Magda Fried, 56; Told Auschwitz Experiences

A survivor of the Nazi Holocaust who was honored by President Reagan for her first-hand accounts of life in the Auschwitz concentration camp has died at 56.

A family member said Magda Fried died Monday of cancer.

Mrs. Fried was a teen-ager in Svalada, Czechoslovakia, in 1944 when she and other members of the town’s Jewish community were loaded aboard cattle cars and taken to Auschwitz in Poland.

In her frequent talks to students and civic organizations, Mrs. Fried recounted how 65 members of her family--including her mother, a sister and a brother--were put to death in the camp’s gas chambers.

She spent a year and a half at Auschwitz and was assigned the task of sorting and bundling the clothing, shoes and other personal items of inmates who were executed.

She and her husband, Samuel, who also survived Auschwitz, were recognized for their work at a White House ceremony in 1981. Last year, Mrs. Fried received the Anti-Defamation League’s Torch of Liberty award.

The Frieds settled in Omaha in 1948 and founded the Society of Survivors, an organization of former concentration camp inmates who now live in Nebraska and western Iowa.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by two sons and a daughter.