The Nazi Hunter My Father-in-Law Never Mentioned

There is a particular kind of silence that comes with a family archive. Not the silence of things withheld, but of things never asked. You inherit the boxes, and inside them are the answers to questions nobody thought to put while the people who could answer were still in the room.

I found two books.

The first is a 1961 Doubleday first edition of The Hunter, the autobiography of Tuviah Friedman, the man who spent fifteen years searching for Adolf Eichmann. On the half-title, in blue ballpoint, in a hand that hurries: “To my best friend Harry Brill from the Kibbutz.” Then a line of Hebrew. Then a signature and a date: 10.III.1985.

The second is Nazi Hunter, Friedman’s own summary of forty-two years of his work, published by his institute in Haifa. On the title page, in a clearer hand: “To my friend Harry Brill and his Lady. With Compliments. Yours, Tuviah Friedman.” Beneath it: “N.Y. 22. May 1987.”

Harry Brill was my father-in-law. Edna, the “Lady,” was my mother-in-law. I knew Harry for thirty-eight years and Edna for thirty-seven.

Friedman was born in Radom in 1922 and lost most of his family in the Holocaust. After the war he devoted himself to tracking Nazi perpetrators. In Vienna, working in the same postwar world as Simon Wiesenthal, he helped identify and locate war criminals. He later moved to Israel, directed the Haifa branch of Yad Vashem, and in 1957 founded his own Institute for the Documentation of Nazi War Crimes. He contributed to the long effort to trace Adolf Eichmann and spent decades pressing governments to pursue men who had escaped justice.

Harry’s war was different. He came off the Exodus 1947, the ship carrying some 4,500 Jewish refugees that the British intercepted and ultimately forced back to the British occupation zone of Germany. There is a press photograph of Harry on the deportation train out of Hamburg, pressed against the wire. A year later he is standing alone in the Negev in a rough field uniform, the butt of a rifle resting on the ground. He later lived at Lohamei HaGeta’ot, the Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz, which Edna’s brother Yakov helped found with other Holocaust survivors and resistance fighters.

The date on the first book turns out to be documented.

On Sunday, March 10, 1985, Tuviah Friedman was in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The Morning Call reported that he spoke to about a hundred people at a brunch at Temple Beth El while campaigning for Josef Mengele to be found and brought to trial. Sunday school classes from Temple Beth El and Congregation Sons of Israel attended. Harry and Edna were themselves members of Sons of Israel.

This was not an ordinary author tour. It was February and March of 1985, amid renewed pressure to find Mengele. His remains would be discovered in Brazil that June, though nobody in that room knew it. Friedman was sixty-three years old and still working the phones.

In the middle of that afternoon, a Catholic woman approached him with a brochure about the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth, a group of nuns murdered by the Nazis. Friedman stopped and asked for her name. He was thinking of including their story in his work.

That small exchange stopped me because the woman had unknowingly touched the fault line running through Edna’s own life. Edna survived in Warsaw under a Polish Catholic name. After the war she spent her adolescence at St. Mary’s Convent School in Lowestoft, England, devout, top of her class, the lead in every play, until Yakov came for her at sixteen. She did not recognize her own brother until he sang Oyfn Pripetshik, the song their mother had sung before the war. Edna kept the Catholic devotional objects from that part of her life tucked away in a bedroom drawer for the rest of her life.

On that same Sunday in Allentown, Friedman inscribed Harry’s copy of The Hunter. Ten days later, on March 20, he wrote in it again, this time a longer passage entirely in Hebrew. I am still working to establish exactly what it says and will not make it say more than the evidence allows.

Two years and two months later, in New York, Friedman inscribed the second book. This time he included Edna.

“And his Lady.” Whatever these two men were to each other, by 1987 the relationship had a shape. It included her.

What I do not know is how it began. Friedman was in Vienna until 1952 and in Haifa afterward, down the coast from the kibbutz where Harry lived, in the small overlapping world of Holocaust documentation, survivor institutions and archives. Their paths could easily have crossed there.

The inscription identifies Harry by the kibbutz. It does not say the two men met there, and I am not going to make it say so.

Harry kept the books. He kept Friedman’s business card, with the Haifa address in raised type. He kept the newspaper clipping, folded, with the book rather than in a drawer of clippings. He understood those objects as belonging together.

He kept all of it for the rest of his life and said nothing.

I wrote Little Edna’s War from more than five hours of Edna’s recorded testimony, Yakov’s testimony and the family archive. I thought I understood the shape of this family’s history. Then two books came out of a box addressed to a man I thought I knew, in the handwriting of a man I had never imagined in the same room with him.

The archives may yet answer the question. Friedman’s papers are at the National Library of Israel. The Ghetto Fighters’ House holds its own archive. Somewhere there may be a letter, a visitor record or another inscription.

But I have begun to think the unanswered version tells a truth of its own. This is what survivor lives can look like from the outside: not a clean narrative, but a set of objects kept together for reasons the keeper never explained because, to him, they needed no explanation.

He knew why the clipping went inside the book. We are the ones who have to work it out.

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Janet Bond Brill, PhD, is the author of Little Edna’s War, based on her mother-in-law’s Holocaust testimony, published on January 27, 2026, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Order Now.