Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    I'm No Hero: Journeys of a Holocaust Survivor
    Unavailable
    I'm No Hero: Journeys of a Holocaust Survivor
    Unavailable
    I'm No Hero: Journeys of a Holocaust Survivor
    Ebook282 pages3 hours

    I'm No Hero: Journeys of a Holocaust Survivor

    By Henry Friedman

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Henry Friedman was robbed of his adolescence by the monstrous evil that annihilated millions of European Jews and changed forever the lives of those who survived. When the Nazis overran their home town near the Polish-Ukrainian border, the Friedman family was saved by Ukrainian Christians who had worked at their farm. Henry, his mother, his younger brother, and a young schoolteacher—who had been hired by his father when Jews were forbidden to attend school—were hidden in a loft over the animal stalls at a neighbor’s farm; his father hid in another hayloft half a mile away.

    When the family was liberated by the Russians after eighteen months in hiding, Henry, at age fifteen, was emaciated and too weak to walk. The Friedmans eventually made their way to a displaced persons camp in Austria where Henry learned quickly to wheel and deal, seducing women of various ages and nationalities and mastering the intricacies of dealing in the black market. In I’m No Hero, he confronts with unblinking honesty the pain, the shame, and the bizarre comedy of his passage to adulthood.

    The family came to Seattle in 1949, where Henry Friedman has made his home ever since. In 1988 he returned with his wife to Brody and Suchowola, where he succeeded in finding Julia Symchuk, who, as a young girl, had warned his father that the Gestapo was looking for him, and whose family had hidden the Friedmans in their loft. The following year he was able to bring Julia to Seattle for a triumphal visit, where she was honored in many ways, although, as Friedman writes, “in her own country she had never been honored with anything except hard work.”

    Like many other survivors, Henry Friedman has found it difficult to confront his past. Like others, too, he has felt the obligation to bear witness. Now retired, he devotes much of his time to telling his story, which he believes is a message of hope, to thousands of schoolchildren throughout the Pacific Northwest. He has received national recognition for his role in establishing the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, and as a founder of the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Washington Press
    Release dateJul 1, 2011
    ISBN9780295801452
    Unavailable
    I'm No Hero: Journeys of a Holocaust Survivor

    Related to I'm No Hero

    Related ebooks

    Social Science For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Ancestry Releases Millions Of Records Of The Holocaust

      Sep 22, 2020

      Millions of records of Holocaust victims are now available to search for free on the family history website ancestry.com. Ancestry has recently completed its digitisation of records from the Arolsen Archives, adding nine million records made in the

      1 min read

    • Article

      Warsaw Rises

      May 17, 2018

      Home Army soldiers, using a pistol and a Błyskawica sub-machine gun, fight the German forces on the streets of Warsaw Four and a half hours of film recorded during the Warsaw Uprising has survived, giving a unique insight into the lives of soldiers

      13 min read

    • Article

      The Tangled Roots Of The Third Reich

      Oct 26, 2023

      WITH THE CENTENARY OF THE Weimar Republic’s founding just gone, and that of Hitler’s rise to power fast approaching, interest in modern German history is as strong as ever. New books about Nazism and World War II still adorn the shelves of most books

      5 min read

    • Article

      Our Problem With The Camps Isn't Semantic; It's Moral

      Jun 21, 2019

      When is it OK to call a concentration camp a concentration camp? If you answered, "When it's a concentration camp," you clearly weren't paying attention to the Mighty Wurlitzer of Beltway social media last week. The reedy first note was an Instagram

      3 min read

    • Article

      Commentary: Can The World Agree Upon A 'Common Memory' Of The Holocaust?

      Feb 16, 2018

      My mother and father were survivors of Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald. All that remained of our family tree were a few yellowed photographs tucked away in a drawer. I can't pinpoint exactly when I first learned that, aside from my parents, every cl

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Education of Bill Oliver

      Aug 28, 2018

      The Education of Bill Oliver
      16 min read

    • Article

      To Prague, With Love

      Oct 4, 2020

      To Prague, With Love
      9 min read

    • Article

      Deceitful Toys

      Aug 4, 2020

      Deceitful Toys
      3 min read

    • Article

      Power Trip

      Aug 31, 2021

      Power Trip
      5 min read

    • Article

      Veil of Shadows: On Jewish Trauma, Place, and American Anti-Semitism

      Nov 27, 2018

      A little less than 50 miles from Krakow, at the confluence of the Vistula and Sola rivers, there is a town of slightly under 50,000 inhabitants named Oświęcim. The official tourist site for Oświęcim describes the city as being “attractive and friendl

      12 min read

    • Article

      The Saboteur Of Auschwitz

      Sep 12, 2019

      Author Colin Rushton Publisher Summersdale Publishers Price £8.99 Released Out now When soldier Arthur Dodd returned to England following VE Day on 8 May 1945, he was carrying a heavy burden that extended beyond the hardships of serving in World Wa

      1 min read

    • Article

      My Best Friend

      Oct 1, 2020

      My Best Friend
      6 min read

    • Article

      It’s Not the Holocaust

      Jun 22, 2018

      It’s Not the Holocaust
      3 min read

    Reviews for I'm No Hero

    3/5

    3 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      I'm No Hero reminded me of Scheisshaus Luck: irreverant, youthful, and full of hutzpah. Both authors were young men who found the war and their internment to be no reason to stop chasing women, taking advantage of opportunities for self-benefit, or struggling with the adolescent angst of moving from child to man. At times, I didn't like the people they were, but that doesn't make this a less important Holocaust memoir. I think it is important for those of us who come after that victims of the Holocaust were not first and foremost heroes, but people. People who acted with dignity and heroism, people who acted foolishly or with self-interest, people who did the best they could with little to no support or resources. After all, could we truly say that we could have done any differently?