Aaron Fried, the son of Moshe and Amalia, was born in Leipzig, Germany, on 23rd May 1926. In 1939 he arrived in England and settled there. He was educated in Manchester and lived in the home of an uncle. On completing high school he studied stage-art; his ambition was to become an actor in Palestine.
Even before he reached military age, he volunteered for the British Army as an act of revenge following the Nazi actions against his people and particularly his parents, who had remained in Germany and been murdered by the Nazis. On the formation of the Independent Jewish Brigade in Palestine, he requested and was granted a transfer. He fought with them on a number of fronts against the Nazis. At the end of the war, he served in Italy in securing Displaced Persons Camps. When his time came to be discharged and return to England, he deserted, and after working with the Haganah he found his way to Palestine and enlisted in the Palmach in 1945, and with the outbreak of the War of Independence, volunteered for the army. For the short period of his time as a civilian in Palestine, he worked as an English teacher. He was imbued with courage and optimism.
As a soldier in the Givati Brigade he fell near Latrun on 13th May, 1948, in Operation “Maccabi” the breakthrough of the road to Jerusalem, just a few weeks after his marriage.
He was buried the next day at the Nachlat Yitzhak military cemetery.
Source: Translated from the Yizkor website by Joe Woolf