The true story of one girl’s fight for survival against the unspeakable terror of Auschwitz – an important and sensitive retelling.
Tova Friedman was just five years old when she and her mother were sent to a Nazi labour camp. She turned six in Auschwitz. At twelve she was on her way to America, ready to start a new life and tell her tale of survival.
From the destruction of the Jewish ghetto in central Poland, where she lived as a young girl, to the dark days of the camps and eventual liberation by Russian forces in 1945, Tova’s story is one of incredible courage, resilience, bravery and the enduring power of hope.
Her extraordinary journey – told in the bestselling The Daughter of Auschwitz – is reimagined here for young readers with respected children’s author Hilary Freeman. It includes historical context about the Second World War and the Holocaust, an afterword that contextualises Tova’s later life and work campaigning against antisemitism, and a Q&A section featuring the questions she’s most frequently asked about her story.
An extraordinary true account that will help young readers understand the scale of what happened and why it must never happen again.
Tova Friedman was born in 1938, just one year before the outbreak of the Second World War. She was one of hundreds of Jewish children living in the Polish town of Tomaszow Mazowiecki at the time. At just five years old, she and her mother were sent to Auschwitz as Jewish prisoners of war. By the war’s end, only five children from Tomaszow were still alive. Tova is one of the few living survivors to recount her experience of the Holocaust and is a campaigner against antisemitism. After teaching at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and living in Israel for a decade, she became the director of a non-profit social service agency in New Jersey for 25 years. She is a very proud mother of four and grandmother of eight. She is a therapist, and lives in Highland Park in New Jersey, US. Recently she has gained a new audience with her family-run TikTok, which has over 500k followers and 9M+ likes, and her videos have attracted 75 million views.
