“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”
ELIE WIESEL
Description from Goodreads:
"A powerful memoir by one of the youngest ever 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.
Tova Friedman was only four years old when she was sent to a Nazi labor camp at the start of World War II. While friends and family were murdered in front of her eyes, the only weapon that Tova and her parents possessed was the primal instinct to survive at all costs. Fate intervened when, at the age of six, Tova was sent to a gas chamber, but walked out alive, saved by German bureaucracy. Not long afterwards, she cuddled a warm corpse to hide from Nazis rounding up prisoners for the Death March to Germany.
In this heartrending, lyrical account of a young girl's survival during the Holocaust, Tova Friedman, together with Malcolm Brabant, chronicles the atrocities she witnessed while at Auschwitz, a family secret that sheds light on the unpalatable choices Jews were forced to make to survive, and ultimately, the sources of hope and courage she and her family found to persist against all odds."
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This is an extremely hard book to read but one I feel necessary so the past is not forgotten.
Tova was born just prior to the start of World War II; her earliest memories being of living in the ghetto her family and parents were sent to by the Nazi's. From the ghetto, she and her parents are sent to a labour camp; Tova is 5 years old. At the age of 6, Tova and her mum are separated from her dad for the first time as they are placed in different cattle cars and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Tova describes her experiences from the eyes of an innocent child trying to make sense of the horrors she hears and witnesses every day. How someone, let alone a child, can survive what went on in that hell and come out the other side and live even close to a 'normal' life is beyond me. It is testament to the strength of her mother and the lessons she taught Tova that she survived and became the woman she did.
Many thanks to Quercus Books and NetGalley for enabling me to read and share my thoughts of this powerful, heart-breaking but uplifting book. This should be required reading for all school children and adults alike.
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