Sam (Samuel) Fried

Survived by his loving wife Frances Fried; children, Susan Fried, Sandi and Ed Fried, Julie and Jim Fried, Kimberly and Andrew Robinson, Mark Robinson, Nancy Robinson Rech; and 14 grandchildren. Preceded in death by his loving wife, Magda Fried, and daughter-in-law, Paula Robinson.

MEMORIAL SERVICE 11am Thursday, April 14 at Beth El Synagogue, 14506 California St., Omaha. Donations please to: Sam and Frances Fried Holocaust and Genocide Education Fund (#01133430) or The University of Nebraska Foundation, P. O. Box 82555, Lincoln, NE 68501.

JEWISH FUNERAL HOME 402-556-9392
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From the Omaha World Herald Newspaper:

Nebraska’s most widely known Holocaust survivor never forgot the concentration camp smell of burning flesh.

“I can still remember,” he said, “someone pointing to the smoke from chimneys and saying, ‘There are your parents.’ ”

Sam Fried, who wore the prison ID A-5053 on his left arm, survived Auschwitz and eventually arrived in Omaha. He operated a successful business, Master Electronics

In later years he spoke to thousands of students and raised money to start university programs on genocide and other atrocities.

Fried died Monday of heart complications at 87 and will be remembered at 11 a.m. Thursday at Beth El Synagogue. He believed in tikkun olam, acts of kindness performed to repair the world.

“He just had a strong belief in the power of the human being,” said daughter Susan Fried of Boston. “Even though he had seen human beings at their absolute worst, he still somehow believed in our ability to rise up above that and to do good.”

David Boocker, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, said Fried believed in the future and left a legacy of education.

“Sam emerged from the most terrible experience anybody could imagine,” Boocker said, “but he was more than a survivor. He triumphed, and his life was such a great contribution to society.”

Sam Fried was raised in an idyllic childhood in Rakosin, Czechoslovakia. But in 1944, his family and other Jewish families were rounded up by Nazis and placed on cattle-car trains to Auschwitz.

He was about 15 when he got off the train and told captors he was 18. A doctor — he said it was the notorious Josef Mengele — sent Sam to a work camp but ordered his parents to the gas chambers.

His mother’s last words to him: “Save yourself.”

Fried was often beaten, and his weight dropped to a skin-and-bones 80 pounds. But on a forced march to another camp, in early 1945, he hid under a bed and escaped into the woods, eventually meeting up with Russian soldiers.

In Europe after the war, he married Magda, also an Auschwitz survivor. They arrived in America in August 1949, and he often said he was “born the day I came to this country

The couple soon arrived in Omaha, raised three children and put them through college, but kept a low profile on the Holocaust. In 1979, though, after a neo-Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois, Sam and Magda began speaking out.

They helped organize an Omaha dinner at which survivors honored liberators, including World War II veteran Louis Blumkin of the Nebraska Furniture Mart family.

Magda died of cancer in 1985, and Sam continued speaking publicly. His second wife, Frances, supported his Holocaust work and helped raise funds.

In 2001, in the week after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, Sam urged immigrants to donate to the relief effort.

“Muslims, Christians, Jews — I challenge all immigrants,” he said. “The country needs them now.”

In 2002, the Frieds placed a “Six Million Lights Memorial” in each of four Omaha synagogues. The hand-cut stones each contained a light that blinked 6 million times a year — representing the 6 million Jews among the estimated 11 million people who died in the Holocaust.

In 2005, on the 60th anniversary of the end of the war and the liberation of concentration camps, Sam turned down an invitation to return to Auschwitz. He said it was not a cemetery but a slaughterhouse.

As he told students and others, an irony of the Holocaust’s inhumanity is that it came from a nation — Germany — that was not uncivilized but rather full of history, culture, poetry and art.

In his later years, Fried became the impetus behind the creation of an academic chair at UNO. Among the donors was Louis Blumkin, who had helped liberate Dachau.

“The liberators saved our lives,” Fried said in 2011. “Louie Blumkin was one of those men of valor. The Blumkins have been constant supporters of our efforts to educate — to ensure that we will never forget.”

Louis Blumkin died in 2013, but the academic efforts continued. An endowment fund started by the Frieds has grown to more than $1 million, supporting Holocaust education at UNO and four other campuses: Creighton University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the University of Nebraska at Kearney and Wayne State College.

UNO began offering a minor this semester in Holocaust and genocide studies.

“I was always amazed,” Dean Boocker of UNO said, “how Sam, in spite of his experiences, maintained a positive outlook on life and on human nature. All of us who knew him and adored him are eternally grateful.”

Besides his wife, Frances, and daughter Susan, Fried is survived by sons Ed, of Kansas City, Missouri, and Jim, of Omaha, as well as their spouses, his stepchildren and 14 grandchildren.

In addition to the morning service Thursday, the family will welcome the public to Beth El, 14506 California St., starting at 5:30 p.m.

When honored at UNO a few years ago, Sam Fried said: “I feel like I’ve been to hell, and now I’ve ended up in heaven.”

His health had slipped the past two years, and he recently ran a high fever and suffered heart problems before he died Monday night.

“My dad talked a lot recently,” Susan Fried said, “about the last thing his mother said to him, to ‘Save yourself.’ And that he really dedicated his life not just to honor that, but to make a life and show her that he did much more than just save himself.

“He created so much more. I don’t know of very many people who went through what he did and changed the lives of so many.”

• Reference: Find A Grave Memorial - SmartCopy: Jun 18 2016, 18:46:21 UTC