The Thaler Holocaust Education Trust welcomed Yom HaShoah Guest Speaker Tova Friedman, one of the co-authors of The Daughter of Auschwitz: My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope. Friedman spoke at Coe College, Cornell College, Kirkwood Community College and Mount Mercy University in March 2023. Students from several schools attended her presentation at Kirkwood.

Tova Friedman was one of the youngest people to emerge from Auschwitz. After surviving the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Central Poland where she lived as a toddler, Tova was four when she and her parents were sent to a Nazi labor camp. She was 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.

In her memoir The Daughter of Auschwitz, Tova immortalizes what she saw, to keep the story of the Holocaust alive, at a time when it’s in danger of fading from memory. She has used those memories that have shaped her life to honor the victims. Tova and her co-author, award-winning former war reporter Malcolm Brabant, have painstakingly recreated Tova’s extraordinary story about the world’s worst-ever crime.

Tova feels it is important to fight against antisemitism. As a survivor she feels an obligation to share her voice.