Tova Friedman survived a labour camp and the gas chamber at Auschwitz. Now, with the help of her teenage grandson, she is using social media to educate a new generation.
Tova Friedman was five when she got her tattoo. She was in Auschwitz and her tattooist was another prisoner, a teenage girl.
"Her hands were shaking," she says. "How could I forget it?"
Friedman sits very erect on a sofa across from me. We're in the house of her daughter, Taya, in a New Jersey suburb.
She remembers that all the children were made to line up and that some thought they might be getting an extra ration and pushed to the front. She remembers how the young tattooist with shaking hands worked, talking to her softly as she applied the letter and the numbers A-27633, one spot of ink at a time.
"To me she was old, but looking back, she can't have been more than 17, 18," Friedman says. "I still remember how I felt the pricks."
She recalls the tattooist saying, "I'll give you a very neat number. If you ever survive you can buy a blouse with a long sleeve and nobody will know what happened to you."
The tattooist told her it was important to memorise her number and Friedman discovered, in the weeks that followed, that this was true. She also recalls that not long after all the children had been given their tattoos, the kindly tattooist was sent to the gas chamber at Auschwitz.
"She was killed afterwards," says Friedman. "After her job was done."
Friedman, who is now 84, is wearing a top that conceals the small tattoo on the inside of her left forearm, just as the girl said it would.
"Most people feel that children don't remember much," says Friedman. "I don't think they realise the effect that events have on very young people."
The events, in her case, form an extraordinary childhood story, the kind you never want any child to have to tell. She survived a campaign of violence and mass murder that reduced the Jewish population of her home town in Poland from 15,000 to 200. She survived a concentration camp where the children were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz, where she was marched into a gas chamber and emerged again to tell the tale. All this by the time she was six.
Now, as part of the last generation of Holocaust survivors, she has begun telling the story to a young audience, on TikTok, where her videos have attracted 45 million views, and in a new memoir, The Daughter of Auschwitz, written with the British journalist Malcolm Brabant.
I ask Friedman if she feels anger. "I don't call it anger," she says. "I would call it shock."
I mention one of her TikTok videos, which is about forgiveness.
"I never," she says. "I don't forgive."
Her grandson, Aron, beside her, jumps in. "The video was that you won't forgive."
"Yeah," she says. "You see in Judaism, you can forgive… only for yourself, not for ones who are dead. I can't forgive for them."
Friedman is a therapist and she keeps busy. On the day I visit her, she rises at 5.30am to type up some work. As we chat, her phone buzzes with calls from patients. I wonder if it makes people hesitate to divulge their problems when they know what she has been through.
"You don't compare problems, you know," she says. "If your foot hurts, it hurts. You can't compare it with somebody else."
At her daughter's house, I sit in the dining room with her daughter, Taya, and Aron, 17, who is also the producer of her TikTok videos. "Everyone my age gets their information from social media," he says. "There is a lot of denialism [about the Holocaust] and antisemitism on TikTok."
So he began posting videos of his grandmother answering basic questions. What happened when she arrived at Auschwitz? ("The first thing they did was they made us take off all our clothes.") How did she survive? ("Well, I really survived by hiding with a corpse.") What was it like to be liberated? ("The only thing I thought of was food.") What does she think of Holocaust films? ("Whatever you see, it was a hundred times worse.")
Aron says he has to censor the responses. "People saying things like, 'Hitler was right,'" he says. But he also began fielding questions from people who seemed never to have heard of the Holocaust. And his grandmother started getting recognised in the street.
"People say, 'I have seen you on TikTok,'" Taya, Friedman's daughter, explains. "She gets hundreds of letters." Often they discuss a trauma the writer has suffered. "People are so inspired," she says. "The message is, if you can go through this and survive, so can I."
Friedman was born Tola Grossman, in 1938. Jews in her industrial town of Tomaszow Mazowiecki were forced into a ghetto in December 1940 and subjected to a series of selektions in which many were deported to the extermination camp of Treblinka.
After surviving several of these, and a mass shooting of civilians in the ghetto, she and her parents were deported to a labour camp called Starachowice, in central Poland, in 1943, where her parents worked in a munitions factory by day while she hung around with a group of Jewish children, playing a game called Catch the Jew. The children "always wanted to be the Nazis", she says.
The following year her parents got wind of another selektion process as the Germans prepared to dismantle the camp: SS officers began rounding up all the children. Friedman's parents hid her in a cavity in the ceiling above their room in the barracks and, through a gap in the planks of the roof, "I saw the kids that I'd played with who were all around my age – five, six or seven," being assembled outside, she writes. "The Nazis were liquidating the camp and they didn't have room for children."
She had to remain hidden, in their room at the barracks. When the camp was broken up, in July 1944, she emerged into the daylight for the first time in months, seemingly the only child left as bored-looking soldiers hustled them into cattle cars behind a steam locomotive. She remembers a woman saying to her mother, "You have a child?" and asking, "May I touch her?" and holding Friedman's face reverently in a cupped hand. "Tears tumbled down her face," Friedman writes. The lady said, "I lost three children. They were ten, seven and four. They were taken."
They were bound now for Auschwitz. Once there, her father would be sent to another camp and Friedman would be separated from her mother and placed in the "children's camp". Friedman recalls becoming inured to the death all around her. When a girl in the bunk above her died during the night, she knew they would be punished if there was one missing during roll call. So she dragged the girl's body from the bed and along the floor to the entrance to their barracks.
"I had to get her number," she says, meaning her prisoner number. "I still remember how heavy she was. I remember saying, 'I'll never make it to the front.' It's the only time that I dealt with a body. And dead people are very heavy."
She writes that when the girl's number was called, "I remember feeling an unusual sense of pride in dealing with the problem, despite not understanding numbers. I raised my arm and responded triumphantly, 'She's dead.'"
She was not scared either when all the children in her barracks were given an unusually good hot breakfast of semolina one morning and were marched through the cold towards one of the gas chambers. Their parents, seeing them come past, screamed.
But, "I didn't know what the end was," she says. After the war, her father would say that the human mind could not conceive of what was happening. "So, as a child, what did I know about gassing? I knew that you walk into the room; you don't come back."
In this case they did come back, that group of children. Friedman wonders if their execution was halted by some error in the paperwork or by a general directive from Heinrich Himmler, fearful that the world was becoming aware of the scale of the genocide.
How must it have been for her mother, seeing her only child marched off? "That's why she died so early," says Friedman. She died at 45. "She couldn't live. I was so happy when she died. She suffered too much. She suffered every day of her life that I knew her. I was so relieved for her."
Her mother had saved the two of them in January 1945, as Russian forces advanced towards Auschwitz and the SS began evacuating the camp, forcing the prisoners to march westward for Germany. Her mother found Friedman in the children's barracks and made her hide in the infirmary by climbing into the bed of a patient who had died.
Some time later a German military unit came through and Friedman recalls a soldier approaching the bed, the gravel in the soles of his jackboots grinding on the floorboards, while she held her breath.
"Eventually, he moved on," she writes. "I fought hard not to gasp as I exhaled."
It's gripping, to read this. It must have been terrifying to live it.
"I wasn't the least terrified," says Friedman. "I wasn't afraid of a dead body… I was covered, I was warm. My mother was nearby. Let them come. This was the least of my problems."
Others, discovered alive, were dragged from their beds and shot, she says. Then the soldiers set fire to the building. As the smoke thickened, her mother arrived to pull her from the bed, saying the Germans had gone.
"All around me, women were climbing out of beds," she writes. "The half-dead were pushing cadavers out of the way."
Two days later, the Russians arrived. Friedman and her mother left in April for their home town, where they were eventually reunited with her father, but not with the family her mother had hoped to find. They were all gone: 150 people.
A lifetime later, Friedman returned to Auschwitz in 2020. Survivors celebrated the liberation and "talked about how much they accomplished", says Friedman. "What's interesting about this is how people can recuperate. How you can witness your entire family shot, including your children, and then remarry, have children again. You never forget these children that you lost, but you could still experience joy and happiness the second time around. I'm amazed by that."
In the "displaced persons" camps that many survivors passed through after the war, "A thousand children a month were being born," Friedman says. "And there were a lot of marriages. They weren't love marriages. It's like, 'You were my neighbour, but we didn't know each other.' 'No, but I knew your family. Let's get married.'"
If you have lost everyone but someone remembers your parents, "that memory is enough to bind you together", she says.
"When you're little, you see the floor; you don't see the ceiling," says Friedman. "I saw the details." Her story is one "of hope and survival and regeneration", she says.
Back when she was five years old, the tattooist had told her to think of a life after the camp. "See, how can I forget that?" says Friedman. "We have to live one more day because this will end eventually. We just have to make it."
Book extract
'We have a treat for you this morning'
The day Tova Friedman was taken to the gas chamber, aged six.
Auschwitz II, aka Birkenau extermination camp, German-occupied southern Poland, autumn 1944. Aged six.
I remember the best breakfast I ever had in the extermination camp. For once, it wasn't a coarse hunk of stale bread and watery soup. At the time I thought it was porridge, whereas now I believe it was more likely to have been a standard German comfort dish, farina pudding: semolina cooked with sugar and maybe condensed milk. Whatever it was, for children like me who were starving, it was delicious. "We have a special treat for you this morning," said an adult voice. "Eat up. It's cold outside. We are leaving."
I wolfed down the semolina and scraped every sticky grain off the tin cup with my spoon. Ours was the last remaining children's block. We all instinctively knew where the walk was going to take us. It didn't matter. Our bellies were full for the first time in a long while. We were living from minute to minute. And in that moment, we were just thankful for the gift of food. When I think about that breakfast now, I find it distressing that even with children, the Nazis played mind games.
After we'd eaten, we came out of the barrack. The ground was rock hard and covered in frost. I can't be certain when it was, but it was probably the end of October or the start of November 1944. We turned left and walked towards the railway track. There must have been over 50 children aged from 4 to 12, escorted by 2 female members of the SS. I was one of the smallest, extracting every ounce of warmth from the rough coat I wore over my shift dress. I was still wearing my white lace-up shoes and no socks. I was at the back of the line with another little girl and we were talking as we walked. Dead bodies, all thin, sharp angles, covered with frost, lay scattered on the ground, not far from the path we were taking. I knew that they just dropped dead on the spot from starvation, exhaustion and disease. Maybe they had just died in the past few minutes. Or maybe they had passed away the night before and hadn't been collected yet by the Leichenkommando, the work teams responsible for corpses. Either way, the sight didn't disturb us. The cadavers were merely part of the landscape.
We walked past another of the children's barrack buildings. It was empty. We hadn't seen those children for a few days. Some of the older ones in our line surmised that the SS had come for them and they'd been taken to the crematorium. "Maybe it's our turn," I said to my companion. As ever, I had already accepted the idea that death was my fate. I wasn't exactly sure what death was, or what happened afterwards, but I remained convinced that all Jewish children had to die. As we were walking, whispers trickled down from the front of the line to the back. Someone had asked where we were going. The answer seemed to be that we were indeed heading to the gas chamber. We kept on walking. The German breakfast was doing what it was intended to do. I was nervous but not excessively distressed. For once, I had a full stomach and that inner cold that comes from starvation had, for the time being, disappeared.
Suddenly, a woman's loud voice pierced my consciousness. "Tola." I was confused. That was my name. For months I hadn't heard it spoken outside the children's barrack. To adults, I wasn't Tola any more. I was A-27633. "That must be my mother," I said to my companion. "She's the only grown-up who knows my name." I looked to my right and there were all these thin women, who seemed to be half naked, pressed up against a barbed-wire fence. They all looked terrible, displaying the hallmarks of starvation. "Tola, where are you going? What's going on?" my mother shouted. I couldn't see Mama in among the crowd. All I heard was her voice. "We're going to the crematorium," I replied, almost jauntily. Suddenly, all the women behind the wire began screaming and ululating. We carried on walking and the screaming became louder and more desperate. I turned to my young companion and said, "I don't understand why they are crying. Every Jewish child has to go to the crematorium."
We must have been walking for about 15 minutes. Then, just before we reached the railway track, we turned right, close to a long, single-storey T-shaped building with sloping roofs. It resembled a large community hall, apart from the incongruous annexe on the side with a squat brick-built chimney emitting that foul-smelling smoke.
"Go down the steps," ordered a soldier in an SS uniform. We did as we were told, and entered a stark, bare concrete room with grey walls. Coat hooks lined the walls. What a sinister and scary place it was. This was the anteroom for the gas chamber in Crematorium III. "Hang up your clothes in such a way that you will know exactly where they are when you come out. You are going to have a shower now."
The concrete walls amplified the bitter temperatures. I undressed and immediately began shivering. I stood on tiptoe, hung up my clothes and placed my shoes neatly beneath them. I looked down to see if there were any landmarks on the floor that I would recognise later. Then I looked to the left and right to determine which children were on either side of me for when we emerged from the shower. Except, I had this sixth sense that we wouldn't be coming out. Still the guards maintained the delusion that we would. Some of the older children were sobbing. Some quietly. Others less so. The noise upset the German desire for order and more than once, they told us to shut up.
The guards distributed ragged threadbare towels, reinforcing the fiction that we were only in this dungeon for a shower. The towels didn't pacify the older ones. I was given a small orange one which I wrapped around myself by tucking it under my arms. It gave me momentary warmth, although I soon started shivering again. Echoes of whimpering children, suffering from the cold and sheer terror, filled the room. Some were swept along by the sense of doom that descended on us. Not me. I remained silent. I didn't cry. I had resigned myself to my fate. Whatever that may be. As long as I could escape the cold. We all huddled together in that concrete waiting room, a few feet from the shower doors. I didn't feel afraid. And I didn't miss my parents. This event, whatever it was, was something I had anticipated.
Wrapped in our thin towels, freezing, shivering and shaking, we clung to each other for warmth. We watched and listened as, on the far side of the room, uniformed SS guards with clipboards barked at each other. They seemed to be confused. Ordinarily, German operations ran like clockwork, but on this frigid morning, the mechanics of the Nazi war machine appeared to have malfunctioned. We waited and waited. The tension was excruciating. The whimpering was getting under the skins of the Germans, who repeatedly yelled at us to be quiet. We remained standing, wrapped in our towels for hours. Suddenly, a harsh command snapped us to attention. "Raus, raus." ("Get out, get out.") We were ordered to get dressed as quickly as possible and go back to our barrack. "It's the wrong block," I heard someone say. "We'll take them another time." We filed out of the waiting room, back up the stairs and retraced our steps towards the Kinderlager, escorted by two SS guards.
In the history of the Holocaust, of all the millions who entered gas chambers in Poland, such as Auschwitz, Majdanek, Chelmno, Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor, there were very few who somehow survived the experience. Our group of 50 children was probably the largest number to live to tell the tale. I always thought my escape was a miracle of the Holocaust. To this day, I don't know if we were saved because, as I thought at the time, there was confusion over which children were scheduled for extermination. But if we were indeed the last children in Birkenau, how could the SS have been expecting another group to be gassed?
If our entry to the gas chamber took place on or after November 2, 1944, it's feasible that we were saved by Heinrich Himmler, the second most powerful man in the Third Reich and one of the architects of the "Final Solution". On this date, Himmler decreed that there were to be no more gassings using the cyanide-based Zyklon B. His order defied Hitler, who was insistent that the extermination of the Jews continued until the task was completed. One of the catalysts for Himmler's decision was recognition that the Allies were by then aware of the scale of the genocide. The turning point happened in late July 1944 when the Soviet Red Army captured the Majdanek extermination camp, 220 miles northeast of Auschwitz. The Russians took the place intact, before the Germans had a chance to destroy the gas chambers and other infrastructure. Evidence of Nazi war crimes was then indisputable.
Extracted from The Daughter of Auschwitz by Tova Friedman and Malcolm Brabant, published on September 1 (Quercus Books).
Written by: Will Pavia
© The Times of London