Author with Babylon roots to speak about father’s escape from the Holocaust at St. Joseph’s University event

Growing up in Babylon, Irene Stern Frielich didn’t know much about her father Walter Stern’s history.

Frielich (she was Irene Stern back then) knew Walter had grown up in Germany. She knew that, after Kristallnacht in November 1938, 12-year-old Walter, his mother and grandmother fled across the border to Holland, where they had family.

Kristallnacht was the night when thousands of German Jews were rounded up and synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses across Germany were torched in a wave of Nazi violence.

Frielich didn’t know how Walter survived the war because he never talked about it.

“We knew not to ask questions,” Frielich said of herself and her brother, David Stern, who is co-president of Temple Beth El in Patchogue.

But having so many unanswered questions left Frielich feeling different from her friends and like “an outsider.”

“I knew there were secrets that weren’t being discussed,” said Frielich, 64, who lives in Boston and owns a company that makes instructional videos for corporations.

It was only after their father died, in 1994, that Frielich and her brother discovered Walter had made a video describing his wartime experience in detail.

“We don’t know why he made it or why he didn’t send it to us before he died,” Frielich said.

The discovery of the video propelled Frielich to start researching her father’s story.

Frielich, along with family members, made four trips to Germany and the Netherlands, retracing Walter’s steps from his hometown in Germany to the Dutch village where he and his mother and grandmother hid from the Nazis in the attic of a farmhouse for more than two years. (Walter’s grandmother died during the war, but he and his mother made it to the U.S., where she lived across the street from the Sterns in Babylon.)

Frielich tells her father’s story, and of her own journey to discover it, in her book “Shattered Stars, Healing Hearts: Unraveling My Father’s Holocaust Survival Story.”

She will discuss the book in an appearance on Nov. 10 at St. Joseph’s University.

The painful truths Frielich uncovered include finding out that Walter’s grandfather had perished in Auschwitz in 1942, one of more than a dozen family members to die in the camps or in the ghettos of Europe.

The sorrow didn’t stop Frielich from wanting to find out the details of her father’s story and share it with the world.

“I just really needed to know,” she said.