Survivor shares memories of loss, liberation<\/b><\/p>\n
Even at the age of 80, Mercer Island resident Henry Friedman still has vivid memories of his childhood in Brody, Poland \u2014 memories he wishes he could forget.<\/p>\n
The Holocaust survivor related his haunting story to an audience of area students May 30 at the Kent-Meridian High School Performing Arts Center, giving the younger generation a firsthand account of one of the darkest periods in history.<\/p>\n
Friedman, chairman of the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center, brought students back to 1939 Poland, when the Russians bombed his hometown and paved the way for Nazi occupation in the largely Jewish town.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy city of Brody was burning, but what caught my eyes was a horse lying across from my house,\u201d Friedman said. \u201cHe had such big eyes, and he had a big wound in his side \u2014 a bullet wound or a shrapnel wound. I was just mesmerized by the sight until my mother came over and put her hand over my eyes. I was 11 years old at that time.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Nazis invaded in 1941 and quickly began revoking many of the Jews\u2019 basic human rights. Friedman lost three uncles to Nazi executioners within the first several months of occupation, and German officers raided his home, taking all of his family\u2019s possessions. Friedman remembers trying to keep an officer from stealing his mother\u2019s wedding ring from her finger.<\/p>\n
\u201cI ran looking for the pistol my father kept, and luckily I didn\u2019t find it because I wouldn\u2019t be here to tell you the story,\u201d he told the high-school audience.<\/p>\n
Every Jew was required to wear an arm band with the five-point Star of David for identification, Friedman said, and the new \u201claw of the land\u201d offered his people no protection from German and Ukrainian mistreatment, violence and murder. His mother was beaten so badly she couldn\u2019t lift her arms for months, and his cousin was forced to clean out an outhouse with her bare hands, he remembers.<\/p>\n
When Jews were herded into ghettos in 1942, the Friedman family went into hiding in a nearby village with two different Ukrainian Christian families. Friedman, his mother, his younger brother and a female teacher his father hired were hidden in a tiny loft in a barn, in which they only had space to sit or lay down. His father hid alone in a similar space in a nearby barn.<\/p>\n
The family would be in hiding for 18 months.<\/p>\n
Friedman had a white sheet the size of his old hiding place on stage at the Kent-Meridian presentation, and he invited four volunteers up to show the way they were situated in their hiding place.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was stuck there with two females and my kid brother, so I was not a happy camper,\u201d he told the students. \u201cEighteen months I spent like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said the Christian family would send up two meals a day at first, but as the months wore on, meals were reduced to once a day. The four were freezing from the cold and slowly starving, but they had another problem. Friedman\u2019s mother was pregnant.<\/p>\n
He choked up as he told the students of the family\u2019s decision to kill the baby to spare its suffering and ensure their survival. They took a vote, and Friedman admits his vote was to kill his newborn sibling \u2014 a girl.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy that time we were infested with lice and fleas,\u201d he said. \u201cWe were starving. We were living in constant fear. I sat facing the other way as my teacher helped my mother give birth to this miracle, and then she was killed. I tell you this so you understand how inhumane those times were.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said he still lives with the guilt of his vote.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m 80 years old now, and I have to go to the grave with this guilt that when I was 14 years old I made a decision to kill another human being,\u201d Friedman said.<\/p>\n
In 1944, he said the family heard shells flying outside the barn walls, and it was \u201cmusic to their ears.\u201d The Russians soon liberated them that March, their bodies emaciated but still alive, and they returned to Brody in July to find the once 15,000-strong community of Jews reduced to less than 100. Friedman\u2019s family was the only Jewish family in the town to survive intact.<\/p>\n
Friedman\u2019s poignant story was part of a long-running, annual Holocaust speaker series organized by Kent Mountain View Academy educator Pat Gallagher. This year\u2019s series also featured Nazi death camp survivor Robbie Waisman and Buchenwald liberator Leo Hymas.<\/p>\n
Gallagher said the series is aimed at educating young people about the atrocities of the past in order to better prepare them for the future.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think this is the only way to curb this type of thing happening again,\u201d Gallagher said.<\/p>\n
He also said World War II survivors are nearing the ends of their lives now, and there may not be many more chances to hear their stories.<\/p>\n
\u201cLiberators are dying at a rate of 1,000 a day right now,\u201d Gallagher said. \u201cThese students will walk out the door in June having experienced something most students never will.\u201d<\/p>\n
Contact Daniel Mooney at 253-437-6012 or dmooney@reporternewspapers.com.<\/p>\n
Learn more<\/p>\n
To learn more about the Holocaust, visit the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center Web site, www.wsherc.org. Henry Friedman\u2019s book, \u201cI\u2019m No Hero: Journeys of a Holocaust Survivor,\u201d can be purchased online from major bookstores.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Even at the age of 80, Mercer Island resident Henry Friedman still has vivid memories of his childhood in Brody, Poland \u2014 memories he wishes he could forget.
\nThe Holocaust survivor related his haunting story to an audience of area students May 30 at the Kent-Meridian High School Performing Arts Center, giving the younger generation a firsthand account of one of the darkest periods in history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":12189,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-12188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12188"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12188\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12188"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=12188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}