Auschwitz Survivor Tells Her Story

As Hitler came to power in the 1930s, many Jews failed to see how dangerous he was until his armies were on the march, rounding them up and putting them into death camps, said Tova Friedman at the Calvin College January Series 2015 on Tuesday.

“The Holocaust under Hitler is a warning,” said Friedman, one of the youngest survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp. “Hitler rose, and people didn’t believe what he would do. They didn’t believe what could happen.”

 We need to believe it, she said, when people such as Hitler start to speak out and threaten others with violence.

“Look at what happened in France last week,” she said, referring to the killing of 17 people by assailants French police are calling Islamic extremists. Among other things, the terrorists attacked a French satirical magazine.

“Believe it if someone says they are going to kill Catholics or Protestants or whites or blacks,” said Friedman. “If they say it, do something about it.”

She credited the French people with taking to the streets—to the tune of nearly four million people--on Sunday to protest terrorism and racism after, said newspapers, the deadliest attacks on French soil in more than half a century.

Running through Jan. 26, the January Series 2015 starts at 12:30 p.m. during the week in the Covenant Fine Arts Center.

The series, which  features a wide range of speakers such as Friedman, reaches 45 cities throughout the United States, three Canadian provinces, and a site in Europe through a remote broadcast.

Friedman, a social worker and therapist, said she tells her story as a way to bear witness to the horrors brought on by Hitler, to caution others to do all they can to beat back this type of terrible, almost unimaginable horror, and to bring about healing.

“Because I was saved, I hope I can save someone else in some way,” she said.

Now 75, Friedman was one of 5,000 Jewish children living in the Polish town of Tomashov, near Lodz, before World War II. At the end of the war, only five children from Tomashov were still alive, she said.

She recalls looking out the window of her home and watching first the elderly being killed and then the children. She watched this from a special place in her home where her father had hidden her.

But then she and her mother were put in a truck and eventually ended up in Auschwitz. As soon as she arrived, Friedman says, they shaved her head.

“I looked around, but I saw no children,” she said of the camp. “I later realized they let me live because they had no orders on their clipboards to kill me. I was five and a half.”

At Auschwitz, which was surrounded by electrified fencing,  they stood in lines for hours, waiting to be shot or beaten or sent to the crematorium.

She credits her mother with saving her, with providing for her as best she could and for telling her how to act in the camp.

“In Auschwitz, you had to be invisible. You never wanted to make eye contact with the guards,” she said. “There were no suicides at Auschwitz. They wanted you to die of starvation.”

People who were imprisoned there had small pieces of bread to eat, little water and eventually no hope.

“It went from bad to terrible to pure termination,” she said. “We were living in a complete and utter nightmare without ever being able to wake up.”

Friedman was separated from her mother for a period and recounted getting serial numbers, her death-camp identification tag, tattooed on her arm.

There are gaps in her memory, such as the time spent sick with a high fever. But she remembers the day she was walking along a path in the camp with others and they kept having to bend down to pull frozen corpses out of the way.

Being separated from her mother at the time, she said, “I forgot that I had anyone on this earth. I was just waiting to die.”

One day, bald and naked, she was lined up and marched with other prisoners to the crematorium. She saw the smoke and smelled the burning bodies.

Once they arrived, they waited four or five hours. But then they were marched back. During that march, her mother called out to her and they were reunited.

“By then, the allies were coming and everything at the camp was in chaos. The Germans were taking off their uniforms and putting on prison clothes,” she said.

In order to protect her from those Germans still in uniform, her mother took her into what had to have been a hospital, where her mother found a dead, warm body and had Tova lay under the sheet next to the person.

“I heard the Germans coming. I could hear their big boots. I held my breath,” she said. “One soldier stopped by my bed and then moved on.”

Soon, her mother reappeared and a day or two later the Russians liberated the camp.

Friedman spoke a little about her early years in the U.S. and some about her life after. Her mother died when she was 18 from an injury she received when she was beaten in the camp by the Germans.

After sharing her story, she said she wanted to emphasize the message that Hitler was evil, but evil can lurk and fester anywhere.

“Hatred and bigotry can grow so quickly. They are like a seed that grows into a cancer that destroys societies,” she said.