‘Remember this’
Claims Conference puts out videos of 80 Auschwitz survivors to mark the 80th anniversary of the death camp’s liberation
The video is chilling.
Tova Friedman of Highland Park looks calmly out at the camera. She has big blue eyes, short blonde hair, discreetly red lipstick, big gold hoop earrings, and a gold necklace. She speaks with only the hint of an accent, and the hint might be less Poland than Brooklyn. She’s 87 but doesn’t look it.
She tells the story of how, when she was 6 1/2, she and the older children in her barracks at Auschwitz were given a good breakfast. They knew what that meant — that they were due to be gassed that day. And it should have happened. The children were told to strip naked and made to stand for a long time — she doesn’t know how long — outside the crematorium. But then, well, whoops. Never mind. They were told to get dressed.
“What happened?” her mother asked. “They’ll do it the next time,” Tova said.
The video, one of 80, is part of a campaign that the Claims Conference has organized to mark the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz, which falls on January 27; that day, not coincidentally, also is International Holocaust Survivors Day.
“Five years ago, at the 75th anniversary, about 120 Jewish Holocaust survivors from all over the world went to Auschwitz,” Greg Schneider, the Claims Conference’s executive vice president, said. “I was there, I spent time with many of them, and it was very emotional and very moving. So this year, we thought, okay, let’s try to arrange for 100 survivors to go to Auschwitz.
“But our staff said there’s no way we can do that.
“So I said okay, let’s try for 80 survivors. And the staff said no way. It’s absolutely not possible.”
That’s because almost all of the survivors alive today were children when they were freed from the death camp; to have been a child 80 years ago is to be fairly old now. Some of the survivors who were able to go to Poland five years ago have died; others are too frail to travel, particularly to such a grim place, with its nightmare memories. “One survivor said to me: ‘This probably would be the last trip I’d ever take in my life’ — he didn’t have more than one trip left in him. ‘And I don’t want that last trip to be to Auschwitz,’” Mr. Schneider said.
“We realized that we were in a transition period, from having a significant number of people making the trip to having fewer people, and having the trip be too much for them.”
But the Conference still wanted to mark the date. “We started to think about what we could do, and we came up with the idea of creating a website and a campaign called ‘I Survived Auschwitz: Remember This.’”
The videos are posted here: www.claimscon.org/rememberthis. The creators hope that they’ll circulate widely on social media as well.

“We videotaped 80 survivors and asked each one of them the same question. What one thing would you want the future generations to remember? And so each of those survivors, from around the world, shared intimate thoughts.
“What we see in this campaign is the combination of important experiences and lessons and very personal moments. We talk in broad strokes — we say never again — but at the core it’s very personal and emotional, and from that larger lessons emerge.”
This can be very hard on participants, Mr. Schneider acknowledged. The taping was made as easy as possible — it was mainly done on Zoom, from the survivor’s home, with the survivor’s supporters out of view but nearby, and in the survivor’s native language; everything, including the English memories, are subtitled in English. “We want to make a connection between the survivor and the viewer,” Mr. Schneider said. “It shouldn’t be abstract. You should be able to look the survivor in the eye.
“There are about 220,000 survivors alive today,” he continued. “We encourage all of them to make videotape testimonies, to write their memories, to share their stories.”
Although it was easier for most Auschwitz survivors to tell their stories on video than to go to Poland, particularly in the wintertime, still, it’s hard. “They’re in their 80s and 90s, and we’re asking them to really think about what they want to pass on. It’s not easy to face your own mortality. That’s true in general, but these people have been the torch bearers. The ones who continued to tell the story. But this won’t always be the case, so now we’re asking them what they want to pass on.
“Each answer is personal and unique to that person and that person’s experience,” Mr. Schneider continued. He talked about two stories that have particularly stuck with him. One is a man, remembering now, as he has throughout his life since liberation, that his brother asked that he not be forgotten, just before he was murdered. The brother has not been forgotten.
“And then imagine being torn from your mother on a train platform, when you are very young. It is so disorienting. And then imagine looking back at it 80 years later.”
How does he do his job without crying? “The resilience of the survivors,” Mr. Schneider said.
“I was speaking with one of them, who frequently speaks about her experiences, and she told me she can’t sleep for three days before she’s scheduled to speak. She has night terrors. She has great anxiety. I said to her, ‘You don’t have to do this,’ and she said, ‘Yes I do.
“‘When my sisters were murdered, I knew that it was my responsibility to remember them, to make the world better somehow, to teach about it.’
“So when I hear that, I know that I don’t have the luxury of crying and falling apart. If this 90-year-old woman endured what she endured, and has night terrors before she talks about it, and still talks about it, still forces herself to talk about it, then I can just get on with my work.”
Tova Friedman was born in Gdynia, Poland, in 1938. Both her parents survived — she and her mother, who was with her in Auschwitz, managed not to go on the death march at the end. Eventually, after the war, they reunited with Tova’s father, who had been at Dachau. She was one of five Jewish children from Mazowiecki, where her family had moved, who survived the war; there had been 5,000 of them.
No matter what you’d expect in an Auschwitz survivor, Ms. Friedman isn’t it.
She’s sharp, combative, very smart, and deeply funny. She didn’t want to talk about what she’d said in the video because “I have absolutely no idea what I said,” she reported. But she knows what she didn’t say. “I know it wasn’t trite because I hate trite. I am not going to say something that is nonsense.”
Ms. Friedman came to the United States when she was 12. She was a good student; after high school, she went to Brooklyn College, where she majored in psychology. Then she went to City College Uptown, where she got a master’s degree in Black literature. “I lived in Harlem then, and I wanted to understand my neighbors a little better,” she said. She married Maier Friedman, who earned a doctorate in biochemistry from MIT. She had two children and the family moved to Israel, where he had a job in his field and she taught English as a second language at the Hebrew University.
They lived in Israel for a decade before they came back to the United States for his job. Ms. Friedman went back to school for a second masters, this one in social work, specializing in gerontology. Eventually she became the director of the Jewish Family Service of Somerset and Warren Counties, a job she held for more than 20 years.
Ms. Friedman still works as a counselor.
“Survivors are much more motivated, because they understand the value of life,” she said. “So many of them have been utterly and completely successful in every field. Some have become very wealthy and have donated a lot of money to Jewish causes. Some have gigantic businesses.
“You will not find a slouch among them.”
Ms. Friedman often talks about the Holocaust — something she began doing about 40 years ago and has been doing ever since — addressing a range of audiences. “I am a popular speaker, because I never say the same thing twice,” she said. “I don’t have any notes. I speak all over the world. I spoke in Africa. I spoke in Thailand. I am going to Germany and Poland to speak, and to Austria, but not to speak there. That’s just to listen to a few operas.
“I speak anywhere somebody wants me, if they meet my conditions,” she continued. “They have to get me there somehow, so I have to spend no energy or money on transportation. And then they have to provide me with a hotel room, for me and for my daughter, who always comes with me.”
Ms. Friedman has four children and eight grandchildren. She’s written a memoir, “The Daughter of Auschwitz: My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope.”
And she has a wicked sense of humor.
“I love to laugh,” Ms. Friedman — remember, an 87-year-old Auschwitz survivor — said. “I have a theory that only serious people know how to be funny. I notice that people who have not gone through much in life don’t know anything about humor.
“That’s why Jews are so funny. It’s because we’ve been through so much. You have to know tragedy in order to understand comedy. So I try to lighten things up.”
She retold a story that she’d heard from a comedienne; she thinks it was Joan Rivers. “She loved her husband very much, and he committed suicide,” she said. “She really was in a terrible state. About a year or two later, she was interviewed, and she said, ‘Well, you know, I see my husband almost every day. I am near him. I don’t feel like he has disappeared.’
“The interviewer said, ‘How is that possible?’ And Joan Rivers said, ‘I took his ashes, and I spread them all over Nieman Marcus. So now I can see him every day.’
“This is funny, and it’s also poignant, because she really loved him.
“I try to see funny things in what I do. I don’t know if I can always say something funny. When I speak at Auschwitz, there’s not much room for comedy.
“But who knows what will come out of my mouth?”
The story that comes out of Ms. Friedman’s mouth in the Claims Conference video is not even vaguely funny. It is searing. It is both matter-of-fact and angry. But it is her humor and brains and drive that have kept her going.
Each one of the videos is different, as each of the survivors is different. But each of them has a story that must be told, and we are obligated to listen to them.
To repeat, they’re at www.claimscon.org/rememberthis.
comments