Auschwitz Survivor Warns: 'Never Again' Is Under Threat

At a terrifying and horrifying presentation in Sag Harbor last week by a woman who survived the Holocaust, co-author of the book The Daughter of Auschwitz: My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope, there were audience members who stood to cite as antisemitism both anti-Israel activists demonstrating at a Jewish-owned restaurant in Sag Harbor and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s seeking to have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested if he comes to the city to attend a U.N. session in September.

Tova Friedman, now 87, was a prisoner at the Auschwitz concentration camp as a young girl. She was taken to a gas chamber there, but on that day it didn’t work.

She gave her presentation at the Center for Jewish Life–Chabad. She was introduced by Rabbi Berel Lerman, who said: “We are, sadly, living in times of rising antisemitism. It’s not just ancient Jewish history which is being rewritten. It’s history that has unfolded before our eyes.”

That included, he said, the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

“It’s very important that we have the right source of information, the truth. The best way to fight darkness is with the light.”

He described Friedman as “one of the greatest sources of inspiration regarding her surviving the Holocaust.”

Mark Moskowitz of the American Society for Holocaust Education and Remembrance and a resident of Northwest Woods then spoke about a trip by the society this April to “that dreadful place”—Auschwitz—during which Friedman accompanied participants and told of what happened there.

In her presentation, Friedman said that in the Holocaust, “genocide is what we experienced… We were slaughtered.”

She said “the plan was to kill 12 million Jews,” all the Jews of Europe.

“Hitler only went up to six [million]. He didn’t have time to finish it.”

She spoke of how Nazi soldiers arrived at her town in Poland and first “shot the elderly and children.”

She described how her father, a tailor, made a “crawlspace” where she hid.

She told of her family’s transit by cattle car, and her father being sent to the Dachau concentration camp while she and her mother were sent to Auschwitz. She was tattooed with a number that she noted.

She was kept in a kinderlager, or “children’s camp,” at Auschwitz.

She detailed horrific conditions, including starvation.

She and other children were later taken to a gas chamber.

“We waited,” but it didn’t function.

“They couldn’t do it this time and would do it the next time.”

But then, with the Soviet Army closing in, the Nazis began evacuating Auschwitz.

Buildings were burned, crematoria leveled as the Nazis, she said, sought to hide what they had done there.

Remaining survivors were sent, she said, on a “Death March,” which she and her mother avoided by hiding among corpses in the camp infirmary. The corpse of the woman she hid under was still warm, she said.

In the discussion period, Florine Wachter of Muttontown stood and spoke of Mayor Mamdani wanting to have Netanyahu arrested. “In order to know your future, you have to know your past,” she said.

“We American Jews must say it never happens again. We have to be tough like Israelis” and “stand up and protect our heritage.”

Mitchell Agoos of East Hampton stood and thanked Friedman for “humanizing an inhuman story.”

He then spoke about the demonstration at Lulu restaurant on July 5.

“So far nothing happened” to those in the group although their identities are known, he said.

“If we allow this to stand, where will we go next?” he declared.

Friedman, who lives in New Jersey, said she heard about what happened at Lulu.

Friedman emigrated with her family to the United States in 1950.

She received a bachelor's degree in psychology from Brooklyn College, a master's degree in Black literature from the City College of New York and a master's degree in social work from Rutgers University.

She taught at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was a therapist and director at a Jewish Family Service facility in New Jersey.

She and her late husband, Maier, had four children.

She co-authored The Daughter of Auschwitz, published in 2022, with British journalist Malcolm Brabant.

In its prologue, she writes:

“No matter how much the last few remaining survivors and I share our stories, it seems that people are forgetting. Personally, I was horrified to learn about the levels of ignorance revealed in a survey of young Americans…. Two-thirds of those interviewed had no idea how many Jews died in the Holocaust…. Twenty-three percent believed the Holocaust a myth or had been exaggerated. Seventeen percent said it was acceptable to hold neo-Nazi views. A similar survey in Europe… showed that a third of European Jews knew just as little or hadn’t even heard of the Holocaust.”

“Those astonishing, alarming numbers point to just one thing: antisemitism, or hatred of the Jews, is on the rise again in the United States and across Europe,” she writes.

“I find it very hard to believe, after everything we endured in…the extermination camps…that the insidious attitudes of the 1920s and 1930s are resurfacing. The worst crime in the history of mankind happened less than eighty years ago, and it’s fading in memory already? That, quite frankly, is appalling.”

Friedman continues that “with this book I am trying to immortalize what happened, to ensure that those who died are not forgotten. Nor the methods that were used to exterminate them.”

She writes: “Hatred is one of the fastest-growing phenomena today. Hate of every kind, especially toward minorities. Wherever you are in the world, I implore you, do not repeat the history to which I was subjected.”

She concludes: “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.”

Her maiden name was Grossman. We are not related. However, all of my family who didn’t leave Europe, on both the Grossman and Hyman sides, were murdered in the Holocaust.