The Daughter of Auschwitz – Friedman Tova (2022)

This memoir tells an extraordinary story of courage, resilience and survival. Tova Friedman was one of the youngest people to emerge from Auschwitz. After surviving the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Central Poland where she lived as a toddler, Tova was four when she and her parents were sent to a Nazi labour camp, and almost six when she and her mother were forced into a packed cattle truck bound for Auschwitz II, also known as the Birkenau extermination camp, while her father was transported to Dachau. During six months of incarceration in Birkenau, Tova witnessed atrocities 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. As Nazi killing squads roamed Birkenau before abandoning the camp in January 1945, Tova and her mother hid among corpses. After being liberated by the Russians, they returned to their hometown in Poland, where Tova's father eventually found them and the family was reunited. Tova immortalizes what she saw to keep the story of the Holocaust alive and honour its victims. Written with former war reporter Malcolm Brabant, the book uses painstaking research and vivid detail to recreate her extraordinary story.