After 42 Years, Whittier Woman Tells Dramatic WW II Escape Story in Book

At first glance, the beauty shop owned by Frieda Frome Krieger looks like any other. Three black swivel chairs, upholstered in plaid, are reflected in square mirrors on one wall. A row of hair dryers attached to chartreuse-colored chairs sits silently.

But there is something different about the salon, reflecting something different about Krieger. There are no pictures of spike-haired models taped to the walls, and no pop music blares from mounted speakers. Instead, thick gilded frames border the mirrors and the strains of classical music float softly from a black armoire.

Krieger walks haltingly across the room, leaning slightly forward at the waist. She wears a beige blouse tied in a bow at the neck, a black skirt that falls to mid-calf, stockings and white leather tennis shoes.

“My feet,” she says in accented English. “You should see what they did to my feet.”

The accent comes from Lithuania, the country Krieger fled as a teen-ager after seeing her father and two brothers killed in a wave of World War II anti-Semitism. The fragile feet are a reminder of injuries she suffered during the five years before she immigrated to the United States, years spent hiding in the woods, serving as a secret agent, working in labor camps, waiting in a Soviet jail and making her way through four countries to seek an American visa in Munich.

Now, 42 years later at age 62, Krieger has published a book through the Iowa State University Press in which she recounts her flight. It is titled “Some Dare to Dream: Frieda Frome’s Escape From Lithuania.”

“When I first came here, nobody wanted to listen to what I had to say,” Krieger remembers. “I’ve carried it all these years with me. I realized I might not be able to live too much longer and I wanted to tell my story.”

The story is something Krieger has kept hidden away, not even sharing it with her two daughters or her beauty shop clients. Krieger felt tremendous guilt about surviving the war when many family members and friends died. She went through years of psychological therapy to resolve those feelings.

“It’s like a chain of trouble if you keep talking about it,” Krieger said. “I was determined to break the chain of trouble.”

Krieger believes she has broken the chain, but still seems consumed by her past. She has taken time away from her beauty salon work to promote the book, talking about her experiences in places as nearby as a Whittier church and as far away as Buffalo, N.Y.

Sitting on the sofa of her Whittier home, Krieger opens the book’s red-jacketed pages to point out pictures of herself as a Lithuanian teen-ager, and to read aloud from particularly dramatic passages.

“Just one more short one,” she said to a visitor. “Do you mind?”

It is especially important to Krieger that the plight of Lithuanian Jews be publicized. Of the 160,000 Jews living in Lithuania before the war only 10% ultimately survived. “Lithuania was one of the biggest slaughterhouses in Europe,” she said.

Her autobiography, written in the first person, opens in the Lithuanian capital of Kaunas. The happy days of Krieger’s childhood segue into the horror of first Russian, then German invasions. Her father and two brothers were killed by anti-Semites, her mother died in a Nazi work camp and Krieger narrowly escaped death herself.

A year after the war ended, she married, then used forged identification papers to make her way to Munich. She and her husband obtained American visas a short time later and settled in El Paso, Tex., where her uncle lived.

She Sold Cosmetics

From the looks of the Hollywood movies Krieger watched as a child, she expected life in the United States to be easy.

“My dreams were shattered,” she said. “I ended up selling cosmetics door-to-door in the desert wind.”

It was in El Paso, at age 22, that she wrote “Some Dare to Dream,” then put the manuscript aside because the Holocaust was a socially uncomfortable topic.

When her marriage foundered, Krieger divorced and moved to Los Angeles in 1948. She came to Whittier a couple of years later. She married a local businessman named Krieger and had two daughters before that relationship also ended in divorce.

Krieger held jobs as a Hebrew teacher and music director at a local synagogue before opening Frieda’s Custom Hair Design in Whittier. Since then, the business has given her a comfortable life, she said.

European Flavor

Her daughters are grown and happily married. And the decor of the East Whittier home she calls her “dream house,” like her shop, evokes the Europe she left behind.

A walnut grand piano sits in one corner of the living room beside champagne-colored curtains with festooned valances. Tapestries in heavy frames hang on the walls, and a candelabra stands on a coffee table.

Surrounded by copies of favorable book reviews, Krieger talks of her plan to write another book. This one will be about her life since she arrived in America.

“I finally have it all together, but I still want to do more,” she said. “If you quit wanting to do other things, you’re dead.”