The Daughter of Auschwitz: My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope

Product Information

adjutant to the comandant (August 1938) and commander of the detention camp (December 1939) in Sachsenhausen Chief Commandant ( Standortältester') in Auschwitz ("Operation Höss" – mass murder of Hungarian jews) Romanov, Sergey (8 November 2009). "Holocaust Controversies: War-time German document mentioning Auschwitz gassings: testimony of Eleonore Hodys". Holocaust Controversies . Retrieved 24 July 2018.

Primomo, John W. (2020). Architect of death at Auschwitz: a biography of Rudolf Höss. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company. pp.76–79. ISBN 978-1-4766-8146-7. OCLC 1133655190. Die 4jährige Tova musste mit ihren Eltern in solch ein Vernichtungslager und mit 6 kam sie nach Auschwitz-Birkenau. Wie überlebt man solch ein Grauen? Warum hat gerade sie überlebt? Sie berichtet davon mal sehr nüchtern und manchmal sehr emotional.Höss experimented with various gassing methods. According to Eichmann's trial testimony in 1961, Höss told him that he used cotton filters soaked in sulfuric acid for early killings. Höss later introduced hydrogen cyanide (prussic acid), produced from the pesticide Zyklon B, to the process of extermination, after his deputy Karl Fritzsch had tested it on a group of Russian prisoners in 1941. [8] [7] With Zyklon B, he said that it took 3–15 minutes for the victims to die and that "we knew when the people were dead because they stopped screaming." [45] In an interview at Nuremberg after the war, Höss commented that, after observing the prisoners die by Zyklon B, " ...this gassing set my mind at rest for the mass extermination of the Jews was to start soon." [46] Tova Friedman was only four years old when she was sent to a Nazi labor camp at the start of World War II. While friends and family were murdered in front of her eyes, the only weapon that Tova and her parents possessed was the primal instinct to survive at all costs. Fate intervened when, at the age of six, Tova was sent to a gas chamber, but walked out alive, saved by German bureaucracy. Not long afterwards, she cuddled a warm corpse to hide from Nazis rounding up prisoners for the Death March to Germany.

A powerful memoir by one of the youngest ever 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.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.

Thomas Harding (31 August 2013). "Was my Jewish great-uncle a Nazi hunter?". The Guardian . Retrieved 24 September 2017. A new book is out today that tells the harrowing story of one young girl’s survival through the Holocaust. I spoke recently with that once young girl and her co-author, who’s well known to our NewsHour viewers. Tola Grossman was just a five-year-old Jewish girl in 1944, when she and her parents were shipped in cattle cars to the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. She would become one of the youngest survivors of the camp, freed as the Red Army swept across Poland and into Germany in 1945, and the depths of the horrors it inflicted on the Jews of Europe became apparent. 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, Co-Author, "The Daughter of Auschwitz: My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope": Well, he was talking to me.We, as people, could do nothing to stop these murders, nor the next. There was no retribution. No eye for an eye. They were killing us with impunity. Tova survives through unimaginable deprivation, and has amazing recall of some of the incidents in the ghetto and concentration camp, considering how young she was at the time. She was actually in the gas chamber near the end of the war, when the Nazis decided there was some mixup and they weren't supposed to gas this particular group of women and girls. PeterApplebome (14 March 2007). "Veteran of the Nuremberg Trials Can't Forget Dialogue With Infamy". The New York Times . Retrieved 15 March 2007.

After discussions with Höss during the Nuremberg trials at which he testified, the American military psychologist Gustave Gilbert wrote the following: 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. Darunter über 6 Millionen Juden, die in Ghettos gepfercht wurden, um anschließend in den Vernichtungslagern ermordet zu werden. It is horrifying reading Tova's story, to read how casually the young Tova viewed death, not afraid of hiding snuggled up tight with a corpse because as she said, why be afraid of the dead woman, the dead wouldn't hurt her. No, not like the alive Nazis would. These experiences are so beyond what I can comprehend, reading her story, her words as she describes what life was like for her. One of her first memories being in the ghetto and her always hidden underneath a table with a tablecloth, this is where she spent most of her young days. The train ride in the cattle cars, just everything, it is like reading a horror story. I cried and cried for the young Tova and the loss of innocence. I feel as she did, that these stories need to continue to be told, that we need to be reminded of these horrific events, we need to be vigilant and aware so that this history is never again repeated. This book should be on everyone's required reading list. This is really one of the key lessons, I think, of the Holocaust, which is that if you stand aside and you don’t do anything, then disaster and murder and genocide takes place. And the worst thing of all is complicity. And at the time there was an awful lot of antisemitism in Poland. Not everybody in Poland was antisemitic, there were lots of people who actually fought really hard, but in the town that Tova came from, it was quite bad.They murdered most of them, not some of them, most of them. I just want to tell you, there were about 15,000 Jews in this town, the beginning of the war. When the war ended in 1945, 300 returned out of 15,000. All these were murdered, some in Auschwitz, some in Treblinka, some starvation. And from hundreds and many, many, many children, five survived. So, in a sense, the entire town was destroyed.