Fredericka Martin came to Greenbelt in April of 1939 to be the supervising nurse at the new Greenbelt hospital. Born in 1905 in Cooperstown, N.Y., Martin graduated nursing school in Christ Hospital in New Jersey and served as supervisor and head nurse in several hospitals in New York City. During the early 1930s, she became active in the nurses’ union, attended political science classes, began to study foreign languages and first went abroad in 1935, traveling to England, Germany and Russia.
Concerned about the growing threat of fascism in Europe, Martin joined the Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy and went to Spain in January 1937 to serve as chief nurse and administrator of the American Hospital division, supervising the work of 54 nurses and helping to set up six hospitals. (In 1936-38, 2,800 American volunteers, collectively known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, traveled to Spain to become part of the International Brigades of almost 40,000 men and women from over 50 countries who fought on the Republican side against the Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War.) After training Spanish women to assume some of the nursing and hospital administration duties, Martin returned to the U.S. in February 1938 and embarked on a yearlong national speaking tour, recruiting personnel and raising funds to keep the medical volunteers in Spain supplied. Not long after this, she moved to Greenbelt.
Martin, who Greenbelters came to know as “Freddie” (or “Freddy”), married Dr. Samuel Berenberg, Greenbelt’s public health officer, in June 1940. Freddie had spent her free time studying Maryland’s early history and that September the Berenbergs assisted for a week with an archaeological dig in St. Mary’s City, bringing home various colonial artifacts, which they were happy to show to interested Greenbelters (Greenbelt Cooperator, September 26, 1940). Later that year, Freddie was elected a member of the Maryland Historical Society in recognition of her “valuable contribution to the history of Maryland as a result of her research into the background of some of the state’s lesser-known landmarks” (Greenbelt Cooperator, January 2, 1941).
In June 1941, Dr. Berenberg took a leave of absence from his job to fill a post as the medical officer on the Pribilof Islands, some 200 miles off the coast of Alaska. There the Berenbergs managed a hospital for the indigenous Aleuts on St. Paul Island. Freddie immediately became immersed in Aleut culture, language and history. She also gave birth to a daughter, TobyAnne. When Japanese warplanes began to reconnoiter the Aleutian Islands and Pribilofs, the Berenbergs directed construction of an air raid shelter on their island and later managed the evacuation of the Aleuts to the Alaskan mainland.
The Berenbergs returned to Greenbelt in October 1942 but left for good in January 1944 when Dr. Berenberg was appointed chief of child health services for New York City’s Department of Health. Freddie continued writing the book she had started in Greenbelt (Greenbelt Cooperator, March 19, 1943), The Hunting of the Silver Fleece: Epic of the Fur Seal (published 1946, republished in 2021), and editing an Aleut language dictionary (The Aleut Language, https://library.alaska.gov/hist/hist_docs/docs/anlm/02057447.pdf), which Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes lauded as “breaking down the language barrier that had existed between us and some 3,000 American citizens living on the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska” (Greenbelt Cooperator, January 18, 1946).
After the Berenbergs divorced in 1950, Freddie and TobyAnne moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where Freddie worked for the next 40 years as a writer, translator and instructor in a Spanish language institute. She published an additional book, Sea Bears: The Story of the Fur Seal (1960) and, in 1986, was made an honorary citizen of St. Paul Island and awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Alaska. She also worked tirelessly to gather materials and conduct research for a book on the medical units in Spain during the Spanish Civil War but was not able to finish it before her death in Mexico in 1992.
Shortly before Freddie’s death, TobyAnne donated her mother’s papers to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. The collection transferred to New York University in 2001, with additional materials donated to the collection as recently as December 2023. The journal she kept in the Pribilofs was published in 2010 by University of Alaska Press, Before the Storm: A Year in the Pribilof Islands, 1941-1942.
To learn even more details of the remarkable life of this one-time Greenbelt resident, go to findingaids.library.nyu.edu/tamwag/alba_001 or alba-valb.org/volunteers/fredericka-imogen-cohen-martin.