Tova Friedman, child survivor of the Holocaust, has been a speaker at numerous engagements. But what she talks about is “not really my story,” she said.
Instead, “it is the story of the million-and-a-half children that did not survive” the Nazi death camps.
Born in Tomaszow Mazowiecki, a town in central Poland, Friedman, 66, was only five years old when she entered Auschwitz. When the camp was liberated in January 1945, she was six years old.
She was the youngest out of about five children that survived from her hometown, and possibly was the youngest of all the approximately 7,000 survivors liberated from the camp, she said.
More than 1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, the years that the camp was in operation, almost all of them Jews.
Friedman will speak on her “personal experience as a child survivor” as keynote speaker for the Yom HaShoah “Memorial to the Six Million, Remembrance of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and All Resistance,” held on Sunday, May 8, 2 p.m., at Congregation Shalom.
Friedman said she will “take the audience with me into the child’s world of the Holocaust,” as she talks about her experiences first living in the “ghetto, labor camp, and then extermination camp.”
In 1950, Tova moved to the United States with her parents, who both also survived.
In an article in the Chicago Tribune on Jan. 30, Friedman said she “once calculated the odds of all three members of my family — my mother, my father and myself, surviving the war as Polish Jews. It came to one in 1,000. We were among the lucky ones.”
Friedman, along with two other child survivors from Tomaszow Mazowiecki, Rachel Hyams and Frieda Tenenbaum, told their stories to author Milton J. Nieuwsma for his book “Surviving Auschwitz: Children of the Shoah,” (I Books, paperback), which is now in its second printing.
The book inspired a television special by the same name that will air on PBS in May, commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps.
In the book, Friedman tells of her eight months at Auschwitz, including how at one point she was led to a gas chamber, only to be sent back because of a clerical mistake.
Of her story, Friedman says, “I speak to everyone who wants to hear, because the survivors are disappearing.” One day, she added, “people will only see us in videotapes.” She said that she wants to “make sure people see us as witnesses in case someone tells us it didn’t happen.”
She sees what she is doing as a “sort of legacy,” she said. “I don’t want those who have been killed to be forgotten.”
Friedman has spent a great deal of her life working for the Jewish community. She lived in Israel from 1967 to 1977 with her husband and four children, and she taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She now is executive director of Jewish Family Service in Highland Park, N.J., where she lives.
The Yom HaShoah commemoration is partially funded through the Harold & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center’s Raye and David Yom Hashoah Endowment Fund, the JCC Luba Slosberg Memorial Endowment Fund and the Pincus and Bluma Weinstock Yom HaShoah Endowment Fund.
Event chair is Sandra Hoffman. For more information, contact Dorene Paley at the JCC, 414-967-8217 or dpaley@jccmilwaukee.org.
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