On Wednesday the German Bundestag commemorated the victims of National Socialism. In a speech before the full assembly, Holocaust survivor Tova Friedman recalled the horrors of the Nazi regime. She spoke about the painful memories she carries and the imperative to prevent forgetting. Having survived the Auschwitz‑Birkenau extermination camp as a child, Friedman stressed the importance of keeping the history alive to warn future generations about the dangers of antisemitism.
Friedman explained that she never had the chance to meet her grandparents or great‑grandparents because they were murdered in Germany during the war. She remembered the six million Jews-including one and a half million children-killed solely because of their Jewish origin. With vivid detail she described being hidden in a Polish ghetto as a child and later enduring life in Auschwitz‑Birkenau.
In her address she highlighted that antisemitism still exists today, appearing in new forms. She shared the experiences of her grandchildren, who faced discrimination because of their Jewish faith, urging listeners to remain vigilant and oppose all forms of hatred and prejudice.
At the onset of World War II Friedman and her family were first deported to the Tomaszów Mazowiecki ghetto. When she was five years old, the Nazis sent Friedman and her mother to Auschwitz‑Birkenau. She survived the extermination camp as one of the youngest known child survivors, initially due to a presumed technical glitch in the gas chambers and later by hiding among corpses in the infirmary during death marches.
After her liberation on 27 January 1945, Friedman discovered that many of her family members had been killed. She and her family emigrated to the United States in 1950. In New York she studied psychology, literature, and social work. In 1960 she married and spent ten years in Israel with her husband, Maier Friedman, teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Upon returning to the U.S., she worked for more than twenty years as a psychotherapist and director at the Jewish Family Service of Somerset and Warren Counties in New Jersey, a position she still holds today.