’s had just moved from Europe and found this all quite a chore.

Martin Friedmann did not complain too much, not that he could anyway, and treated other prisoners for a small fee to keep the family going.  Herbert like other children joined the Monfort School. The war killed thousands across the globe and the Nazi’s decimated many of the hapless Jews in concentration camps. For the Friedmann’s, their life in Yercaud was far removed from the horrors of Europe, especially Germany.

After the War, Martin Friedmann decided to stay on in Yercaud. During this period Herbert’s grandmother who had refused to accompany them, was sentenced to a concentration camp in Bohemia but hung herself to death before the event, an act which was to affect the family in India deeply. Martin continued with his profession, treating the workers of coffee plantations suffering from malaria, tuberculosis, or parasites. However, as many of the poor plantation workers were not able to pay money as fees he had to be happy with gifts such as jackfruit. Martin Friedmann thus earned very little (less than 4,000 rupees a year, approximately $1,000/-). The Friedmann’s however received a monthly support of Rs150/- (from 1945 onwards) from the Jewish Relief Association. They could not even afford a refrigerator and used to store precious penicillin at a planter friend’s estate some 5 miles away.

Martin continued with his research in various fields of tropical medicine, presenting papers on ophthalmology as well as several papers covering dermatology, parasitology, human metabolism and malaria, all while at Yercaud. Herbert his son, whose story we are tracing, had in the meantime passed out (in 1944) from Monfort school with multiple distinctions, second to one Chengappa. On the final day at school, his principal treated him to his first cigarette, to celebrate his ceremonial passing into manhood, an event that Herbert recalled gleefully in his interview with Thalia. I believe he continued with his bachelors course at the Madras Christian College.

Herbert then moved to the Madras Medical College, as the only European amongst Indian students. He is emphatic in his statement that he never felt victimized or discriminated against and always enjoyed his days in India. But he does admit that he always questioned if he was German, Indian (not Indian according to him since he did not have a caste), European or something else. He labored on, to complete his post-graduation in the Madras University. He submitted many papers from the MMC biochemistry department, which can still be viewed in their records (Method to diminish pigments secreted from urine, Aug 1952).

Christiane Fritsche provides continuation - Back in Yercaud, Martin Friedmann's already tense financial situation worsened dramatically in the spring of 1953, when he became seriously ill. He was, of course, "too proud," as his lawyer working on the reparation for the Friedmanns in Germany would state. Lili Friedmann wrote a letter in April 1953, apparently behind her husband's back, and asked the lawyer urgently - To deal with the "accelerated settlement" of the claims for reparations from the state of Germany. After all, it was probably "a mystery & Martin a terrible worry" for the family to get through without the income from practice.

In May 1953, Martin Friedmann also submitted an application for ongoing support payments at the Federal Consul General in Bombay, and the Friedmann’s received about DM 440 from the Consulate monthly from June 1953.

Martin Friedmann's health deteriorated as his affliction became serious, the diagnosis was Amoebic dysentery. He was moved to CMC Vellore (Started by the American Ida Scutter) for treatment but succumbed to a heart attack. On August 28, 1953 Martin Friedmann died, aged 63 years and was buried in the Vellore cemetery.

For his widow and his two sons, the deputy consul general of the German Consul General consented, and demanded, on account of her "urgent need", the rapid processing of the claims for reparations. Lili Friedmann was obviously at the end of her powers. In March 1954, no compensation had yet been received from Germany, and according to a statement from the Foreign Office, the Consul General had reduced her support by half. Lili Friedmann then turned to the German authorities and recommended that if they were to continue their "Jewish extermination policy", they should send "the necessary cyanide" and take over the funeral expenses. Whether this enraged letter had anything to do with it, what we do know is that in May 1954, the Landesamt für Wiedergutmachung issued an initial decision providing the Friedmann family a compensation payment of a good DM 12,600..

Herbert Friedman - The German Jew with an Indian passport…

It was at this juncture that Herbert Friedmann was contacted at Madras by the very same man who helped his father immigrate to India, Herr Ganz, who had by then become the Chancellor of the University of Frankfurt. He helped Herbert get a fellowship for a PhD course at the University of Chicago through one Robert Felix, Professor of Biochem at Frankfurt and a visiting professor at University of Chicago.

With that, and the new fortune, the family decided (Lili incidentally moved to BC Canada with Gerhart and passed away in 1973, they had contemplated moving to Australia earlier) to make North America their home and they sailed out of India. Herbert upon landing in Halifax was instantly struck by the absolute silence that assailed them in that port, after years of bedlam in India with the noises on the roads and the teeming masses.

Herbert Friedmann, the scholar from Madras University continued to possess Indian citizenship and an Indian passport. It is interesting to note that he an Indian national living in USA, travelled back to Europe and Germany using that passport, with a visa for Germany and other countries. Herbert went on complete his doctorate from the University of Chicago, under Birgit Vennesland in 1958. Some years after arrival, he acquired American Citizenship.

Continuing on, he worked as a research associate and later moved to Baltimore to complete a two-year fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University, where he met his future wife, Joan Bowerman. In 1960, Friedmann returned to Chicago as an assistant professor in physiology and began his extensive studies of vitamin B12 and its role in bacterial nucleotide synthesis. He was later promoted to associate professor and excelled in teaching to become a favorite among students at UC. For his exceptional undergraduate teaching abilities, Friedmann won in 1978 the coveted Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence.

His 56 teaching laws, something oft quoted by all and sundry is what any aspiring teacher should keep to their heart or by their bedside. His books on enzymes are studied by many a medical student. I do not know if he interacted with entrants from Madras or if he had anything to do with India after becoming American, I would only assume in the affirmative after listening to his fond remembrances of his lovely days in India. It had as you will all agree, been a long journey for him and his family…

Herbert C. Friedmann 86, passed away on January 13, 2014.

Gerhart followed Herbert’s footsteps. He too obtained a B.Sc. and an M.A. from Madras University, worked briefly with the Tata institute of fundamental research Bombay and obtained a Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia (working with the Raman Effect!). He taught Physics at the University of Victoria in Canada from 1958 to 1990 and was a keen chess player. He had passed away earlier, in 1990 and is remembered through a bursary for aspiring scholars, awarded in his name, annually.

I do not know if the alumni or the administrators of the Monfort School in Yercaud remember Herbert or Gerhart Friedmann or if the old-timers of Yercaud remember his father Martin, the German doctor who treated them in return for jackfruits, making India his world, but perhaps this small article may do just that, gently remind them.

Let me end with a few extracts from Herbert’s 56 laws of teaching

•      Never snow a student under, with an exhibition of your erudition: a student is far less interested in what you know than in what he or she can learn.
•      Look at the students when you lecture; the ceiling and the floor are not interested, and neither is the blackboard.
•        Never expect your students to learn or to understand anything that you cannot or did not learn or understand yourself.

Herbert said in his interview with Thalia that it was after all two dreaded diseases that gave back his family their life – Syphilis and Leprosy!!

But above all, Herbert always remembered India as a wonderful, wonderful place and he fondly recalled the one Tamil sentence he had memorized in school. It was as you would have guessed, ‘Ithu oru nalla pasu - This is a nice cow’.

References

•  Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India: Kindred Spirits in the 19th and 20th Centuries Edited by Joanne Miyang Cho, Eric Kurlander, Douglas T McGetchin
• Jewish exile in India - Anil Bhatti, ‎Johannes H. Voig
•   Gaebler website on the Germans  
•  Thalia Gigerenzer’s Podcast on Friedmann 
• University of Chicago tribute 
• Ausgeplündert, zurückerstattet und entschädigt : Arisierung und Wiedergutmachung in Mannheim, Von Jackfrüchten und dem Guineawurm: Die Familie Friedmann in Indien - Christiane Fritsche, Johannes Paulmann
• Herbert Friedmann picture courtesy – University of Chicago website as above. Martin’s picture courtesy Geni website
• Herbert’s 56 teaching laws 

Note – I have three people to thank specifically in this effort. One is Thalia for her podcast featuring an interview with the late Herbert Friedmann, the second is Christiane Fritsche for her article (cited, in German). Finally the late Mr S Muthiah, the chronicler of Madras who gently nudged me in this direction with his comment - why don’t you check on the Italian prisoners in Yercaud, after I sent him a link to an article on the Italian prisoners in Bangalore…

Previously published in Madras musings in a concise and edited format as The scientist from Montfort & Madras