The Daughter of Auschwitz

The Daughter of Auschwitz: A Memoir

By Tova Friedman and Malcolm Braban
Narrated by Saskia Maarleveld
Publishication date: September 6, 2022
Listening length: 7 hours, 53 minutes
My review: 4 out of 5 stars 

Read for my March 2023 Reading challenge, bonus prompt 3: Memoir by a woman or no-binary person. 

A powerful memoir by one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz, Tova Friedman, following her childhood growing up during the Holocaust and surviving a string of near-death experiences in a Jewish ghetto, a Nazi labor camp, and Auschwitz.

"I am a survivor. That comes with a survivor's obligation to represent one and half million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis. They cannot speak. So I must speak on their behalf."

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 labour camp, and 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 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 honour the victims. Written with award-winning former war reporter Malcolm Brabant, this is an extremely important book. Brabant's meticulous research has helped Tova recall her experiences in searing detail. Together they have painstakingly recreated Tova's extraordinary story about the world's worst ever crime.

Another amazing story of survival in the face of tremendous tragedy. As Americans, I don't think we can begin to imagine what the people went through during the Holocaust, but this is one way we can try to understand, by reading first-hand accounts. Tova is one of the youngest survivors to come out of Auschwitz. This is her story. 

If you can listen to nothing else, listen to the foreword of this book. The author has a warning for us: 

“in this age of warp-speed internet, change can happen much faster than it did eighty years ago. We need to be constantly vigilant and brave enough to speak out."

Some of my the most shocking revelations to me were from the introduction. Tova mentions a Survey commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, published in September 2020: in a survey of young Americans two-thirds of people interviewed didn't know how many Jews died during the Holocaust (over six million), almost half couldn't name a single concentration camp or ghetto, 23% believed the Holocaust had been a myth or exaggerated, and 17% said it was acceptable to hold neo-Nazi views. 

as American philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We need to remember what has happened so that we don't ever have anything like this happen again. 

When asked how our current world compares to the Europe of the 1930's, Tova writes: 

It's true that no government in the world today has such a doctrine enshrined in law and supported by the population at large. Nevertheless, we all know countries where discrimination is prevalent and perhaps even tolerated. 

Only 80 years ago, over 6 million Jewish people were murdered simply because they were Jewish and there is every possibility that we could be headed down a very similar road today. In this book, Tova tells of the many things that her brave mother did to ensure her safety, her survival. It is apparent that without her, the story would have come out quite differently. Now in her mid-80s, Tova sees it as her responsibility to speak out about the Holocaust, to represent the 1.5 million Jewish children who never lived to see the end of the war.  

The holocaust, the worst crime in the history of mankind, happened less than 80 years ago, and it is fading from memory already... that, quite frankly, is appalling.