In June 1941 German troops conquered Riga. The Jewish tailor Frīda Frīd had to perform forced labor and move into the ghetto soon after. In December 1941, she narrowly escaped a mass execution in the Rumbula Forest. She pretended to be dead and went undiscovered among the many corpses. She managed to escape and went into hiding.
Non-Jewish former neighbors, acquaintances, and complete strangers gave Frīda Frīd food and shelter. She had to keep finding new hiding places in and around Riga, since the helpers feared discovery if she stayed too long. In early 1942, while staying with a Mrs. Pesla, Frīda Frīd received a visit from the Latvian police. Under interrogation, she successfully denied her Jewish origins, but had to leave the hiding place for safety reasons.
Olivia Viļumson continued to find new hiding places for Frīda Frīd with members of Riga’s Adventist community. From the spring of 1943, the Viļumson family let her stay on their own farm. When in danger of discovery, Frīda Frīd slept in a pit in the nearby forest. As the front came closer, she had to spend the last weeks of the war until liberation in October 1944 in a bunker she had dug out of the earth in the forest.