The Daughter of Auschwitz
Meet Tova Friedman - A Child Survivor of the Holocaust
This Legacy Series event was made possible by Wallace Shealy and Catherine Yael Serota Shealy.
Tova Friedman was born on September 7th, 1938 in Gdynia, Poland, a suburb of Danzig. Her family came from Tomaszow Mazowiecki, a small town near Lodz, Poland, and returned there as soon as the war broke out.Â
After surviving the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Central Poland where she lived as a toddler, Tova was five when she and her parents were sent to a Nazi labour camp, and almost six when she and her mother were forced into a packed cattle truck and sent to Auschwitz II, also known as the Birkenau extermination camp, while her father was transported to Dachau.
During six months of incarceration in Birkenau, Tova witnessed atrocities that she could never forget, and experienced numerous escapes from death. She is one of a handful of Jews to have entered a gas chamber and lived to tell the tale.
As Nazi killing squads roamed Birkenau before abandoning the camp in January 1945, Tova and her mother hid among corpses. After being liberated by the Russians they made their way back to their hometown in Poland. Eventually Tova’s father tracked them down and the family was reunited.
At the end of the war she was just one of five Jewish children to return. More than 150 members of Friedman’s family were murdered. Friedman is among the youngest people to survive the Nazi Holocaust.
After spending several years in a German sanatorium for tuberculosis and Displaced Persons camps, Friedman and her parents arrived in the USA when she was 12 years old. They lived in Brooklyn where she met and married her husband of 60 years, Maier Friedman. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from Brooklyn College and a Master of Arts in Black Literature from City College of New York. Together they immigrated to Israel and lived there for over ten years where she taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. After returning to the US, she earned her Master of Arts in Social Work from Rutgers University and became the director of Jewish Family Service of Somerset and Warren Counties for over 20 years and still works there as a therapist. Friedman has 4 children and 8 grandchildren. Friedman continues to share her story with students and audiences at public and private schools, at colleges, and places of worship all over the country.
