Tova Friedman - The Daughter of Auschwitz: My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope

The Daughter of Auschwitz

My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope

Tova Friedman
and
Malcolm Brabant

To my amazing parents, Reizel and Machel, who saved us all. And to my children and grandchildren who will always remember.

Tova Friedman is eighty-four years old and lives in Highland Park, NJ. She is one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz and uses her vivid memories to write and speak against anti-Semitism and prejudice. She was the director of a nonprofit social service agency for twenty-five years and continues to work as a therapist.

Malcolm Brabant is an award-winning British former war correspondent who witnessed genocide in Bosnia. His evocative writing style and forensic probing of Tovas memories remind readers of the horrors of the Holocaust at a time when hate is on the rise around the world and historys worst crime is fading from memory. He is now a foreign correspondent for PBS, with several accolades to his name.

Contents

On driving away from my morning with Tova, the closing lines of Shakespeares King Lear came to mind:

The oldest hath borne most; we that are young

Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

Elie Wiesel would, Im sure, allow us to use his phrase when we cite Tova Friedman as a heroine of truth and memory.

Sir Ben Kingsley, February 2022

My name is Tova Friedman. Im one of the youngest survivors of the Nazi extermination camp known as Auschwitz-Birkenau. For much of my adult life, Ive been speaking about the Holocaust to ensure people never forget.

I was born Tola Grossman in Gdynia, Poland, in 1938, a year before the Second World War began. After living through every stage of the Nazis attempt to wipe out the Jewish people, I eventually moved to America, married Maier Friedman and later began calling myself Tova.

No matter how much the last few remaining survivors and I share our stories, it seems that people are forgetting. Personally, I was horrified to learn about the levels of ignorance revealed in a survey of young Americans that was commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and published in September 2020.

Two-thirds of the people who were interviewed had no idea how many Jews died in the Holocaust. Almost half couldnt name a single concentration camp or ghetto. Twenty-three percent believed the Holocaust was a myth or had been exaggerated. Seventeen percent said it was acceptable to hold neo-Nazi views. A similar survey in Europe in 2018 showed that a third of all Europeans knew just as little or hadnt even heard of the Holocaust. It also showed that 20 percent thought that Jewish people had too much influence in the worlds of business and finance.

Those astonishing, alarming numbers point to just one thing: anti-Semitism, or hatred of the Jews, is on the rise again in the United States and across Europe. I find it very hard to believe, after everything we endured in the ghettos and the extermination camps during the Second World War, that the insidious attitudes of the 1920s and 1930s are resurfacing. The Holocaust, the worst crime in the history of mankind, happened less than eighty years ago, and its fading from memory already? That, quite frankly, is appalling.

Im now eighty-three years old, and with this book, I am trying to immortalize what happened, to ensure that those who died are not forgotten. Nor the methods that were used to exterminate them.

Many people wonder whether the world we inhabit now is similar to Europe of the 1930s, when Nazism and Fascism were on the rise in the run-up to the Second World War. Back then, anti-Semitism was the official state policy of Adolf Hitlers Germany. Its true that no government in the world today has such a doctrine enshrined in law and supported by the population at large. Nevertheless, we all know countries where discrimination is prevalent and perhaps even tolerated.

Hatred is one of the fastest-growing phenomena today. Hate of every kind, especially toward minorities. Wherever you are in the world, I implore you, do not repeat the history to which I was subjected.

Remember, the Holocaust began less than twenty years after Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, his master plan for eradicating the Jews. In the age of warp-speed internet, change can happen much faster than it did eighty years ago. We need to be constantly vigilant and brave enough to speak out.

On that note, just as we were putting the finishing touches to this book, President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops to invade neighboring Ukraine, imperiling world peace in the process. The images were so familiar to me. Terrorized children and adults, destruction of homes and families, war crimes, millions of people displaced, hunger, bomb shelters and communal graves. And I hope that after nearly eight decades of reflection on mans inhumanity during the Holocaust, Ukraine reminds us of the importance of helping those affected by the ravages of war.

As you read on, I want you to taste and feel and smell what it was like to live as a child during the Holocaust. I want you to take a walk in my shoes and in the footsteps of my family, even though, in the worst of times, we didnt have shoes. I want you to understand the dilemmas that faced us and the impossible choices we had to make. I hope you get angry. Because if you are angry, theres a chance youll share your outrage, and that increases the chances of preventing another genocide.

I come from a long tradition of oral history. I consider myself more of a narrator and storyteller than a writer, which is why my friend Malcolm Brabant has been helping me. He has a way with words and images.

We met in Poland in January 2020, as the world commemorated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, which took place on January 27, 1945.

Malcolm has been a war reporter. He witnessed ethnic cleansing close at hand in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s. He knows the stench of genocide. Hes had some narrow escapes and painful experiences that are different to mine. What we have in common is that we are both survivors.

He has delved into the Nazi occupation of Poland to try to place my childhood in the right context.

As we worked together to revive the sounds, smells and tastes of the Holocaust, I found that hidden memories came flooding back. Sometimes they kept me awake all night. Everything that happened to me and the people around me is buried somewhere deep in the recesses of my subconscious. As a practicing therapist, I must accept the possibility that age and time have blurred my worst memories. The human brain and body are extraordinary instruments, and they have survival mechanisms that we may never fully comprehend.

Some details of my story may not precisely align with other accounts of the Holocaust. After the war, my mother talked to me incessantly about what happened to us, to make sure I didnt forget. The conversations I recall in this book are not verbatim. The content, tone and nature, however, are an honest representation of what was said at the time. We all have different memories and versions of the truth. This is my truth.

I dont believe I suffer from survivors guilt, which is one component of what psychiatrists call survivors syndrome. Those who experience this condition punish themselves for surviving, even though they are blameless. I dont think the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust would want me to feel guilty. Instead, I have chosen to embrace a new termsurvivors growththrough which I actively use my experiences to build a meaningful life in honor of those who died in the Holocaust. I will remember them.