#Tova Friedman

[theredandwhitequeen]

Book 33 of the 50 book challenge. The Daughter of Auschwitz by Tova Friedman and Malcolm Brabant. Tova was born in 1938 a year before the Nazis took Poland. She survived the Holocaust and left Auschwitz when she was 6. She was in a ghetto, a labor camp and a death camp and survived which is miraculous, because most children were killed when they arrived at Auschwitz immediately. She spent months in a childrens block until the place was liberated. Both of her parents survived as well, her mom in Auschwitz and her father in Dachau. Her mother lost over 150 family members and her father had 3 sisters survive. 1 was later murdered by polish antisemetic people. Her family moved to a displaced persons camp in Germany then to the US. Her mother died when she was 14 in the US. Her father died much later in Israel. She married, had children and became a social worker. The book is fascinating.

[onetwistedmiracle]

content warning: Auschwitz, Shoah, subject of WP article survived the Holocaust

She survived Auschwitz. Now she’s teaching Gen Z about it — on TikTok.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://s3.amazonaws.com/arc-authors/washpost/c735a7bb-d04e-404a-9f73-82314e1e810b.png&w=196&h=196

By Marisa Iati

March 29, 2023 at 9:17 p.m. EDT

Viewers frequently flood Tova Friedman’s TikTok account with probing questions: Why didn’t she try to escape from Auschwitz? Could she hear people screaming from the gas chambers? Were there any times when she almost died but got a second chance?

With the help of her 17-year-old grandson, the 84-year-old tries to convey the grim reality of Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp in Poland, while avoiding graphic language that might scare her young viewers.

“I don’t want to turn them off, so I have to be careful a little bit how to do it,” Friedman said. “I’m very careful in choosing my vocabulary.”

Nearly 500,000 people have subscribed to Friedman’s TikTok account, previously reported by NorthJersey.com, since she and her grandson, Aron Goodman, launched the page in fall 2021. They said they’re trying to counter online Holocaust denial and misinformation by sharing Friedman’s firsthand experience — ensuring that the truth lives on, even with antisemitic views widespread in the United States.

“I have a terrific obligation to speak,” Friedman said in an interview. “I don’t have survivor’s guilt, but I have survivor’s obligation, so that I speak to remember.”

Born in Poland on the cusp of World War II, Friedman was forced by Nazis first into a Jewish ghetto and then into Auschwitz. At age 6, she was released from a gas chamber for reasons she still does not know. She once hid next to a still-warm corpse to evade Nazis gathering prisoners for a death march, according to her memoir, and she eventually gained her freedom when Auschwitz was liberated in 1945.

In most of her TikTok videos, Friedman perches on a couch at Aron’s home in Morristown, N.J., and speaks directly to the camera. She also invites her audience into various other settings, including a radio recording studio and a float in a pro-Israel parade.

One post shows Friedman holding up her sleeve as the camera zooms in on the Auschwitz identification number tattooed on her forearm: A-27633. In another video, Friedman holds up the Red Cross card that she used to travel after the Holocaust ended.

TikTok not long ago was totally unfamiliar to Friedman, who initially thought Aron was saying “Tic Tac.” Aron said he recently had to explain to her why they can’t edit a live video like they do to other posts.

But Friedman said her grandson has made adjusting to the platform as painless as possible. He coaches her to make the most of the videos’ short time frame and edits the posts afterward. When she feels uncomfortable while recording, they stop.

Aron also shields Friedman from the antisemitic remarks that their account sometimes receives and said he tries not to dwell on them himself.While much of TikTok’s content is positive, antisemitic extremists have sometimes co-opted the platform to spread hateful content and conspiracy theories, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

“Those give me fuel to try to continue this work,” Aron said. “For the most part, I think about the positive impact we have,” including a message from a teacher in India who wanted to use some of the account’s material for her class.

Holocaust education in Aron’s own classes has been limited, he said. While TikTok videos can’t replace widespread lessons in schools, Aron said he hopes his account will inspire young people to learn further on their own. Friedman, who works as a therapist,also speaks frequently to students and other groups.

All of it, she said, is meant to make people understand the perils of unbridled loathing.

“It’s a warning to be careful with the hatred that you feel about somebody or something,” Friedman said. “It’s okay to feel dislike. … But it’s a different thing to act on it.”

While Aron and Friedman try to expand their content to Instagram and other platforms, they’re also figuring out the future of the “TovaTok” account. Aron is set to leave New Jersey for college in St. Louis this fall, and he’s unsure what that means for the project. He might expand the account to include interviews with other Holocaust survivors, he said, or make videos with his grandmother over FaceTime.

Friedman, for her part, isn’t ready to throw in the towel on their TikTok page.

“I just want to speak as long as I can and reach as many people as is possible as long as I’m alive,” she said.

[mariacallous]

In “Honey Cake & Latkes: Recipes from the Old World by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Survivors,” Tova Friedman writes, “My late husband’s favorite food was tzimmes, but he also shared his family’s recipe for kasha varnishkes. So from the time I had my own family and had children, we always used to prepare tzimmes and varnishkes. This is the “old-fashioned” way to make it: with lots of mushrooms.”

This hearty dish is perfect for the crisp fall months.

[loveisbraveandwild]

2023 books (check out my storygraph for reviews)

january

unbought and unbossed, shirley chisholm

true biz, sara nović

yerba buena, nina lacour

the racism of people who love you, samira mehta

night, elie wiesel

seven says in june, tia williams

the reading list, sara nisha adams

finna, nino cipri

ace, angela chen

nightcrawling, leila mottley

the light we carry, michelle obama

how to resist amazon and why, danny caine

the daughter of auschwitz, tova friedman

kaikeyi, vaishnsvi patel

just as you are, camille kellogg

hijab butch blues, lamya h

february

a guide to just being friends, sophie sullivan

mean baby, selma blair

lavender house, lev ac rosen

loveless, alice oseman

the department of rare books and special collections, eva jurczyk

small game, blair braverman

wash day diaries, jamila rowser

the heartstopper yearbook, alice oseman

yellowface, r.f. kuang

stay true, hua hsu

the school for good mothers, jassamine chan

elatsoe, darcie little badger

under the udala tree, chinelo okparanta

there there, tommy orange

making a scene, constance wu

happy place, emily henry

i have a question for you, rebecca makkai

finding me, viola davis

wow, no thank you, samantha irby

march

lark and kasim start a revolution, kacen callender

mooncakes, suzanne walker

lies we sing to the sea, sarah underwood

the family outing, jessi hempel

dead collections, isaac fellman

ace voices, eris young

the anthropocene review, john green

mad honey, jennifer finney boylan & jody picoult

all my rage, sabaa tahir

hello, molly, molly shannon

fine, rhea ewing

nevada, imogen binnie

super late bloomer, julia kaye

love & other disasters, anita kelly

the boy with a bird in his chest, emme lund

the honeys, ryan lansala

the 57 bus, dashka slater

making love with the land, joshua whitehead

a history of my brief body, billy-ray belcourt

there are trans people here, h. melt

patricia wants to cuddle, samantha allen

babel, r.f. kuang

april

lessons in chemistry, bonnie garmus

ace of spaces, faridah abike-,ymide

the things we do to our friends, heather darwent

deaf utopia, nyle dimarco

black cake, charmaine wilkerson

simon vs. the homo sapiens agenda, becky albertalli

the things we couldn't say, jay cole

long black veil, jennifer finney boylan

good talk, mira jacobs

remarkably bright creatures, shelby van pelt

[defaultjane]

Get to know me better tag game I was tagged by @vorchagirl, thanks for the tag! ^_^

Last song I listened to: Feuer frei! by Rammstein

Currently reading: "The Daughter of Auschwitz" by Tova Friedman and Malcolm Brabant

Currently watching: The Righteous Gemstones, The X-files, Hannibal

Last TV show/movie: The Righteous Gemstones for TV and the last movie was Batman Forever.

Favorite color: Black, dark red, and dark blue.

Spicy/sweet/savory? Depends on what I'm in the mood for, mostly savory.

Last thing I googled: carrot ginger pineapple smoothie

Song stuck in my head: Kiss me you animal by Burn the ballroom

[heplev]

Die Juden können es nie recht machen

The Persian Jewess, X/twitter, 3. Juli 2024 Die Holocaust-Überlebende Tova Friedman überlebte Auschwitz im Alter von nur 6 Jahren. „Nach dem Krieg fragten uns die Leute: ‚Warum seid ihr wie Schafe in die Gaskammer gelaufen?’ Und jetzt sagen sie: ‚Warum wehrt ihr euch?’ So oder so, wir können nicht gewinnen.“ Holocaust Survivor Tova Friedman survived Auschwitz at only 6 yrs old. “After the war,…

[dirtycowboy1845]

From Fox News - Auschwitz survivor warns antisemitism is a 'cancer' spreading across America: 'It's killing our country'

Auschwitz survivor warns antisemitism is a 'cancer' spreading across America: 'It's killing our country'

[limejuicer1862]

Ekphrastic piece "R*pe of the Sabine Women" by Tova Beck-Friedman

[jogallice]

Réseaux sociaux : afin de « stopper la haine », cette survivante d’Auschwitz utilise TikTok pour parler de la Shoah aux plus jeunes.

See on Scoop.it - JamesO

Des questions, une réponse courte : depuis un an, Tova Friedman, une Étasunienne d’origine polonaise, fait des vidéos sur le réseau social , avec l’aide de son petit-fils de 17 ans. Elle raconte ce qu’elle a vécu il y 78 ans lorsqu’elle a été déportée avec sa mère. Ses réponses aux questions des adolescents cumulent des millions de vues.

JamesO's insight:

Via l’agence JamesO Média❗️N.D.L.R. : article de presse (temps de lecture : 2 minutes + audio de 3 minutes) publié par Franceinfo (Radio France) le mardi 09/05/23.

  1️⃣2️⃣ fois par jour 📆

8️⃣4️⃣ fois par semaine 🆒

4️⃣3️⃣6️⃣8️⃣ fois par an 📅

  #culture #histoire

#numérique #technologie #réseaux

#ÉtatsUnis #Amérique #international

  📡 JamesO.InfO 🛰

🖥 L’info garantie sans algorithme 🖨

  🟣 Le fil violet de JamesO.InfO

Le numérique, la technologie et les médias.

[zehub]

Afin de "stopper la haine", cette survivante d’Auschwitz utilise TikTok pour parler de la Shoah aux plus jeunes

Depuis un an, Tova Friedman, une Américaine d’origine polonaise fait des vidéos sur le réseau social , avec l’aide de son petit-fils de 17 ans. Elle raconte ce qu’elle a vécu il y 78 ans lorsqu’elle a été déportée avec sa mère. Ses réponses aux questions des adolescents cumulent des millions de vues.

[leontiucmarius]

Tova Friedman a devenit vedetă pe TikTok la 85 de ani. Poveștile ei despre Holocaust i-au adus succesul. VIDEO

Supraviețuitoarea, în vârstă de 85 de ani, povestește ororile holocaustului pentru milioane de oameni, devenind vedetă TikTok. 75 de milioane de vizualizări: Tova Friedman a devenit o vedetă TikTok la 85 de ani cu poveștile ei despre Holocaust. Ea vorbește despre experiențele ei înainte și după lagăr. O supraviețuitoare a Holocaustului a devenit o vedetă TikTok la vârsta de 85 de ani datorită…

[newswireml]

Holocaust survivor shares on TikTok to educate young people#Holocaust #survivor #shares #TikTok #educate #young #people

MORRISTOWN, N.J. — Holocaust survivor Tova Friedman is a TikTok star at age 85, thanks to her 17-year-old grandson. In the family living room in Morristown, New Jersey, he records short videos of his grandmother reminiscing about life in 1944 and 1945 when she was a 6-year-old child at the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. She also discusses her experiences before and after the…

[eagletek]

Child Holocaust survivor becomes TikTok star

Holocaust survivor Tova Friedman is a big hit on social media at age 85, thanks to her 17-year-old grandson and TikTok. (March 23) (AP Video: Ted Shaffrey)        #Child #Holocaust #survivor #TikTok #star http://rssfeeds.usatoday.com/~/732431723/0/usatodaycomnation-topstories~Child-Holocaust-survivor-becomes-TikTok-star/

[jewishbookworld]

The Daughter of Auschwitz by Tova Friedman, Malcolm Brabant

The Daughter of Auschwitz by Tova Friedman, Malcolm Brabant

My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope Foreword by Ben Kingsley 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. “I am a survivor. That comes with a survivor’s obligation to represent one and half…

[magnetothemagnificent]

This might be a bit sensitive topic, so you don't have to if you don't want to, but could you recommend some holocaust literature? I've come to realize the representation of it in the media isn't always that great, and well, thought you might have an opinion

Absolutely!

Some websites:

Yad Vashem- The World Holocaust Remembrance Center.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Some books written by or on behalf of Holocaust survivors:

"Lily's Promise: How I Survived Auschwitz and Found the Strength to Live", by Lily Ebert

"Man's Search for Meaning", by Victor Frankl

"The Redhead of Auschwitz", by Nechama Birnbaum on behalf of her grandmother, Rosie Greenstein

"Night", by Elie Wiesel

"A Gypsy In Auschwitz: How I Survived the Horrors of the ‘Forgotten Holocaust’", by Otto Rosenberg

"I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror", by Pierre Seel

"The Daughter of Auschwitz: A Memoir", by Tova Friedman

"An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin", by Gad Beck

"The Diary of Éva Heyman," by Eva Heyman, published posthumously. She was murdered during the Holocaust.

"The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust’s Shadow", by Krystyna Chiger

"A Teenager in Hitler's Death Camps", by Benny Grunfeld

Some books written about the Holocaust:

Encyclopedia of the Holocaust

Pharrajimos: The Fate of the Roma During the Holocaust

The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration

Doctors Under Hitler

Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism

Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany

The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism

Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene

The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals

Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields

The Suffering of the Roma in Serbia during the Holocaust 

Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the Holocaust

Films:

Survivors Testimony Film Series

Numbered

Secret Lives: Hidden Children and their Rescuers in World War II

Shoah

I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life & Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal

A People Uncounted

Media to avoid:

Historical fiction written by non-Romani, non-Jewish authors that focuses more on the Germans than on their victims. "Number the Stars" and "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" are the biggest offenders.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I tried to make it as thorough as possible.

[mariacallous]

“As far as matzo-ball soup, my mother made the best,” Ronald Lauder said the other night on the Upper East Side, in the bookshop of the Neue Galerie, the art museum he founded. Lauder, seventy-eight, the younger son of Estée and Joseph Lauder, and a billionaire heir to their cosmetics fortune, was there to celebrate the publication of a cookbook. “Honey Cake and Latkes: Recipes from the Old World by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Survivors” was organized by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation, of which he is the chairman.

In the shop, before the book’s launch, Lauder sat with a handful of its contributors. How did the idea originate? “When you’re dealing with survivors, when you’re dealing with Jews, everyone has a different version of events,” he said. “But there’s only one version that’s correct, and that’s mine.” In January of 2020, Lauder had invited a hundred and twenty survivors to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau on the seventy-fifth anniversary of its liberation. At dinner one night, talk turned to gefilte fish. The group stayed in touch. Maria Zalewska, the foundation’s Polish-born director, began to gather recipes.

More than one survivor remembers sustaining fellow-prisoners with vivid descriptions of the foods they’d eaten in their earlier lives. Tova Friedman (kasha varnishkes, carrot tzimmes), a sprightly eighty-four-year-old with a silvery-blond bob, was five and a half when she was sent to Auschwitz. “Food is home,” she said. “And if you talk about it the smell comes to you and home comes back.”

Eugene Ginter, eighty-three, who was liberated just before he turned six, had a more complicated relationship with smells. “When I came in Auschwitz,” he recalled, “I looked through the wooden slats of the cattle car, and I said, ‘It’s very pretty,’ because it had trees. But then the smell, it was a sweet smell. It was the human bodies being burned.” Ginter’s contributions to the book are the foods his mother made after the war, to fatten his emaciated frame: dark chocolate shaved over buttered black bread; a boiled potato mashed with buttermilk; kogel mogel, whipped egg whites beaten with yolks and sugar.

Across the hall, in Café Sabarsky, servers circulated with trays of champagne and bite-size versions of some of the book’s recipes: Elisabeth Citrom’s eggplant salad with crispy rye croutons; David Marks’s rakott krumpli, Hungarian layered potatoes with cheese; Goldie Finkelstein’s rugelach. Sitting on a banquette, Lois Flamholz, ninety-four, a survivor who was born in Czechoslovakia, looked at a photograph of herself in the book in which she presses circles of dough together for jelly cookies. “I miss those cookies!” she cried. “I can’t stand,” she explained. “I stopped cooking, I stopped baking.”

On another banquette, the actor and director Joel Grey recounted, to the producer Jeffrey Seller, his experience filming “Cabaret” in Germany, in 1971. “I was terrified on the flight,” he said. “I stepped off the airplane, stood on the ground, and wept.”

Lauder moved to a lectern. “The first title of the book was ‘Auschwitz Recipes,’ ” he said. “It didn’t go too far.” Midway through his thank-yous, he turned toward the door. “Before I say anything else, a very special woman is coming in now, Marion Wiesel.” He went on, “It was Marion who I called to get the recipe from her husband, Elie. And, today, the latkes that you ate were from Elie’s recipe.”

The latke recipe was, unusually, absent onions. Later, a pushy interlocutor asked Mrs. Wiesel, ninety-one, a survivor herself, and a gifted translator, if it was true that her late husband didn’t care for them. She said, “I can’t believe you’re interested in whether or not he liked onions.” Elisha, the Wiesels’ son, said, “My father preferred to focus on the positive. So rather than an onion-hater, I would think of him as a chocolate-lover.” According to family lore, Marion had ensnared Elie with her latkes, and also bribed him into quitting smoking by promising him a Jaguar. “There was no Jaguar,” Elisha said.

In the lobby, on the way out, Tova Friedman, whose TikTok account, TovaTok, has nearly half a million followers, held court. Thanks to her new memoir, “The Daughter of Auschwitz,” she’s been invited around the world to tell her story. “So they took us to this . . . high tea,” she said, describing a visit to London. “We got that thing, full of little sandwiches. So I said, ‘What happened to the crust? That’s the best part of the bread!’ ” She went on, “You eat your soggy white bread, I got an idea. I’m gonna invent chai tea,” as in the Hebrew word for life, pronounced gutturally. “It’s gonna be rye toast, with crusts, and it’s gonna be lox. It’s gonna be gefilte fish.” ♦