Joepie, 1981: Abandoned war-child finds comfort in music

Here's part two of the 1981 Belgian Joepie-series: Frida.

In 1977 Frida found her father thanks to an article in a German teenage-magazine. In an interview she had told he was a German officer who was stationed in Norway during the war, but had left back home with his troops afterwards. Frida nor her mother had heard from him since, that’s why she assumed him to be dead. A few days after the article had been published, she was proven wrong. A certain Alfred Haase had read Frida’s moving confessions, was startled finding out he was Frida’s father and contacted the magazine’s publisher. His story was verified and also confirmed by the authorities. A few weeks after that Frida met her father for the first time in her life.
Frida was born November the 15th 1945 in the Norwegian village Narvik. Her mother Synne Lyngstad had met the German officer Alfred Haase during the last year of the war and had experienced a romantic summer with him. This all ended when Alfred was called back to Germany. Although he promised to return, she never heard from him again. Extensive research by Frida’s mother led to the wrong conclusion that Haase had died. That loss was too much for her. Two years later Frida’s mother died, lonely and abandoned. She was only 21 years old. Little Frida found shelter with her grandmother.
Pretty soon the old lady found out her granddaughter was given a hard time, because her father was an unknown German soldier. They decided to move to the Swedish village Torshälla, where grandmother was making a living as a nanny.
Aged 13, Frida started singing with a dance-band. She had to lie about her age, otherwise she wasn’t able to get a working-licence. “If that bandleader had known I was only 13, he never would have hired me,” says Frida.
A few years later she was hired as a singer with Bengt Sandlunds’ jazz-orchestra. With the bass-player of that orchestra, Ragnar Eriksson, it was love at first sight. Shortly after that, Frida and Ragnar started their own band, Anni-Frid Four. They got married and had two children, Hans (1963) and Liselott (1967). In the same year that her second child was born, Frida had her first big hit. She had won a TV-show with the song 'Free Day' and a week later it was at number eight in the Swedish charts. The success continued, and a year later Frida was one of Sweden’s most popular singers. However, in the meantime her marriage had ended. In 1969 she met Benny Andersson at a concert in Malmö. He was performing there with the Hep Stars. A few weeks later they started living together, but it wasn’t until 1978 that they got married.

The happiness wouldn’t last for long. In the winter of 1980 Benny met another woman, for whom he left Frida. Six weeks after her divorce, Frida revealed there was a new man in her life: Bertil Hjert (37), vice-president of a textile-company in Uppsala. Frida: “He has become a part of my life. Marriage isn’t important to me any longer. But I can’t live without love.”