Max Frieds early career struggles helping him deal with weight of $218 million Yankees contract

New Yankees ace Max Fried strikes up some Q&A with Post columnist Steve Serby.Q: What was that like when you visited Dachau?A: I went back-to-back years for a couple of soccer trips with a couple of buddies, just lining it up so, like, if we went to go see Manchester City, Manchester United in England, and then we wanted to go see PSG versus Real Madrid in Madrid, and kind of scheduled our trip around that.And then the days in between we kind of just were like, “OK, well we’ve got three or four days in between, let’s go to Germany.” In that time we went to Munich and then we went outside to Dachau, and then just being able to do the sightseeing thing in Europe for the first time, but just trying to make the most of being out there.

… Me growing up Jewish and understanding that I have a lot of family that were killed in the Holocaust, to be able to go and step … I’d heard about it my whole life growing up and to be able to step and kind of like feel the energy that is just still extremely … it’s heavy.… You go into the grounds and you can feel that there was definitely evil done down there.

… So to be able to experience it in person … You know the evils that were done, but to be able to step on the grounds, see the gas chambers, to see the quarters, to see where they were living, working and all those little things and just being in person, in the flesh, it kind of just brought a heaviness and a weight and more of an understanding of this is something that happened in somewhat of a recent past.Join Post Sports+ for exciting subscriber-only features, including real-time texting with Greg Joyce about the inside buzz on the Yankees.

Q: What family members do you know that were killed?A: My dad’s dad side.They were from, like, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and all the borders were just kind of always getting moved, and then right before the war, they happened to move to Israel, in that region and that area, and a lot of the family that sta...