Shivering and shaking under a thin towel in an Auschwitz gas chamber, Tova Friedman had resigned herself to death.
At just six years old, she had seen more horror than most see in a lifetime. She also knew that people who entered the gas chambers did not come out alive.
Clinging to another little girl for warmth, Tova huddled for hours, awaiting her death.
The tension was excruciating, as the desperate pleas and whimpers of those around her became deafening.
Suddenly, the SS guards started shouting at them to get out.
Get all the latest news sent to your inbox. Sign up for the free Mirror newsletter
“It’s the wrong block,” Tova heard someone say. “We’ll take them another time.”
Of the millions who entered gas chambers in the Second World War, the 50 children Tova was with that day were some of the few who lived to tell the tale.
Now 84 and a grandmother of eight, she says: “What I saw in Auschwitz is something I still think about every day.
“Even on that day as we were being marched to the gas chamber, I turned to my companion and said, ‘Maybe it’s our turn’.
“I had already accepted the idea that death was my fate. I wasn’t exactly sure what death was, or what happened afterwards, but I remained convinced that all Jewish children had to die.
“It’s still shocking to me that the world allowed it to happen.”
Tova now believes the executions were indirectly halted by one of the main architects of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler.
While researching a new book on her experiences, she realised that she entered the gas chamber on or after November 2, 1944.
On this date, Himmler decreed that there were to be no more gassings using the cyanide-based Zyklon B, an order which directly defied Hitler.
By this stage, the Allies were aware of the scale of the Nazi genocide.
Tova says: “It’s entirely feasible that we were saved by Himmler, who was the second most powerful man in the Third Reich.
“There may have been an order from above. But the message must have taken time to travel from Berlin, because all the children in the barrack next door to us never came back. We saw them walk into the gas chamber and never come back.”
Tova never found out what happened to those other children who survived that day in the gas chamber with her.
“We were totally brainwashed into thinking we were all just numbers – mine was A-27633 – and not people. We didn’t have names,” she says.
“So I was never able to track any of them down.”
Tova, who now lives in New Jersey, was five when she was sent with her parents to a Nazi labour camp from her home town in Poland, where the Jewish population reduced from 15,000 to just 200 over the course of the war.
Her number is still tattooed on the inside of her left forearm.
Tova’s time in the gas chamber was one of countless near-death experiences during the war. She survived a series of mass shootings in her ghetto before she was sent to a labour camp called Starachowice, in central Poland, in 1943.
There she survived another SS purge in the camp when her parents hid her in a cavity in the ceiling above their room in the barracks.
Tova remembers: “I saw the kids I’d played with. They were all around my age – five, six or seven. It was ‘Kinderselektion’ – children’s selection. It was their time to die because the Nazis were liquidating the camp and they didn’t have room for children. They were making it ‘Kinderrein’ – child pure. Cleansed of children.”
Tova remembers the morning of her planned execution. Unusually, she was given a hot breakfast of semolina.
She recalls her mother screaming as she watched her daughter being marched into the gas chamber. But she was so thin, Tova only recognised her when she called out her name – something she was unaccustomed to hearing as she had been referred to by the number she was tattooed with at the death camp for so long.
“I looked to my right and there were all these thin women, who seemed to be half naked, pressed up against a barbed-wire fence,” she recalls.
“They all looked terrible, displaying the hallmarks of starvation.”
It was thanks to her mother Reizel that Tova is alive today.
In January 1945, Russian forces advanced on Auschwitz and the SS began evacuating.
Reizel hid Tova in the camp infirmary by getting her to lie in the bed of a patient who had died.
Although her parents survived the war, Tova says the trauma eventually killed her mother at the age of 45.
Tova emigrated to the US and married her husband of 60 years, Maier. They had four children and she became a therapist, which she still does today.
Now her family are sharing her memories on social media, helping to educate younger generations, especially in an age of growing anti-Semitism.
Her grandson Aaron, 17, has turned her into a TikTok sensation, with his videos attracting 45 million views.
In them Tova answers simple questions, such as what happened when she arrived at Auschwitz and what it was like to be liberated.
Some of the comments on his videos are from people who have never even heard of the Holocaust, and say sickening things such as, “Hitler was right”.
Aaron says: “We get some really awful comments sometimes, which I have to censor. That just shows me how important it is for us to be getting this information out there.”
Tova adds: “I’m very grateful to my children and grandchildren. We are still very close to Israel and to Judaism and my family helps me to continue my message. Hitler tried to break that continuity, but he couldn’t.
“It’s extremely important that we share these videos on social media because we are the last witnesses.
“When we are gone, there will be nobody left to tell these stories and they may be forgotten or denied.
“I’m speaking for all Holocaust survivors to ensure our memories live on for ever.”
- The Daughter of Auschwitz, by Tova Friedman and Malcolm Brabant, published by Quercus Books, is out now
