Edward Gastfriend

Edward Gastfriend

B: March 21, 1925, Wodzislaw, Poland – D: November 18, 2025, Delray Beach, Florida

Eddie Gastfriend was one of the youngest, longest incarcerated, and longest-lived survivors of the Holocaust. Born Lolek Gastfrajnd in the hamlet of Wodzislaw, in southern Poland, in a two-room flat with a single coal stove for heat, he was the youngest in a pious Jewish family of ten. A Talmud prodigy fluent in Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Aramaic, he was accepted at age 12 into the leading rabbinical seminary in eastern Europe, Yeshivas Chochmei Lublin. Too young to actually board there, his father took him home with plans to start in another two years. The blitzkrieg intervened, however, and the Nazis shuttered the Yeshiva and boasted of burning its 20,000-volume library to ashes.

Having attended Polish public schools in Wodzislaw and later in the city of Sosnowiec, Gastfriend grew familiar with the antisemitic taunts and blows of Catholic schoolchildren. He considered this "training" for the gauntlet to come. The German invasion of Poland transformed the Chasidic bookworm into a resistance member. Recruited for his blond-hair and blue-eyes to pass as a non-Jewish orphan, he was conscripted as a courier, purloining military correspondence from officers' quarters, while also smuggling the food to stave off his family's starvation. As his parents were marched to the cattle train to Auschwitz, his father begged him to both do what he needed to survive and yet also fulfill the values of their tradition.

Ultimately betrayed, he found himself also condemned to Auschwitz, where at its peak 8,000 Jews a day were being gassed and incinerated. Young Gastfriend frantically grappled with comprehending his existence. But as bizarre as he found this world, he was a fastidious observer, continuously drawn to consider the individuality of everyone he met – their mood, manner, approachability, and capacity to relate. This included fellow inmates, work detail foremen, SS guards, and Kapos. His three-year survival in the camps was predicated on some combination of perception of danger, decisiveness, and a capacity to elicit compassion, often unexpectedly. Unpredictable moments of hope accrued, whether eliciting advice to volunteer for safer work details for which he was entirely unqualified but desperate to learn on the fly, instinctively hiding to evade experimental castration, or being gifted a small loaf of bread or a deceased's shoes. Also, in no small part, he may have benefitted from a potent immune system, and, as he often attributed it, luck.

His own words vividly convey this experience, in the authentic voice of that Chasidic child, although authored at age 75. In 2000, Temple University Press published his heart-wrenching book, My Father's Testament: Memoir of a Jewish Teenager, 1938-1945. Reviewer Chaim Potok called it "remarkable" and "riveting" in its "Biblical simplicity" and its portrayal of the complex dynamics unleashed by crisis in the father-son relationship.

The book was a historically crystalline first-person account of Gastfriend's survival through the concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Seibersdorf, Blechhammer, Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald, and Langenstein-Zwieberge. In this last camp, tunneled by hand nearly 10 miles into the Harz Mountains of Germany, his enslavement involved construction of the V3 cannon, which was so secret, inmate rations were calculated so as to assure death from starvation within three months – to minimize the risk of survival, escape, and exposure of the weapon.

Following liberation, Gastfriend was housed in a United Nations-run displaced persons camp in Eschwege, Germany. After searching for family and supports back in Sosnowiec and finding nothing but residual antisemitism, he returned despondent. A female Norwegian UN worker who thought much of his language skills, memory, and aptitude insisted he apply to emigrate to the USA. He passed a verbal exam for a U.S. refugee program led by publisher Bartley Crum and former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Unbeknownst to Gastfriend, a cousin, Shloimie Zilberberg, was secretary to the famed Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, and was regularly scanning the newspapers for names of incoming refugees. Miraculously, upon arrival in New York harbor Zilberberg saw Gastfriend's name and arranged to receive him as he disembarked.

The natural expectation, given Gastfriend's early destiny for rabbinical training, was to board at Schneerson's Yeshiva and continue Talmud study. Within two weeks, however, Gastfriend suffered a profound inability to conceive any longer of a just and merciful G-d in the theology in which he was raised. He departed with the Rebbe's compassionate understanding. For the rest of his life, however, he nevertheless retained a determined, universalist, humanistic, and optimistic love of Judaism and Jewish tradition.

Moving upon the advice of friends to Philadelphia, he worked his way up in retail clothing, his father's vocation in Poland, from sales to management to owning multiple stores and office building and shopping center investment. He married Marilyn Weisman, of Philadelphia's Strawberry Mansion neighborhood; they built a tightly knit family of three children, steeped in Conservative Judaism, educating them at Solomon Schechter Day School and Gratz College's High School program.

Gastfriend's intellectual promise never enjoyed the formal training it deserved. With only a sixth-grade education, once in the U.S., he self-educated in a host of secular subjects. He was admitted to Drexel Institute of Technology's undergraduate program, where uninitiated faculty were perplexed at his mastery of some areas of knowledge and total ignorance of others. Unable to support both his family and tuition, he dropped out after a semester. Later, he prepared for and gained a seat at Temple University's School of Law, without a high school or undergraduate degree, only to reluctantly decline admission when he realized his fledgling clothing business would fail.

Despite late hours and six-day work weeks, he was determined to serve some civic role in Holocaust education. Unusually, at the time, he was a survivor who was willing to speak about the rise of Nazism, the fascist transformation of Germany, the dehumanization of the Jewish people and others, and the dual aspects of martyrdom and resistance. Over decades, he was invited to lecture to high school and community audiences and regularly wrote columns and letters to the editors that were published in major newspapers and the Jewish press.

Perhaps most importantly, he never shirked from answering his quizzical children about his tattooed arm, in language and concepts sensitively suited to their capacity for understanding. This was in stark contrast to some survivors' pained silence, which Helen Epstein's 1979 Children of the Holocaust elucidated as further traumatizing the second-generation offspring. Gastfriend, however, shared – even journeying back with his adult children and teenaged grandchildren to his native Poland, to the home of his birth, the railway of his family's deportation, and the very barracks that housed his near-death experience. There, remarkably, he constantly manifested a warm, open curiosity to discuss the Holocaust with strangers he encountered, whether this revealed centuries-old antisemitic tropes, feigned or real ignorance, or sincere interest and shared sadness for this tragic European epoch.

In Philadelphia, Gastfriend became influential in bringing the first Holocaust memorial to North America, in 1964. Nora Levin's book, The Holocaust, was not published until 1968. The first academic chair in Holocaust history would not be established until 1976, at Yeshiva University. As the Memorial Committee co-chair, Gastfriend became close friends with the renowned sculptor Nathan Rapoport, and helped convince Philadelphia's mayor and its widely respected Art Commission to accept and place the Monument to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs directly on the city's grand Benjamin Franklin Parkway, steps from its City Hall. For many years he bore witness to the Shoah in English and Yiddish addresses at city-wide memorial services, attended by crowds exceeding 5,000. Later, he helped guide the founding of the Philadelphia's Anne Frank House and, with his memoir as a teaching text, lectured about the Holocaust to high school, university students, international postgraduate fellows, including German study groups, and educators. To this day, it is his voice that greets visitors to the Monument in a recorded description of the sculpture's symbolism and historical message. In 2021, the Mayor of Sosnowiec, Poland, Arkadiusz Checinski, honored Gastfriend in a commemorative publication recognizing the lost Jewish population of the city and its broader region of Zaglembie. Zaglembie had one of the highest concentration of Jews in pre-war Poland. Checinski wrote that, for the regional guidebook authors, "one of their major inspirations was Edward Gastfriend's My Father's Testament".

Eddie Gastfriend's wife, Marilyn, passed away in 2022 after 70 years of marriage, and remains by his side, buried next to him in Boynton Beach, Florida. He is survived by his son, Dr. David R. Gastfriend, and his wife, Jody O. Gastfriend, and their three children, Eric, Daniel and Rebecca Gastfriend, his daughter Felicia M. Berkowitz and her husband Alan Berkowitz and their three children, Emily and Scott Berkowitz and Katie Rose Aber and her husband Dr. Etan Aber, and his daughter (deceased) Jean Gastfriend and her two children, Dr. Jason L. Bronstein and his wife Lauren Brailey Bronstein, and Jennifer Sargent and her husband, Felix Sargent.

Eddie Gastfriend never stopped grieving for his four siblings and two parents murdered in the Shoah. Nevertheless, he survived and thrived into his second century of life. He nurtured close-knit second, third, and fourth generations. He fulfilled his promise to his father to transmit the meanings of their lives to his descendants – and others. On the day of his death, coincidentally, he was simultaneously blessed with the birth of his thirteenth great-grandchild (so far).

A graveside service will be held at Eternal Light Memorial Gardens on Friday, November 21, 2025, at 12:15pm.

11520 State Road 7 Boynton Beach, FL 33473.

Those wishing to honor Edward with a memorial Contribution are Kindly encouraged to consider a donation to the:

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

https://donate.ushmm.org/6hRw6kqugUOvJLNKCIbD1g2