Author honors grandmother’s life and legacy

Robert Fried grew up hearing about his grandmother’s suffering and survival during the Holocaust. In 2013, he published a book of poems he wrote about her when he was a boy, and is now dedicated to honoring her experience and all of the victims by helping to document more survivors’ stories.

“I was always asked as a kid, Why would you want to write such depressing poetry?” said Fried, 37. “I said, ‘Well, this is what my interest is.’ And 25 years later, I wrote a book that is in museums all around the world.”

The book, “From Generation To…” is a collection of poems Fried wrote between the ages of 10 and 17. They are based on his imaginings of the accounts he heard from his grandmother, Rebecca Fried, 85, whose family was sent to concentration camps from their home in Czechoslovakia when the Nazis took control. Rebecca was imprisoned at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Illustrations in Fried’s book recreate poignant scenes that stuck out to him as a boy, like one of a Nazi SS guard speaking to a young Rebecca, who had asked where her parents were. The guard is pointing toward the smoke rising from a smokestack in the background.

“Basically, ‘This is where they are,’” Fried said. “They’re up in the clouds.”

The book has been added to the collections at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the library at Yad Vashem in Israel, the Jewish Museum in Prague, Czech Republic, and the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan.

Gathering information comes naturally to Fried, a forensic scientist who works with digital evidence. He helped arrange the documentation in 2012 of his grandmother’s experience aboard the famous SS Exodus, the ship filled with Jewish refugees that attempted to land in British Mandatory Palestine, or present-day Israel, in 1947, only to be sent back to Germany by the British.