Born in 1938, just two years before Adolf Hitler invaded her home country of Poland, Tova Friedman unwittingly and without consent, forfeited her childhood in exchange for daily terror and intimidation, barbed wire fences, violence, starvation and brutality at the hand of the Nazis. From the time she was two years old until the age of 7, all she knew was war and death as a child prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. After enduring a living nightmare for her first seven years of life, Tova and her parents, who also survived the war, emigrated to Brooklyn, New York, where they found solace with fellow Jewish immigrants as they tried to build a normal life.
Today, Tova is a mother of four and a grandmother, who travels the world speaking about her experience as one of the youngest living Holocaust survivors on record. She just released her memoir, The Daughter of Auschwitz: My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope, which was co-written with former PBS investigative reporter Malcolm Brabant. The book features a foreword by Academy Award-winning actor, Sir Ben Kingsley, who calls Tova “a heroine of truth and memory.”
Tova’s best advice for overcoming a traumatic event:
“The thing that I really think we need most is hope. If you have hope, it is sort of a belief that you will overcome. It will just take some time. One of my favorite people is [David] Ben-Gurion. He was the first Prime Minister of Israel, and he made the country possible. He used to have a saying that I love: ‘Things that are difficult to accomplish will take some time. Things that are impossible will just take a little longer.’” On the myth of Jewish passivity leading up to the Holocaust – “Why didn’t you leave?”: “That is the exact question I asked my father years ago. I said [to my father], ‘After Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) and everything else, you saw the writing on the wall. Why were you still in that country, in that city?’ He said to me, ‘We all thought that this maniac in Germany would either be killed or he will not be Chancellor; we thought something is going to happen to him.’ In other words, the passivity came from disbelief. We also thought that if anybody gets hurt, it would be the men, never women and children, which was just the opposite. The belief just wasn’t there that this could happen.” “[We all saw Hitler] as a maniac. The German Jews, especially, felt very German. They were German first and Jewish second. They were in politics, in the arts, and in everything. They just couldn’t believe that this country that they literally loved would do this to them. By the time he began to expel them, it was too late. He was too strong. He grew from something very small. I think of it like cancer. You have one cell that is cancerous, and if you don’t cut it out it kills the body. By the time people realized, he already was so organized. And I must tell you something else. He had a lot of people helping him. He had the Intelligentsia, the intellectuals of Germany, being on his side. That is what is scary. He couldn’t have done it alone, and he couldn’t have done it with simple people. He had the best people and the highly educated German people on his side.” On Tova’s mother hiding her from German SS soldiers underneath the corpse of a deceased woman inside the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp when she was just six years old: “It was at the end of the war, and I was six and a half. [My mother] placed my head in a certain way. I knew what she was doing. She was manipulating my body so that my mouth, I would be breathing into the ground and into the mattress, and not up. Then my legs were between the legs of the [deceased] woman. I remember it exactly, because she put my body in a position and I allowed it, of course. I trusted my mother one hundred percent. Then she covered me up with a blanket and all that was visible was the woman’s head and her hands above the blanket. She knew the Germans were going to come and check, because they wanted to leave no witnesses. They were going to kill anybody that looked dead, but wasn’t. She told me not to breathe too much.” “I don’t know what happened to the other children, but I did meet a few children after the war. After the war, there were five children that came back from Auschwitz to my hometown, out of hundreds. So, five children were spared.”
On evading the gas chambers that claimed the lives of so many other Jewish children:
“The children before me, I know that they were gassed. I looked into their window when I walked out of my barrack at one point, and I saw that it was empty. I remember going inside, because it was so cold and there was the little jacket for a girl hanging there. I don’t know why she didn’t take it with her. And inside her jacket pockets were gloves. I said to myself, ‘I could use those gloves.’ But I then thought, ‘No, she was killed. I’m not going to take those gloves.’ I remember that so well.” On whether she questioned her survival: “No, but don’t forget, I didn’t have a real childhood. I was born one year before the war, and I only knew the war. I knew all kinds of things happen. If you stood here, you would be killed. When you were standing outside being counted for hours, which was called ‘Appell,’ sometimes when you stood to the left maybe all the people standing to the left are going to be killed. It was like you were in the middle of a nightmare and you didn’t know what the right thing is to do, or where to go to be safe. I expected all kinds of things to happen without any reason. Us not being killed was just another thing [that happened].” What Tova believes led to the Nazi Party Gaining Traction in Germany Prior to WWII: “The belief that if the other person wouldn’t be around and take my money, my job, my house, then I would be better off. It is the false belief that you will be better off if you get rid of the other person; financially, emotionally, there will be more space, there will be more money and you will have better choices. You need a leader to tell you that. You needed a Hitler. You need someone who is very charismatic. What is mind boggling is, why did all of these intelligent and brilliant people follow a maniac like that? Because he promised them everything.” On Her Belief in God: “I have good days and bad days. I have days where I believe in God, and days when I don’t believe in God. The days when I do, I see the good stuff that is happening, especially to me, personally. I say to myself, ‘It isn’t He who put me in Auschwitz. It’s other people, because he gave them the same free will that he gave me. But I chose this, and they chose the other.’ It’s a puzzle.” On Her Daily Mantra and Her Career as a Therapist: “I want to tell you, my husband died two years ago after sixty years of marriage. I believe very strongly in self-talk. I tell my clients, ‘I see you only once a week for fifty minutes. You live with yourself every day, 24/7. Find a spot in your house where you are very comfortable and talk to yourself.’ I use [that tool] all the time. I will also just sit in yoga position, close my eyes and say, ‘Okay, another challenging day. Make me worthy of the challenge.’ I don’t know to whom I am talking. I do this over and over again, and it’s a good way to start. It’s as good as having a cup of coffee.” On the First Time She Learned How to Laugh, Post-Holocaust: “I want to tell you something; I’m not a big laugher. I don’t laugh too much. I decided I have to learn to laugh, so I took a standup comedy class for seven weeks and I failed it. He said to me, ‘You know, don’t give up your day job. You couldn’t find anything funny in your childhood, so I don’t think it’s so good.’ He didn’t know my background at all. But laughter has become very important. I now somehow try to find the levity [in life].” Leave a Reply. |
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