The Daughter of Auschwitz: My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope
*INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER*
WITH A FOREWORD BY SIR BEN KINGSLEY
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 a 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.
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Lori Hardin –
Wonderful story!
I’ve read many books by Holocaust survivors and this is another great one. Given how young Tova was at the beginning, allowed for a very long and very wonderfully detailed book to be written. Very, very detailed and absolutely wonderfully written. Never forget!
Lila R. –
Very nice item!
Wow! This is a good read! Pick it up!
CRK –
An important true story
This is an amazing story of strength, bravery, and survival. It is so hard to believe this is a true story. I know the person who the book is about and reading her story makes me appreciate everything she survived that much more. The book is well written and captured my attention from beginning to end.
Suzi –
Courage
This is amost awful and wonderful tale of remembrances of survival that I have read. The author and her parents were true to their faith andTheir family despite horrors and deprivation beyond belief. It is poignant and topical now.
James Mason –
A child tells what it was like to grow up in Auschwitz
The Holocaust has been so well covered in print and film that it’s unusual for a new book on the subject to create a stir. Yet Tova Friedman’s account of her early life caught up in Germany’s attempt to eradicate the Jewish people is a shocking and compelling read. She was born in 1938 in central Poland, in a large Jewish community, and from the time she was first aware until the liberation of Auschwitz when she was seven all she knew was the oppression and the murder of the Jews. “As you read on I want you to taste and feel and smell of what it was like to live as a child during the Holocaust,” she states. “Auschwitz imprinted itself in my DNA.”With the help of noted British conflict journalist Malcolm Brabant Friedman gives a matter of fact account of the evil that transpired. First there was the brutality of ghetto life in her Polish home town, and then her family’s transport to Auschwitz. Her mother’s unerring instincts for how to survive served them both well. “My survival depended on my ability to judge the mood of my captors,” she writes. Her father was sent to Dachau and somehow also survived.In Auschwitz she was put into a group of children who had their own barracks. One morning she awakens in her bunk to find her bunkmate, also a young girl, has died of starvation during the night. Her mother sustains a severe head injury in a beating given because she was caught stealing a single potato. Next to the barracks for the children was the laboratory where Dr. Josef Mengele performed his twisted, sadistic experiments. Tova witnessed murder, often in the most brutal fashion, on a daily basis. It was all part of her daily life.During the Holocaust 1.5 million Jewish children were murdered. Tova, at the age of 5, accepts this fate as the reality of being Jewish. Her hometown in Poland had 13,000 Jews in 1939. At the end of the war only 200 had survived. Of those survivors only 5 were children.This book is a very well-written account of a child’s experience living through what is undoubtedly one of humanity’s darkest episodes. Her memory is astounding. This is a book which sets one to thinking.
Norman D. Marks –
A remarkable story of survival and heroism
The author is a little younger than my parents, who were lucky to be born in England rather than in Poland – the home of my mother’s grandfather and family.My great-aunt married a Polish man who had escaped but lost his entire family to the Nazis. I also have distant German, Polish, and Russian Jewish relatives who perished in the camps.The author tells her personal story in terrible detail, making it real for those of us who can’t really imagine the depths of cruelty, not only during the war but even after. Reading about attacks on Holocaust survivors by rampaging bands of Polish anti-Semites shocked me.Even if you have read widely about the Shoah, and even if you have watched movies and TV documentaries about it, you are sure to be amazed by what she recounts. The heroism of her mother and father shines through.Buy this book. Read it. Think about what it means for life today.
W. Merrill –
Fantastic
One of the best books I’ve read regarding experiences of the Holocaust. I will never understand hatred for a religion when it’s the same God all pray to. Bless Tova, her ancestors, her family, and to the 6 million human beings who were murdered.
Kindle Customer –
Great Book
A great autobiography. So real and raw. Iknow so much more about the Holocaust What racism and hatred are capable of creating. .
EME –
As all books about the Shoah, this is a must read to never forget and guide us to a better humanity.
Darina McGrath McGough –
Easy to read,gripping, leaves a deep impression on the reader,We must never forget such books are necessary in this evermore restless world.
Brian –
The story is from a perspective that I’ve never seen before. A child who never knew anything except the persecution of the Jews.
H M Roberts –
What a book!. It took me forever to pluck up the courage to read it. I anticipated how harrowing it was going to be, and I had to break off several times while reading it. I just couldn’t bear to read more than a few chapters at a time.It is such a compelling story of an extraordinary little girl who grew up to be an extraordinary woman. Reading it, I was filled with an overwhelming outrage that children, families, a whole generation of people had gone through this horror, and still there are people who deny it happened, who are filled with hatred for anyone different from themselves. And how the extreme Right – and extremes of all kind – seem to be gaining traction again today. I find it terrifying. The final line of Brecht’s play ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’ kept repeating itself round and round as I read Tova’s story. ‘The bitch that bore him is on heat again.’ That feels completely relevant and current today. Quite terrifying.Though the book is so harrowing and heartbreaking, there is hope in there. God knows how, but there is. It comes from love, an indomitable spirit, stubbornness and pragmatism. The relationship between Tova and her mother shines through; they have such a powerful emotional connection with each other it is quite extraordinary. I wondered whether that was only because of the situation they were in, but I don’t think so. They seemed to be spiritually connected in a way that most children and parents can only dream of. The bravery of that little girl. The long term effect on her mental state must have been extraordinary and one hopes that there was significant support for her and other survivors to help them to come to terms, in as much as that might be possible, with what happened to them.Despite emotional scars, Tova and her parents were the lucky ones, they survived to bear witness. Her memoir, told with clarity and empathy by Malcolm Brabant, is beautifully written; there is even humour, and there is always humility. The book is searingly honest, never mawkish, never self-pitying. Brabant shows considerable skill as a writer, and as an interviewer – he and Mrs Friedman obviously formed an extraordinarily tight bond during the hours they spent together gathering the material for the book.It is a tough read. There are moments when it is almost unbearable, but it is a powerful, compelling and important book that should be on the curriculum for every school, everywhere.
Tezza –
Loved the book .Could’ve been cheaper with the price.