The Jew who got a job offer from the Nazis

"I saw two civilians coming towards me. Each one had a hat on and a long black leather coat, and I recognised them immediately, this must be two people from the Gestapo," says Freddie Knoller.

It was July 1943. Twenty-two-year-old Knoller, had managed to obtain false papers and get work in occupied Paris introducing Nazi soldiers to the nightclubs and brothels of the red light district. But that day he was arrested and taken to Gestapo headquarters.

In a large room with a portrait of Adolf Hitler hanging on the wall, one of the officers interrogated him.

"While he was talking, I saw on his desk a plaster head of a human being and he saw me looking at it and he said, 'Oh this plaster head, that's the head of a Jew, because we were taught how to recognise Jews by the structure of their head,'" says Knoller.

"With that he got up from his desk, went behind me and he took my head between his two hands, tracing it. I'm not ashamed to say I wet my pants because I was so sure I would now be recognised as a Jew.

"He said, 'Oh yes, I can see you come from a good German background and I think you should be joining our organisation as an interpreter, you will be earning a lot of money and finally you will be working with your own people.'

"I felt so amazed, laughing [to] myself… 'Wow what an adventure to be able to get away from the Gestapo, and they want me to work with them.'"

But it was a job offer that Knoller had no intention of accepting. He quickly made himself scarce.

This was the third time he had found himself under Nazi occupation. The first, he had to leave his home in Vienna as a 17-year-old in 1938 when Austria was annexed by Germany in the Anschluss.

His parents sent him to stay with friends in Belgium where they thought he would be safe, but when Hitler invaded the country in 1940, Knoller had to flee for a second time.

He chose to go to France. "I read in these naughty books all about Paris, about Montmartre, about the Moulin Rouge with the half-naked dancers on the stage and this is where I wanted to go," he says.

But things went wrong almost immediately. He was arrested at the French border for having a German passport and was interned in a camp for France's enemies in May 1940. After the Nazis invaded France a month later, he managed to escape and finally made his way to the bright lights of Paris.

But his run-in with the Gestapo made him realise it was too dangerous for him to stay there.

Instead of taking up their job offer, he turned to a friend for help and was introduced to the leader of the French Resistance. He went to live in the mountains near the town of Figeac in southern France, fighting the occupying German soldiers.

"It was a great joy for me to fight my enemies instead of earning money from them," says Knoller.

He learned how to shoot a gun and wire up explosives to derail an enemy troop train.

"Our leader… made sure that whenever we put explosives on to the railway line, we hid it with leaves, grass, so it shouldn't be noticed immediately. Then he told us that we should go and observe, but quite far away, what is going to happen, up in the hills.

"The train came, we heard the explosion, we saw the first engine topple over on the side and the whole thing just collapsed, but we ran away immediately back to our resistance group. I must say it was wonderful."

(BBC)