The Noord-Hollands Archief has mapped out more than 1,300 names of women from Noord-Holland who resisted during the war years. Some of them distributed illegal newspapers, others forged identity cards, helped people in hiding or risked their lives in the armed resistance. All of them were brave enough to stand up to the German occupier. One of them is the Amsterdam Frieda Belinfante. Her turbulent life begins in Amsterdam in 1904 and will end almost a century later in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Frieda Belinfante was an open lesbian, cellist, the very first conductor in the Netherlands and a resistance fighter.
The first conductor
Frieda Belinfante grows up as the third child of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother. She is a social child, her sister will later tell that Frieda always helped others from a young age. And she is musical, just like her father, who is a pianist. When she is 9 years old, he buys her a cello. Playing becomes her lust and her life, but it is not enough.
In her twenties, she discovers another talent: conducting. She becomes the first conductor in the Netherlands and her career takes off. She performs with her own orchestra, from 1938 also in the Concertgebouw, but then war breaks out. Realizing what is coming, and what the fate of her Jewish musicians will be, Frieda immediately disbands her orchestra.
Red glow above Artis
For Frieda it is clear: she will never resign herself to the German occupation. She resists very early on. Frieda joins the artists’ resistance, which includes Willem Arondeus, Gerrit van der Veen and Willem Sandberg.
Together with them she plans the attack on the population register in Amsterdam.
Because the artists consider committing the attack ‘men’s work’, Frieda is not allowed to join the population register next to Artis on 23 March 1943. She awaits the attack on a roof nearby. When she sees a red glow appear over Artis, she knows that the attack was successful.
Although not a drop of blood is spilled, the Germans are furious. They retaliate with a wave of violence. Almost everyone involved in the attack is arrested and executed. Frieda manages to stay out of the hands of the Germans in Amsterdam for a while, by disguising herself as a man, but in the end the situation becomes too dangerous. She flees to Switzerland.
After the war, Frieda emigrated disillusioned to America. There she resumes her old work as a conductor and music teacher. She never talks about the war again. Until journalist and writer Toni Boumans visits her. A deep friendship develops.
In the documentary ‘..but I was a girl’, which Toni makes about her, Frieda tells how the war changed her: “In the past, when I was a child, I got upset when I saw an animal that had been killed. Now it doesn’t bother me anymore. The war has done that to me.”
In 1995, Frieda Belinfante died at the age of 91 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.