Questions I Am Asked About The Holocaust

Can remembering the past truly protect us from repeating it? In Questions I Am Asked About the Holocaust, Holocaust survivor and psychologist Hédi Fried invites you to confront that question personally. Drawing on her experience in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and decades spent answering students’ questions, Fried contends that memory—if it is active, examined, and shared—is our most powerful moral safeguard. Forgetting, on the other hand, is the first step toward repetition.

Her book is structured simply: real questions asked by young audiences during her school visits (“Were you afraid?”, “Why did you not fight back?”, “Could it happen again?”) and her candid, reflective answers. Yet the result is not merely a memoir—it’s an ethical conversation between generations. Fried argues that the Holocaust is not just history; it’s a mirror for how prejudice, obedience, and apathy still work today. Understanding that psychology, she insists, is part of protecting democracy itself.

The Psychology of Ordinary People

Fried reminds us that the Holocaust was not executed only by fanatics. It was carried out by ordinary people—neighbors, teachers, policemen—who obeyed, adapted, or stayed silent. In speaking to students, she often hears, “Why didn’t people fight back?” or “Were there kind SS soldiers?” Her reply dismantles comforting myths: there were no real saviors among the oppressors. Evil, she explains, grew incrementally. People got used to injustice one step at a time, just as her own town of Sighet got used to wearing yellow stars and curfews before realizing they were trapped. Nazi rule blurred moral boundaries until most Germans—and many Hungarians—believed that cruelty was normal. Fried calls this the habit of adaptation, a human tendency to normalize the intolerable rather than resist it.

(Social psychologists have echoed this lesson since the 1960s. Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments revealed the same instinct Fried describes: an unsettling willingness to harm when told to do so by authority.)

Life, Loss, and the Fragility of Moral Worlds

The book begins with her life in pre-war Transylvania, a multilingual, multiethnic world where coexistence seemed normal—until small exclusions piled up. Anti-Semitic school rules and whispered rumors preceded deportations. Then came the cattle cars and separation from her parents on the ramp at Auschwitz. The moment Mengele’s hand sent her mother to the right and her to the left remains, she says, the worst moment of her life. But even amid horror, chance and solidarity determined survival. Her sister Livi, younger but fiercely devoted, kept her alive through illness, hunger, and despair. In Bergen-Belsen, Livi saved her again when she lay unconscious from typhus after liberation.

Fried writes that she survived by luck and by love—the love of her sister, and the instinct to protect one another. The camps were engineered to erase both, yet tiny gestures of human warmth—a shared potato, a joke whispered at night—became acts of rebellion. She also credits childhood security for her resilience; early love from her parents had built an inner wire of trust that the Nazis couldn’t cut.

The Long Work of Healing

After the war, recovery was not instant liberation but another kind of struggle. When she arrived in Sweden as part of the rescue transport, she discovered both compassion and distance: locals offered cocoa and food but couldn’t grasp her story. Writing, she found, became her therapy. Recording her memories turned grief into comprehension—a forerunner of trauma processing long before psychology gave it a name. Her diary became self-analysis, and over decades she transformed pain into teaching. “I finally realized I had survived so that someone could tell,” she writes. Speaking publicly gave her life renewed meaning—and a mission that stretched well into her nineties.

Yet trauma, she admits, never vanishes. A barking dog or the sight of a chimney can still trigger the sensory memory of camp life. Processing, not forgetting, is the path forward. Fried redefines strength not as suppressing pain but as building meaning from it—similar to Viktor Frankl’s idea in Man’s Search for Meaning that purpose helps one survive suffering.

Lessons for a Fragile Democracy

From her vantage as a psychologist and educator, Fried connects her memories directly to our era. The same ingredients of destruction—economic frustration, charismatic leaders, and “us versus them” thinking—still appear in new forms. Every generation, she warns, must relearn democracy and examine its prejudices. Prejudice begins not with hatred but with an unexamined feeling: dislike, fear, or superiority toward the “other.” Once you name it and question it, you weaken its hold. If you do not, societies slide toward moral sleep. Being a bystander, Fried insists, is as dangerous as being a perpetrator. She challenges readers: in your own daily life—school, workplace, online spaces—will you speak up when someone is bullied or minimized? That’s where remembrance turns into action.

Why Her Questions Still Matter

Fried’s conversational Q&A form mirrors how history survives: through dialogue, not monologue. The questions students ask range from naive (“Were you hungry?”) to profound (“Do you still believe in God?”). Her honest answers make the Holocaust tangible, stripping away abstraction. She doesn’t lecture about evil—she demonstrates how small decisions create it, and how small decencies resist it. The book’s final chapters shift from history to moral philosophy, urging you to look inward: What prejudices do you harbor? What kind of citizen do you want to be in fragile times?

In essence, Fried’s message is both simple and immense: Each human being holds the line between cruelty and compassion. We cannot change the past, but by remembering it sincerely and interrogating ourselves, we can shape a more humane future. Her gentle authority comes not from theory but from surviving humanity’s collapse and choosing, over and over, to rebuild it through understanding. As she concludes, “The meaning of life is life itself.”

Fried describes how evil seldom arrives with a bang—it creeps in, disguised as practicality or patriotism. Her childhood in Sighet shows this gradual erosion of freedom. At first, her family only lost rights: school exclusions, professional bans, curfews. Then came yellow stars, ghettos, deportations. Each step seemed temporary, survivable. People told themselves, “It will pass.” This pattern, she emphasizes, is how injustice seduces ordinary societies. What begins as obedience becomes paralysis.

From Normal Life to the Cattle Cars

The Szmuk family embodied middle-class stability: books, music, a family dog named Bodri. Then, almost overnight, soldiers ordered them to pack twenty kilograms each and leave their home. Fried recalls how she said goodbye to her piano, her books, her diaries hidden under the roof. Even as they were marched to the railway, many still believed they were going to work camps inside Hungary. Hope, she notes, is a double-edged sword—it helped them endure, yet blinded them to danger.

Normalization as a Human Weakness

One of Fried’s enduring lessons is that humans can get used to almost anything. Her mother once told her, “We have to get used to it.” Fried resisted—but later realized she had in fact adjusted, step by step. This “getting used to it” is what allows authoritarianism to flourish. By the time the knife reaches your throat, she writes, you are too numbed to resist. She urges readers to see injustices early, while resistance still costs little. Silence in the 1930s, she says, made the 1940s inevitable.

(The moral echoes resonate in Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil”—that atrocities rely not on monsters but on conformists.)

Contemporary Parallels

Fried doesn’t leave this lesson in the past. She invites you to recognize creeping normalization in your own world—subtle racism, online hate, political apathy. Every era poses its own tests. By identifying these small beginnings, she says, you help prevent catastrophic ends. “Injustices must be nipped in the bud,” she writes firmly. That warning, delivered with the calm authority of someone who lived the consequences of delay, gives this chapter urgent modern weight.

“How did you survive?” students ask her most often. Fried insists that survival in Auschwitz was not about strength or morals but about luck—the accident of a guard’s mood, a random selection, a sister’s presence. Fate could kill or save within seconds. Yet emotional bonds multiplied one’s chances: those who had someone to live for endured longer. Fried and her sister Livi clung together through months of horror, transforming sibling rivalry into solidarity. Protecting Livi gave Fried purpose; when she despaired, Livi’s humor lifted her back up.

Solidarity in a World Without Mercy

Inside the camps, deprivation stripped people of humanity, but even there, compassion flickered. Shared food, moral support, and simple conversation could mean life or death. Some kapos abused power for an extra bowl of soup; others risked punishment to shield someone from a beating. Fried saw both extremes. Her reflections reveal that goodness and cruelty coexisted in every barrack, often within the same person. “Evil is a choice,” she insists, “but so is kindness.”

Imagination as Resistance

When hunger defined existence, the girls invented “cooking evenings” in their bunks—sharing recipes from memory until they could almost taste the dishes. Such imagination was rebellion against despair. Fried remembers stealing a stalk of broccoli on the march, risking a beating. Later, in a bizarre twist of luck, she experienced one day of fullness when the guards fed them unlimited bread by mistake. That moment of joy became sacred: “I learned that bread can make you happy.” To this day, she treats bread with reverence.

Her survival, then, blended accident and attitude—what psychologist Viktor Frankl also described: when all freedoms are taken, you can still choose how to face suffering. Fried’s choice was connection over isolation, meaning over nihilism.

Liberation, Fried warns, was not instant joy. In Bergen-Belsen, when British troops arrived on 15 April 1945, she was too sick to celebrate. She could barely comprehend freedom. Fevered and malnourished, she collapsed; her sister’s caregiving pulled her back from the threshold of death. True jubilation came months later, in Sweden, when she and Livi crossed Stockholm’s Västerbron bridge and realized no one was chasing them. That was when they danced.

A Fragile New Beginning

The boat voyage to Sweden felt almost dreamlike—“like a praline wrapped in silver paper,” Fried recalls, describing how the paper sheets on their beds rustled with promise. In Malmö, cocoa and sandwiches awaited. But trauma lingered silently: the survivors hid extra bread under pillows, afraid food would vanish again. Even in abundance, hunger dictated their habits for life. Over time, the kindness of Swedes met the limits of empathy. People wanted to help, but not to listen. The refugees soon realized that “no one really wanted to hear our stories.” Healing, Fried understood, would come not through forgetting but through telling.

Building a New Identity

Sweden offered safety but also ambiguity. “Do you feel Swedish?” young audiences ask. Her answer is layered: at first, acceptance felt conditional—pity mistaken for welcome. Citizenship took seven years; belonging took decades. Only through language, work, and family did she start to feel at home. Yet prejudice reappeared even there. Fried uses this complexity to examine today’s refugee crises: empathy must be more than temporary hospitality. Adaptation, she says, is a mutual process—the refugees’ will to integrate must meet society’s will to include. “If we meet halfway, we will all flourish.”

Years after the war, Fried’s turning point came with a teacher’s invitation to speak at a school. Until then, she had processed her pain privately through diaries and writing. Once she began public storytelling, she realized her survival had purpose: to bear witness. Every lecture became an act of remembrance and prevention. She promised to keep alive the names of her parents, Frida and Ignatz Szmuk, and to help students grasp history with both intellect and empathy. “If no one tells, it will be forgotten—and what is forgotten can be repeated.”

Questions That Keep Memory Alive

Her format—answering bold, sometimes naive questions—turns education into dialogue. Students ask, “Do you hate the Germans?” “Can you forgive?” “After everything, do you still believe in God?” Fried answers without bitterness. She distinguishes hatred from justice: hatred corrodes the hater, she says, while tolerance begins by examining our own biases. On forgiveness, she sides with realism: no one can forgive on behalf of the dead. But one can live without revenge, coexist, and build peace. This moral clarity, delivered gently, helps students see that ethics is lived practice, not abstraction.

Transforming Pain into Ethical Energy

Fried’s message aligns with modern trauma theory—recovery through meaning-making. Like Elie Wiesel, she turned memory into a public moral force. Her storytelling is cognitive reappraisal: when horror is narrated, it moves from chaos into structure. She often quotes the principle that questions are more important than answers: curiosity keeps morality awake. Her lectures therefore model how to think critically, empathetically, and historically at once.

In her final chapters, Fried shifts from remembrance to analysis. She examines prejudice not as an ideology but as an emotional reflex. Humans instinctively divide the world into “us” and “them,” a mechanism that once protected survival but now fuels racism and extremism. She traces prejudice’s roots to early social hierarchies and colonialism, showing how theories of race misused Darwin to justify domination. Her own story illustrates this inversion: she had suffered anti-Jewish discrimination, yet as a girl, she accepted stereotypes about Roma. Only later, in Sweden, did she confront her own bias when she momentarily feared Roma travelers had stolen her child. Realizing the truth—that prejudice clouded her—and naming it aloud became her moral awakening.

Taking Responsibility for the Inner World

Fried insists that peace begins with introspection. “Each of us must examine where our dislike comes from,” she writes. Evil is collective only because individuals fail in private reflection. Tolerance means more than politeness; it demands self-scrutiny. In the schoolyard, she notes, the same roles reappear as in history’s tragedies: bully, victim, bystander, and rescuer. Choose carefully, she tells her listeners. To remain passive is to side with cruelty. You may never face a dictatorship, but daily life gives smaller versions of the same moral test.

Guarding Democracy

Democracy, Fried warns, is fragile. Discontent with its flaws can easily open the door to charismatic demagogues who promise “simple answers to complex problems.” She draws direct parallels from Weimar Germany to modern populism. The defense of democracy therefore depends not only on laws but on civic character—on people who stay informed, compassionate, and courageous. For Fried, remembrance education is democracy’s immune system: history lessons for the heart.

How does one believe, decades after witnessing humanity’s undoing? Fried admits that for some survivors faith died in the camps; for others, it deepened. She herself retained her childhood Judaism but redefined God as a moral compass within humans rather than a divine overseer. “If there is a God, it is the same for all,” she writes—Jehovah, Christ, or Allah—embodied in the Golden Rule found across religions. Fundamentalism of any kind, she cautions, turns that love into hate.

Ageing Into Acceptance

In later chapters, Fried reflects on old age with serenity. Having outlived her nightmares, she describes aging as a natural slowing, a shift toward forgiveness and perspective. She embraces what gerontologists call “gerotranscendence”: a peaceful sense that life’s pieces fit together. Death, once omnipresent, no longer frightens her; it feels like another journey. The body weakens, but gratitude strengthens. Every morning, she writes, is a gift—and every act of kindness a legacy. “The meaning of life,” she concludes with gentle simplicity, “is life itself.”

Her final words transform suffering into wisdom: awareness that time, compassion, and memory are all that remain—and all that are needed to carry humanity forward.