Frieda Belinfante was born in Amsterdam in 1904. Her father Ary was Jewish, her mother Georgina was Christian. Trained as a musician, Frieda was one of the first female conductors. During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Frieda joined a Dutch resistance group. She forged identity documents for people hiding from the Nazis and their collaborators and helped to plan an attack on Amsterdam’s population registry. Klaus Mueller, the Holocaust Museum’s European Representative, interviewed Frieda when she was 90 years old, just 9 months before she passed away.
See also: Frieda Belinfante, een dirigente in het verzet – Lecture on Frieda Belinfante, Amsterdam, May 4, 2019
Please see tribute to Lesbians and Gay men in the resistance during Pride Month 2021 in USHMM Facebook Live Event called Pride Month: Defying Nazi Persecution.. Watch the conversation to learn about Frieda Belinfante, one of Europe’s first female conductors and a lesbian, and painter Willem Arondeus, the gay leader of this group of artists turned resisters. Being gay, their stories of courage were erased for many decades. A conversation between Edna Friedberg and Klaus Mueller
More videos on the Nazi persecution of homosexuals
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