March 27, 28 & 29
Scroll below for Dates, times and locations
The Thaler Holocaust Remembrance Fund will welcome to Eastern Iowa Yom HaShoah Guest
Speaker Tova Friedman, one of the co-authors of The Daughter of Auschwitz: My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope. Friedman will be speaking at Coe College, Cornell College, Kirkwood Community College and Mount Mercy University from March 26 through 29, 2023.
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 FRIEDMAN
Dates, Times and Locations
Sunday, March 26 at 7:30 pm
Coe College
Community Yom HaShoah Service
Sinclair Auditorium
1220 1st Ave NE
Cedar Rapids, IA 52402
Click for Directions
Monday, March 27 at 6:00 pm
Cornell College
(Book signing will take place after presentation.)
600 First Street SW
Mount Vernon, IA 52314
Click for Directions
Tuesday, March 28 at 1:30 pm
Kirkwood
Ballantyne Auditorium
(Book signing after presentation.)
6301 Kirkwood Blvd SW
Cedar Rapids, IA 52404
Click for Directions
Wednesday, March 29 from 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
Mount Mercy University
Chapel of Mercy
1330 Elmhurst Dr NE
Cedar Rapids, IA 52402
Click for Directions