The Frankfurt Book Fair will present its Peace Prize to an Israeli historian. Saul Friedlander, 74, will be honored in October for his works on the Holocaust. “Saul Friedlander has stood up for and cried out for people who were burned to ash; he has memorialized them and given them names,” the book fair association said in announcing its decision to award him the $33,000 prize. “He gave the victims their dignity that had been robbed from them, the recognition of which is the basis for peace between people,” its statement read. Friedlander, a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, was born in Prague, in the former Czechoslovakia. His family, which did not identify with Judaism, fled to France when the Nazis occupied their country. He survived by attending a Catholic boarding school. His parents died in Auschwitz. Friedlander, who had been baptized, returned to Judaism after the war and immigrated to Israel in 1948. He has written numerous works on the history of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, including the two-volume work “The Third Reich and the Jews.”
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