Bergenfield—Just over 75 years ago, an 8-year-old girl left her home in Salzburg, Austria and embarked on a 15-year odyssey that led her to Bergenfield, where she has made her home and helped build the Modern Orthodox community here for the past 60 years.

Today, Margaret Kohlhagen is a community treasure. She is a celebrated volunteer at Care One, as well as the Jewish Home at Rockleigh, and she is a volunteer patient ambassador at Englewood Hospital. In fact, it’s difficult to get her on the phone most days because she is expected as a volunteer in a different place each weekday.

Kohlhagen is a longtime life member of Hadassah and has her own seat at her beloved shul in Bergenfield, Congregation Beth Abraham, the roots of which began in her home. She recently had guests over to view the film about her life that was made by Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Victims History Foundation, in which she described her family’s unique escape from Nazi-controlled Austria and greater Europe.

The story Kohlhagen relays for the time period from 1938 to 1941 is unique in that it shows the affection of the adults around her and the lengths that her parents went to protect their children from the influence of the Nazis, even during several frenetic years of travel, escape, and bribery.

Kohlhagen, or Marge, as her large circle of friends affectionately call her, was born Margaret Friedmann to Otto, a lumber merchant, and Hilda, at that time a housewife, in 1930. Her older brother, Fred, was born in Salzburg four years earlier. Marge described a very secure, close upbringing by her parents in a large, comfortable home, with no understanding of the doors of opportunity closing for Jews. “I was a child,” she said. “Children didn’t listen to the radio and the things that were happening in the world were not discussed with children in those days,” she said.

However, when the Anshluss began in Austria in March of 1938, Marge was no longer permitted to attend her public school, and so was moved, with all the other Jewish children in Salzburg, to a school called the Cloisters, the famous Catholic school that was featured in the 1965 Julie Andrews film, The Sound of Music. The nuns were kind and she and the other Jews in the school were excused from religious studies, so she said this too was acceptable and comfortable. She had no inkling that she was “different,” or that anything was happening in the world that would affect her negatively. “My world was my parents and my brother, and my friends, and I wasn’t aware of anything else,” she said.

It was only after Kristallnacht, in November of 1938, that her parents determined it was impossible to stay in Salzburg. Otto, who frequently traveled to Switzerland and France for work with his export-import business, simply stayed in Switzerland and began making plans for his family’s escape.

“He made arrangements for my brother and me to be smuggled into Switzerland, with a Swiss national, remembered only as Gita, who posed as our mother. She had obtained a false passport registering Fred and me as her children,” she said. “Since I was too young to understand this delicate situation, and the possibility of my saying the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong person, I was told I was going to camp with my brother, with a lady we did not know, who was a business associate of my father. “I had no fear because I was with Fred and everything seemed okay,” Kohlhagen said.

Kohlhagen described a train trip that led to crossing the border between Austria and Switzerland on foot, “just like the von Trapp family in the Sound of Music,” she said.

The journey took 12 hours. The younger Friedmanns were reunited with their father in Basel, Switzerland, where her father made a phone call to her mother back in Salzburg, who described the previous 12 hours as having been the worst of her life, since she had spent the entire time worrying about her childrens’ welfare.

It wasn’t until February 1939, three months later, until arrangements could be completed for Hilda’s safe passage to Switzerland. The papers were made by Paul Grüninger, the police chief of St. Gallen, Switzerland, who was also known as the “Swiss Schindler,” credited with having saved 3,601 Austrian Jews by falsifying documents and backdating passports to help them cross the border. He was convicted of treason and went to jail several months later. After leaving jail, he was ostracized.

“He was a righteous gentile. A tree is planted in his memory at Yad Vashem,” Kohlhagen said. [Grüninger, who died in poverty in 1972, has since had his name cleared by his grandchildren and several sources name him as having performed the greatest acts of courage by any Swiss citizen in the Nazi era.]

Later, Kohlhagen learned that the her mother had spent the previous three months being harassed by the Nazis, who constantly asked her where her husband was.

“She finally told them that he had abandoned her and taken the children. The Nazis then gave her 24 hours to evacuate our beautiful house—a four story house that had four tremendous apartments, one on each floor,” she said. No restitution was ever made to the family for the seized house.

The arrival in Switzerland is far from the end of the story. Kohlhagen and her family then began what she described as three years of “stop-and-go” travels, which meant living in 11 different homes in seven countries, for periods of time lasting a few days to a few months, according to the will of temporary immigration visas and her father’s business contacts. Many of the locations where they stayed were in France, but “they did not want Jews either and only because my father had business connections and had always traveled through these areas, was he able to obtain temporary visas,” she said.

First, they lived in Lichtenstein: “I went to school on skis, to a one-room schoolhouse,” Kohlhagen said. When that visa expired a few months later, they moved on to various locations in France: Mulhausen, in Alsace-Lorraine, and then on to Besançon, Agen (near Boardeaux), and finally Marseilles.

Emigration began from Marseilles, first to Madrid, Spain, then to Estoril, a coastal town in Portugal, and finally to Lisbon, where they departed for New York on the S.S. Excalibur, an American luxury ocean liner, in July 1941. “Only two tickets were available for us on the ships, so my father and brother left first and my mother and I sailed a few weeks later,” she said.

Ironically, crossing the Atlantic presents to Kohlhagen the most difficult and unpleasant memory of the previous several years. “I was continuously seasick and so frustrated, because after having lived on food rations, here the ship offered any kind of food you wanted, especially ice cream, with so many different flavors I never heard of. But I was too seasick to eat anything.”

Perhaps Ernest Kohlhagen, z”l, Marge’s husband who passed away in 2007, described Marge the best, at the conclusion of the film made about her life: “Her childhood was disrupted, completely. She was not given the opportunity to grow up as a normal child, only for one reason, because she was Jewish. She underwent many transformations and lived in many different countries until she got here, and I have often wondered how this affected her personality.

“In that sense, we have a word, Aishes Chayil. She has given and gives so much of herself, in terms of working at hospitals, charitable organizations, synagogues. I’m sure if you can find anything in terms of anything good coming out of a bad situation like that, this is a little bit of an excuse for what happened, that it has made her who she is.”

By Elizabeth Kratz