Holocaust Remembrance Speaker March 27

Tova Friedman, one of the youngest people to emerge from Auschwitz, brings her story to the Cornell College campus as the annual Holocaust Remembrance Speaker on Monday, March 27. 

The lecture will take place in the Hall-Perrine Room of the Thomas Commons at 6 p.m. It’s free and open to the public.

After surviving the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Central Poland where she lived as a toddler, Tova, at the age of 4, and her parents were sent to a Nazi labor camp. Born in 1938, she was almost 6 when she and her mother were forced into a packed cattle truck and sent to 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 that 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 made their way back to their hometown in Poland. Eventually, Tova’s father tracked them down and the family was reunited.

In her memoir, “The Daughter of Auschwitz,” Tova immortalizes what she saw, to keep the story of the Holocaust alive, at a time when it’s in danger of fading from memory. She has used those memories that have shaped her life to honor the victims. Tova and her co-author, award-winning former war reporter Malcolm Brabant, have painstakingly recreated Tova’s extraordinary story.

The event is sponsored by the Thaler Holocaust Committee in conjunction with the Cornell College Chaplain and Spiritual Life Office.