Carpinteria Writers’ Group Encourages
Holocaust Survivor Michael Fryd to
Share His Story Through Writing
Award-Winning Author and Scientist Discusses
Pursuing Writing During Retirement and the
Historical and Personal Experiences that Shaped His Writing
By Ella Bailey | July 23, 2026
Read more from our 2026 Active Aging Guide here.
Creativity grows in Carpinteria with upstanding authors to show for it. Michael Fryd is not only an award-winning creative writer and participant in the Carpinteria Writers’ Group, but also a Holocaust survivor, educational speaker, and award-winning scientist. At 90 years old, Fryd speaks at schools about the Holocaust and the importance of not “othering” minorities. Although Fryd was a DuPont Fellow for 35 years and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, he started publishing his writing at age 75, showing it’s never too late to pursue your creative dreams.
Fryd is from Pennsylvania and spent the majority of his career working for DuPont, and worked 10 years at the University of Pennsylvania before he retired. He is in DuPont’s Hall of Fame of inventions, “along with the people who discovered nylon and Teflon and Kaplan and all these other good things, and I received the Lavoisier Medal for technical excellence,” Fryd said. Fryd also received a PhD in organic chemistry from NYU.
This multitalented individual wanted to be a writer since he was 5 or 6 years old in the midst of World War II. “My family was hiding in a root cellar from the Nazis during the Holocaust. There was absolutely nothing to do there, so my parents taught me how to read, and occasionally my mother would smuggle in a book. The books really broke the walls of the cellar. They allowed me to wonder in the magical world that they represented. And so, I thought it would be just wonderful to become a writer,” he said.
Fryd waited until he fully retired at 75 years old to actualize his lifelong dream of writing because he finally had the freedom and space to pursue that creative outlet.
The Carpinteria Writers’ Group was an encouraging space that helped him begin writing about his life in a creative way. “That really gave me the courage to try to get something published. We’ve been going for 20 years to Carpinteria to get away from the northern cold during the winter. And after a few years there, I kept seeing in the Coastal View that the Carpinteria Authors met on Tuesday mornings. I said, ‘Well, these people are writers. I’m just somebody who has delusions of grandeur.’ But I gathered the courage, and I went to the first meeting, and they were so welcoming and an enormous resource. They’re the ones who made me believe that maybe I could write.”
Eva’s Secret, Fryd’s most recent novel, was published on March 10. He said that he took creative inspiration from his own life and family for both this novel and his memoir, My Mother’s War: A Holocaust Survivor’s Tribute to an Extraordinary Woman. “We survived the war because my mother was just a very unique person who was very cunning, brave, and resourceful. She believed that the truth was a plastic medium that you could shape into whatever you needed it to be,” he said. The novel, Eva’s Secret, features a reflection on a mother’s story from the Holocaust from a son’s perspective.
The novel examines a set of the mother’s diaries written in Yiddish after she passes. “It goes through her having struggled to get an education in spite of being forbidden, and how when she’s exposed to books, she suddenly realizes there’s a much larger world out there than people are even aware of, and this becomes a larger, driving force,” Fryd said.
Fryd’s memoir describes their family’s escape from a ghetto in Poland to France when he was a baby, and then immigrating to America in his young adulthood. “It covers our first 10 years in the United States, having to get acclimated to a new culture, a third language. When you switch cultures, it can be very difficult,” Fryd said.
“I didn’t give talks about the Holocaust until my memoir came out, and the people from the Holocaust Museum (in Pennsylvania) got a hold of me and said, ‘There’s less and less Holocaust survivors; you should talk.’ So, I give around 40 to 50 talks a year to schools,” Fryd said. “I don’t want to talk just about the Holocaust. I want to generalize it as what happens when people define somebody as the other, because once you define them as the other, it allows you to do all sorts of cruel things to them.”
“Hate is more destructive to the person who is the hater than it is to the person they hate,” Fryd said. He emphasized the importance of showing up and educating your local community. “I’ve done it in the past when I was very involved in the Civil Rights Movement, and I feel an obligation to do it now. Small acts of kindness really are important. It’s hard to change the world, but it is easy to give small acts of kindness in your surroundings.”
Fryd’s books can be purchased on Amazon and at bookstores that can order them. Learn more about Fryd and his writing endeavors at michaelfryd.wixsite.com/writer.
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