Parents were Polish/Jewish Holocaust Survivors

Journalist and author with many years experience in story telling

Max Friedman’s parents were Polish/Jewish Holocaust survivors who met in Sweden (where he and his sister were born) after their liberation from Bergen-Belsen.

While Max has been telling the stories of others for his whole career — as a journalist, publicist, corporate editorial director and memoir ghostwriter, but avoided his own family history. He finally got to share his own story by penning a stirring family memoir, Painful Joy: A Holocaust Family Memoir (Amsterdam Publishers, 2022 - available on Amazon). It was a five-year-long journey that began when he was nearly 70 years old, spurred by a question posed by his eight-year-old grandson.

Max talks about what he discovered about the early lives of his parents, and then about their surviving five years of ghettos, slave labor and concentration camps, losing everyone and everything they had ever loved. After emigrating to the U.S. in 1952, his parents spoke little about their past – though their physical and psychological wounds were apparent to their children every day. For Max and his sister, it was enough to simply survive their survival. His journey also focuses on his family living with those traumas in the shadow of the Holocaust.

Max is a member of GenerationsForward, a group of second and third generation individuals sponsored by the Holocaust & Human Rights Education Center of White Plains, New York.

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