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Tova Friedman (Birth name Tola Grossman; born September 7, 1938) is a Jewish American therapist, social worker, author, and academic born in Poland. She is a Holocaust survivor who was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Friedman taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later served as the director of the Jewish Family Service of Somerset and Warren Counties.
Having arrived on a Sunday in June 1944, Friedman was not killed on arrival, but she was shaved and tattooed with a number. She was kept contained in the Kinderlager or "children's camp" and would go on to survive starvation and a trip to the gas extermination chamber on October 7, the one day that the chamber's mechanisms malfunctioned due to other prisoners earlier having detonated an explosive in the chamber. She was further spared from another of the crematoria because her tattooed number was not on the lists of the Nazi officers running the chamber. When the Nazis left the camp in January 1945 and were going to force the remaining survivors to go on a death march, she and her mother hid between the corpses in the infirmary and were freed by the Red Army on January 27, 1945. Soviet soldiers took a picture of her showing her tattoo, which would later become an iconic photo of the war. She and her mother returned to Poland, where they found that their home had been destroyed and most of the rest of their extended family had been killed. Her father eventually returned from Dachau and they remained together in Poland for several years.
The story of Friedman's life was written about in the 1998 book Kinderlager by Milton J. Nieuwsma and her grandson opened a profile for her on TikTok where she posts videos on her experience in Auschwitz and replies to questions from children. In 2022, she published the memoir The Daughter of Auschwitz: My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope which she wrote with journalist Malcolm Brabant.
Friedman spoke on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2025, at Auschwitz.
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