Never Forget - Tova Friedman, 'Daughter of Auschwitz'

84-year-old Tova Friedman, one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz, visits us to discuss her haunting memoir, The Daughter of Auschwitz: My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope. Co-written by Malcom Brabant, Friedman’s memoir details the vivid memories she had of her survival in a Jewish ghetto, Nazi labor camp, and Auschwitz. With so few Holocaust survivors left, she felt an obligation tell her story and more importantly, to remember all the innocent children who died at the hands of the Nazis. “There isn’t much time left for me or people my age and we are the last generation, we are the witnesses, and there are less and less of us, fewer and fewer I should say are alive, and fewer than that are able and willing to talk. So I had been wanting for a very long time to write my memoir…”

In her book, Friedman writes about the many instances when she came near death, but was able to narrowly escape each time. How was she able to survive such atrocities? “Luck and a combination of my mother teaching me how to behave and by listening. When she said ‘be quiet,’ I was quiet. When she told me ‘stand still,’ I stood still. She knew when I would be in danger, and how I would not be in danger if I didn’t move and didn’t cry, and then nobody would pay attention to me, so I should be as invisible as possible and I did that. Because I trusted her, because she always told me the truth.” Of the six million people who died during the Holocaust, over a million and a half of them were children. “Everybody who was a child who made it was just a miracle because their whole purpose was to destroy all children, every child in Europe, every Jewish child in Europe, because they didn’t want any witnesses and they didn’t want us to grow up and tell the world.”

Friedman hopes that her audiences will buy and read her book, “…but most of all I want you to remember, please, remember those that aren’t with us and be very, very weary, well, very careful, of hatred because hatred can lead to exactly what happened to me…We just got to be be careful with hating something we don’t know or we don’t understand.”