Getting to Know our Neighbors: Frieda Grayzel

Continuing our series, “Getting to know our Neighbors”, we’d like to introduce you to Frieda Grayzel who, in 1988, read about a new building on the Charles River designed by Moshe Safdie (Spring 2019 ECG Newsletter). She said “I love being near the water and admired Safdie’s work so I got in my car and drove here to see the big hole in the ground where the Esplanade was to be.” She kept her eye on the building and, when she was able to in 2001, she bought her unit and rented it out until she was ready to move in 2012. And, although she misses her porch enveloped by mimosas, and her yard with its trees and those in the surrounding yards, she doesn't miss the headaches of maintaining a house and loves living here in the Esplanade.  

Growing up in NYC, Queens, Frieda received her undergraduate degree in Art History and Archaeology at Queens College and entered Columbia University Graduate School studying towards a Ph.D. in art history and archaeology.  In her 2nd year there she competed for and won a 15-month Fellowship to train in museum work at the Brooklyn Museum. Then she was chosen to be Director/Curator  of the Heckscher Museum in Huntington Long Island. She worked there for three and a half years and enjoyed every minute of it.  She had already met and dated her future husband, an engineer at Lincoln Labs, in Lexington, MA. and in 1962 was married and persuaded to move to Cambridge. “I loved New York and felt like I was banished to Siberia”! Their first home was a small apartment on Harvard Street in Cambridge that “felt like a very small town back then.” Frieda returned to graduate school at Harvard University in the department of History of Art and Archaeology at the Fogg Art Museum, which granted her an M.A. (and an ABD).  She quickly adds that it took her 10 years to feel at home in Boston.

With one child on the way, in 1965 the growing family bought a 2 family house on Ellsworth Park in Cambridge.  In 1969 Frieda’s husband was recruited from Lincoln Labs to work at the then new NASA Space Center in Kendall Square. (The 14-acre space is now the John A. Volpe Transportation Center presently undergoing major redevelopment plans.) In 1970, Nixon closed the NASA center that Kennedy had built and her husband was recruited to work in Israel. As Frieda notes, “we were both from families that were Zionistically oriented so even though we had 3 children, 2 in diapers, we decided to go”.  The three years there were both difficult and inspiring. The country “is beautiful, filled with incredible history, antiquities and varied landscape packed into a tiny territory. But it is a country permanently in a state of war, threatened by the Arab world, struggling at that time to build a modern nation with tremendous tensions of immigrants from dozens of nations with different languages and cultures many having been dispossessed from Arab countries. We moved back to the US in 1973.” 

The family lived in Newton for 9 years and, in 1984, after her divorce, Frieda moved back to Cambridge to her original home on Ellsworth Park. Her children by then were in college or on their way; they include Sharon a veterinarian with 2 daughters; Laura a nurse with one daughter; and Abraham ‘Bo’ an entrepreneur whose company is ReRack that has continued to survive during the Covid crisis, with 2 sons.  They all live in the Portland OR area. Frieda had an apartment in a retirement community in Portland so she could spend time with her grandkids as they were growing up, but, when Covid hit, she put it on the market. She noted with pleasure that one grandson is now nearby--a junior at MIT.  And a granddaughter studies at Middlebury, in Vermont.

In 1986, Frieda received her MSW in Clinical Social Work from Simmons School of Social Work. From 1986 to 1999, Frieda worked as a clinical social worker at a private practice in Cambridge. She also provided supervision and worked at the Cambridge Hospital Department of Psychiatry with a specialty in Mind-Body work. She retired in 1999 so she could spend more time with her Portland family and in New York where her aging father lived.

In 2012, she sold her Ellsworth Park home and moved into the Esplanade. In her retirement, Frieda said she “ has had a good time”. She has traveled quite a bit --China, Tibet, Argentina, Brazil, the Mediterranean countries, including Israel, Greece, Italy, and France, where she has relatives, and to the Caribbean.  And, of course, with her background, she loves to visit the area’s museums. One of her favorites is the Peabody Essex in Salem, but they all have wonderful art and special collections.

As you can see, Frieda has had a wonderful life filled with many experiences; she continues to be curious and interested in challenges. She is truly a ‘life-long-learner’! When I asked her if there was anything else that our readers should know about her, she shared the powerful story of being a small Jewish child living in Poland under the German occupation during WWII. After being imprisoned in the Tomaszow ghetto at 5 years old, from which her grandparents, many aunts, uncles and cousins were sent to their deaths, Frieda, her parents and her little sister Dorka were sent to a labor camp. When the Germans were ‘rounding up all the children in the labor camp’ her father, who worked in the tailoring shop, making and repairing German uniforms, saved 8-year-old Frieda by burying her under a pile of the uniforms. Her 4-year-old sister was “ripped from my mother’s arms, put in a truck with the other children, driven to a near-by woods and all were shot”.  

Soon after that, her father was sent to parts unknown and Frieda and her mother were taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp.  They survived there for 7 months, incredibly, primarily due to her mother’s heroic courage, struggles, and much luck.  They were liberated by the Russian army in January 27, 1945.  “Poland had remained largely anti-Semitic and, with all our losses, life was unbearable there.” Frieda and her parents (her father survived 6 concentration camps and returned to them) smuggled out of Communist controlled Poland in 1946, lived at 3 displaced persons camps in Germany while waiting for their American visas, and immigrated to the US in 1949. They lived in furnished rooms in Manhattan until they got their own apartment in Forest Hills, Queens.

I so appreciate that Frieda shared this with us. This story of tragedy and survival speaks volumes about Frieda and her parents. She describes her parents as “amazing”. Her mother was “Heroic…she saved my life. Without her I wouldn't be here. She took incredible risks to get a bite of food.” When they arrived in the US, her father supported the family as an expert tailor who served high-end customers and worked, among other fine women’s shops for Oscar de la Renta.  He died at the age of 97, and had moved to the Boston area to spend his last years near Frieda. She treasures that time with him.

Frieda is a special person with an incredible story to tell and a life filled with challenges and successes. When you see her in the hall or walking nearby, please say ‘hello’!

Frieda’s story is included in the powerful book, Surviving Auschwitz: Children of Shoah. It’s available through Amazon. 

--Jane Hilburt-Davis