Henry
Friedman.

Henry (Chaim) Friedman survived Nazi brutality and imprisonment in seven camps, including Mauthausen. His family-preserved educational display identifies his birthplace as Rastenburg, then in Germany and now Kętrzyn, Poland. The source notes explain the unresolved questions about his vital dates. He and his brothers David and Abe survived the Holocaust; their parents did not. In postwar Rome, he stayed with his brother Abe at the Cinecittà displaced persons camp and pursued engineering studies. The technical education he received in postwar Europe became part of the life he would later establish in America.

His daughter recalls that Henry and Abe did clothing work at the camp, including folding clothes, for very little pay. Their brother David moved elsewhere in Italy to seek better-paid work, and the brothers continued to visit one another.

After the war, Henry built a life centered on family, work and creativity. He would go on to marry, work, raise a family, create art, and speak to younger generations about what had happened. His family remembers that education was a way of resisting the Nazis' effort to erase Jewish lives and memory.

Read the wartime records and date qualifications

Henry met Bess at a Jewish dance in New York City. Together they moved to the Detroit area, where Henry sought work in the industrial trades. Their marriage lasted 69½ years, until Bess's passing.

They had two children and nine grandchildren, with great-grandchildren joining the family in later years. Family gatherings mattered to Henry: he enjoyed hearing what everyone was doing and bringing people together. That long marriage and expanding family were as much a part of his legacy as the sculptures he left behind.

Family recollection; the marriage date and Bess's vital records have not yet been supplied.

More photographs of Henry and Bess

A career in engineering

Henry began working in Detroit-area tool-and-die shops before joining General Motors. His family recalls his work in manufacturing automation and robotics-related engineering during a career of about 30 years at GM, bringing technical skill and practical ingenuity to his work.

What his family remembers clearly is his talent with his hands. He understood machinery, components, and the way objects fit together.

That fluency carried into his sculpture, where metal pieces became a vocabulary for memory, faith, invention, and human experience.

Flea markets and found materials

For decades, Henry went to flea markets and junkyards to look for old metal, mechanical parts, and objects other people had passed over. He joked that the flea markets were his “addiction,” his family remembers. The search itself was part of the pleasure.

With an engineer's eye and an artist's imagination, he found new uses for discarded material. Metal could become a biblical scene, a reminder of persecution, a celebration of Jewish life, or a vision of peace.

Inside the workshop

Henry's unfinished basement was both a working studio and a personal gallery. Saws, tools, and machinery shared the space with sculptures, newspaper clippings, certificates, and awards. His grandchildren knew it as a place where they could play ping-pong, too.

His family remembers hand-drawn sketches among his creative materials, though the sequence of sketching, finding materials, and building individual works is not documented. He continued making art long after his working day ended and into retirement. Photographs of surviving notebook pages and paper templates are now available in the drawings and workshop section. Their dates and relationships to individual works remain under research.

Service and community

His family remembers Henry as generous, funny, and deeply welcoming. He loved to talk, to hear another person's story, and to make people feel valued. He was warm and genuine even with people he had just met, often breaking the ice with a little joke. He brought that warmth to volunteering at the Dorothy & Peter Brown Jewish Community Adult Day Program and Fleischman Residence, Jewish Senior Life’s assisted living community. He spent time with program participants and residents and joined them in activities.

A family-preserved announcement names Henry among the 2008 Eight Over Eighty Tikkun Olam Award honorees of Jewish Apartments & Services. The program recognizes older adults whose service embodies tikkun olam, the Jewish commitment to repairing the world.

The announcement supports the family’s recollection of the honor. Read about the record in the family archive.

Teaching the Holocaust

Henry spoke to students and community groups about the Holocaust, sometimes at the Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills. He brought photographs and other materials to help audiences understand his experiences. One especially memorable teaching object was a heavy hammer he had found decades after the war at a garage sale. Its form reminded him of the hammer he had used to break stones during forced labor at Mauthausen.

He would invite a young person to lift the hammer and imagine using a tool of that weight for hours in a quarry. The hammer was not presented as the original object from the camp; it was a later-found example of the type that brought the experience into focus. The family still retains it.

Henry believed the Holocaust must be taught to future generations, including the warning that persecution and mass violence can happen again. His grandson hopes to continue sharing his story through educational talks and exhibitions.

The everyday Henry

Henry called himself “98 years young.” He liked to say you did not become old until you reached 100. His grandson remembers breakfast trips to McDonald's, long walks through the mall, jokes with the people serving his coffee, and the occasional nap during a mall visit.

He was an avid reader of history and often watched the History Channel, especially programs about World War II. Although he did not constantly discuss his wartime experiences at home, he was open to questions. His family remembers a deeply optimistic man who tried to see the good in people and in life.

Language was another part of his remarkable journey. His grandson recalls Yiddish as his primary language, alongside German, some Russian, Italian learned during his postwar years in Italy, and English learned after immigration to the United States.

His family described him as both “a gentleman and a gentle man.”

His hopes for the collection

Henry made sculptures as a creative outlet, but he also wanted them to educate children, grandchildren, and generations he would never meet. He spoke about his experiences so the history of the Holocaust would not be forgotten.

His family recalls that making art and speaking publicly were, in his understanding, ways of getting back at the Nazis—not through violence, but through testimony, creativity, and the continuation of Jewish life.

He was proud of his sculptures and displayed competition ribbons, awards, and newspaper coverage throughout his workshop. He enjoyed showing the work at fairs and exhibitions and talked with his family about the sculptures and what they meant. He generally kept the pieces, setting high asking prices at exhibitions rather than readily parting with them. His 38 sculptures remain in the care of his family. They are being documented for education, research, and possible exhibition, with the hope that the objects will continue the conversations he began.