The Daughter of Auschwitz: My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope
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Tova Friedman is a Jewish American therapist, social worker, author and academic. She was born in Gdynia, Poland on September 7, 1938.
When Nazi Germany invaded Poland, Friedman and her family were forced to live in a ghetto along with 5,000 other Jews. Living conditions were terrible in the six four story buildings where they dwelled.
Over time, the population of the ghetto decreased as a result of starvation, shootings and deportations to concentration camps.
By the time Tova was five years old, her father had been deported to Dachau Concentration camp, while she and her mother had been sent to Auschwitz.
She arrived at Auschwitz on a Sunday in June of 1944. She was shaved and tattooed with a number. The section of the camp where children were kept wascalled Kinderlager or "Children's Camp".
There, Tova survived starvation and a trip to the gas chamber on October 7. The mechanisms failed in the chamber that day because an explosive had been detonated by one of the prisoners.
She was spared once again when the numbers on her tattoo did not match the list that the Nazi guards had.
When the Nazis we're preparing to flee the camp in January of 1945, Toba and her mother avoided being taken on a final death march by their captors. They both hid among corpses in the infirmary. They were later rescued by the Russian Army who liberated the camp, marking the end of the war in Europe.
When Tova and her mother returned to Poland, they found that their home had been destroyed and her extended family killed. Her father eventually returned, after having survived, and they lived together in Poland for several years.
Friedman and her family emigrated to the US in 1950. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology from Brooklyn College, a Master of Arts degree in Black Literature from the City College of New York and a Master of Arts in Sociology from Rutgers University. She went on to teach at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She also worked as a therapist for 20 years. She married and had four children.
The story of Friedman's life was written in the 1998 book Kinderlager by Milton J. Nieuwsma.
In 2022, she published her memoir The Daughter of Auschwitz: My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope, which she wrote with journalist Malcom Brabant.
Friedman spoke on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, on January 27, 2025, at the site of Auschwitz.
No matter how many years have passed, it is extremely painful to learn that a five year old child was subjected to such cruel treatment for a prolonged period.
Along with elderly people, children had the lowest rate of survival in concentration camps. As many as 1.5 million Jewish children alone were murdered or died at the hands of Nazi officials and their collaborators. One can only wonder, how many would have gone on to become great scientists, writers, inventors, and heads of state or simply loving fathers and mothers. That right was stolen from them by ignorance, hate, and the abhorrent actions of many and we all lost something irreplaceable as a result.
Genocide is unacceptable, under any circumstances.
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