Biography
Samuel Fried (May 25, 1928*-April 11, 2016) was an entrepreneur and a Holocaust survivor. Despite the horrors he witnessed and endured, he believed in tikkun olam, the Jewish concept of performing acts of kindness to repair the world.
Fried was born and raised in Rakosin, Czechoslovakia (present day Rakoshyno, Ukraine), and Mukacevo, Czechoslovakia (present day Mukacheve, Ukraine). He was orphaned in 1944 at the age of 14 or 15, when approximately forty members of his family, including his parents, were executed in Auschwitz. When his parents were sent to the gas chambers, he was sent to a work camp near Auschwitz, a coalmine in Jaworzno, where he was responsible for electrical repairs, including working with high-voltage lines. The prisoner ID tattooed on his left arm was A-5053. In 1945, during the death march to another camp, he managed to escape by hiding underneath furniture. After three months hiding in the mountains, he met up with some Russian soldiers, who directed him toward a safe place.
In 1948, he married Magda Chunovic, another survivor of Auschwitz, and the couple moved to the United States in 1949 to create a new life together. At first, they lived in New York City, and Fried worked in a ballpoint pen factory. Three months later, they moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where they stayed for the rest of their lives. They raised three children together, Jim, Susan, and Ed.
In 1959, Fried founded Master Electronics in Omaha, then went on to various other business ventures, including Compu-Fix and Elite Service Club of America. He served on the Board of Trustees for Beth El Synagogue and Temple Israel, both in Omaha. He was also very active in several other Jewish organizations as well as electronics organizations. He was awarded an honorary PhD in Humane Letters from the University of Nebraska at Omaha in 2007.
Circa 1978, following a Neo-Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois, Sam and Magda Fried began to publicly speak out about their experiences during the Holocaust. They spoke at schools and community organizations, held a dinner in honor of liberators, and founded the Society of Survivors.
Magda Fried died of cancer in 1985. Sam Fried married Frances Robinson on December 16, 1990.
Sam and Frances Fried continued to work to further Holocaust education efforts. They placed Six Million Lights memorial plaques in four Omaha synagogues and established the Nebraska Holocaust Memorial in Lincoln. They established the Heartland Holocaust Educational Fund to fund educational programs, including the Sam and Frances Fried Holocaust and Genocide Academy, which offers a minor in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, the first college or university program in this field in the Midwest, launched in Spring 2016.
Sam Fried passed away on April 11, 2016, of heart complications.
* Several documents list Sam's birthdate as May 25, 1925. This date originated when he was sent to Auschwitz as a prisoner. As they were going through Dr. Mengele's life-or-death selection process, word spread among the new prisoners that young ones should say they were older and old ones should say they were younger, to increase their chances of survival. So when the young Fried's time came, he added three years to his age. The ruse was successful, and he was sent to work rather than to the gas chambers.
Sources:
Fried, Sam. "A-5053 Sam Fried Holocaust Survivor." UNO Libraries, Archives & Special Collections.
Fried, Sam. "A-5854 Magda Chunovic Fried Feb 14, 1929 to Nov 4, 1985." UNO Libraries, Archives & Special Collections.
"Holocaust survivor tells story to save others." University of Nebraska Foundation website. December 19, 2012. https://nufoundation.org/-/article-holocaust-survivor-tells-story-to-save-others
Kelly, Michael. "Holocaust survivor and businessman Sam Fried, who shared his story with thousands of students, dies." Omaha World-Herald. April 15, 2016.
O'Connor, Michael. "'For humanity's sake': Survivor's endowment funds UNO minor in Holocaust, genocide studies." Omaha World-Herald. March 8, 2016.
van de Kamp-Wright, Annette. "Frances and Sam Fried create Holocaust and Genocide Studies Minor." The Jewish Press. December 9, 2015.
"Who is Sam Fried?" Sam and Frances Fried Holocaust and Genocide Academy website. Viewed November 30, 2018. https://www.unomaha.edu/college-of-arts-and-sciences/holocaust-and-genocide-studies/fried-academy/bio.php
Found in 16 Collections and/or Records:
File
Identifier: MSS-0129_education
Scope and Contents
This is a three-volume set of information about the Holocaust Education Fund created by Sam and Frances Fried for the purpose of providing education courses at the college and university level, with the aim of fostering understanding, compassion, and mutual respect toward the end of preventing mass atrocities like the Holocaust and other acts of genocide throughout the world. The Fund has financed courses at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of...
Dates:
1966-2013
File — Box 1
Identifier: MSS-0129_education_1
Scope and Contents
The first volume covers the period circa 1966-2006 and contains information on the Frances and Sam Fried Holocaust and Genocide Education Fund, including printouts from the Fund website, correspondence, meeting agendas, meeting minutes, news clippings, press releases, legal documents, speech transcripts, strategic planning documents, financial reports, fundraising forms and fliers, reports, event programs, course syllabi, student papers on the lessons of the Holocaust, thank you notes from...
Dates:
1966-2006; Digitized: 3/8/2018
File — Box 2
Identifier: MSS-0129_education_2
Scope and Contents
The second volume covers the period circa 2006-2009 and contains course materials, syllabi, student assignments, poems about the Holocaust written by students, thank you notes from students, news articles, correspondence, financial records, meeting minutes, fundraising brochures, photographs, and reports. Most of the documents are original and a few are reproductions.Included are records of the National Holocaust Endowment Fund, the Heartland Holocaust Educational Fund, and...
Dates:
2006-2009; Digitized: 11/19/2018
File — Box 4
Identifier: MSS-0129_education_3
Scope and Contents
The third volume covers the period circa 2010-2013 and contains news articles, press releases, event programs, speech transcripts, meeting minutes, correspondence, organizational records, financial records, photographs, student papers about the Holocaust, a teacher's guide to the Holocaust, and other educational materials. Most of the documents are original and a few are reproductions.Included are organizational records of the Heartland Holocaust Educational Fund and the Sam and...
Dates:
2009-2013; Digitized: 4/10/2018
File — Box 1
Identifier: MSS-0129_government
Scope and Contents
This volume covers the period from 1938 to 2013 and contains government documents, correspondence, proclamations, reports, newsletters, event programs, speech transcripts, photographs, and certificates. Most of the documents are original and a few are reproductions.The first document in this volume is an October 28, 1938, telegram from Leipzig to the Secretary of State regarding the forced exodus of Polish Jews from Germany, followed by further telegrams regarding the...
Dates:
1938-2013; Digitized: 2/23/2018
File — Box 1
Identifier: MSS-0129_jma
Scope and Contents
This volume covers the period from 2006 to 2008 and contains information related to the Jewish Motorcyclists Alliance (JMA) and the 2008 Ride to Remember. The Ride to Remember was a charity fundraising event to benefit the Heartland Holocaust Educational Fund. The event took place on Friday, May 23, 2008, wherein approximately 100 Jewish motorcyclists from all over the United States and Canada rode from Omaha to Lincoln. Once they arrived in Lincoln, they attended a ceremony at the Nebraska...
Dates:
2007-2008; Digitized: 11/19/2018
Scope and Contents
Sam Fried created an index to his personal archives. He originally created this as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with two tabs of content, one sorted by date and the other by book. Both indexes have three columns: date of the item, description of item, and book containing that item. There are 637 items described by Fried in the index.Fried printed the contents of this spreadsheet and bound them as the eleventh volume of the physical set in 2013. UNO Libraries Archives &...
Dates:
2013; Record Keeping: 1925-2013
File
Identifier: MSS-0129_index-book
Scope and Contents
This PDF was saved from the Book tab of Sam Fried's Excel spreadsheet index to his collection. This is the same content as the second portion of the printed notebook.
Dates:
2013; Record Keeping: 1925-2013; Digitized: 12/4/2018
File
Identifier: MSS-0129_index-date
Scope and Contents
This PDF was saved from the Date tab of Sam Fried's Excel spreadsheet index to his collection. This is the same content as the first portion of the printed notebook.
Dates:
2013; Record Keeping: 1925-2013; Digitized: 12/4/2018
File — Box 6
Identifier: MSS-0129_index
Scope and Contents
This volume contains a printout of Sam Fried's own index spreadsheet, printed and compiled into book form by Fried in 2013. The first section of the index is sorted by date, with items from different notebooks interfiled. The second section of the index is sorted by book, non-chronological except insofar as items were chronological within each individual notebook.Sam Fried's Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, from which this notebook was printed, is also available upon request. The...
Dates:
2013; Record Keeping: 1925-2013; Digitized: 12/4/2018
File — Box 1
Identifier: MSS-0129_survivor
Scope and Contents
This volume contains Sam Fried's autobiography, told with photographs, letters, passports, maps, travel documents, citizenship documents, news articles, patent documents, writings about Fried, and writing by Fried. The scrapbook includes a mix of original documents and reproductions. Several early documents are in Czech. The majority of the documents are in English.The first part of this volume covers his childhood in Mukacevo, Czechosolovakia (present day Mukacheve, Ukraine);...
Dates:
1925-2013; Digitized: 5/10/2018
File
Identifier: MSS-0129_society
Scope and Contents
This is a two-volume set of information about the Society of Survivors, which was founded by Sam and Magda Fried in 1978 and legally incorporated on July 11, 1979. At first, the Society numbered about 60 members, all Holocaust survivors living in Omaha, Nebraska. Sam Fried was elected the first Chair of the organization. Within a year, the organization had grown to about 100 members from Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska, and Sioux City, Iowa. The organization spoke out against Holocaust deniers,...
Dates:
1967-2013
File — Box 2
Identifier: MSS-0129_society_1
Scope and Contents
The first volume covers the period from 1967 to 1979 (predominantly from 1978 to 1979) and contains articles, meeting minutes, news clippings, correspondence, memoranda, fact sheets, event programs, photographs, and other organizational records of the Society of Survivors. Most of the documents are original and a few are reproductions.Much of the documentation relates to the Holocaust Survivors/Liberators Dinner on April 7, 1979, to honor American Veterans who helped liberate the...
Dates:
1967-1979; Digitized: 11/27/2018
File — Box 2
Identifier: MSS-0129_society_2
Scope and Contents
The second volume covers the period from 1979 to 2013 and contains news clippings, correspondence, event programs, newsletters, meeting agendas, photographs, and other organizational records of the Society of Survivors. Some of the documents are original and some are reproductions.The first half of the volume relates to the Holocaust Survivors/Liberators Dinner on April 7, 1979, including copies of thank you notes sent to participants, lists of veterans who attended or were...
Dates:
Deaccession: 1979-2013; Digitized: 11/30/2018
File
Identifier: 2019-086
Scope and Contents
The collection also includes copies of six video recordings of Magda and Sam Fried sharing their experiences as survivors of the Holocaust. In "Rising City” Magda Fried shares her experiences as a survivor in a 30-minute video, which was probably a home movie. The recording "Magda and Sam Fried – Holocaust Survivors" is Magda and Sam Fried being interviewed by Cookie Hoberman for a television program in Omaha, Nebraska. These and other recordings appear to have been copied from DVDs and were...
Dates:
circa 1980-1985
Collection — Multiple Containers
Identifier: MSS-0129
Scope and Contents
These eleven volumes were compiled by Holocaust survivor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Sam Fried in 2013. Through thousands of pages of documents including letters, speeches, photographs, and other material, Fried shared the story of his life with his wife and fellow Holocaust survivor Magda Fried, and philanthropist and wife Frances Fried. The books as titled by Fried are: A-5053 Sam Fried Holocaust Survivor; A-5854 Magda Chunovic Fried, Feb 14, 1929 To Nov 4, 1985; A-5053 Sam Fried...
Dates:
1925-2013; Digitized: 2018
