Tova Friedman is one of the youngest Holocaust survivors. Her grandson Aron Goodman shares her memories to counter anti-Semitism, educate on Holocaust.
When Tova Friedman came to the United States at 11 years old, she learned that children’s lives in the U.S. continued as normal during World War II and the Holocaust. It felt particularly strange to her because her childhood was dramatically different: She spent more than a year as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp after spending her toddler years in a Jewish ghetto.
“I was shocked when I spoke to kids my age. I was 11 years old, and they were telling me about all kind of experiences when they were children — vacations, summer camps — I couldn’t believe it,” Friedman, 84, of New Jersey, tells TODAY.com. “I thought what I experienced was what the world experienced.”
Her grandson, Aron Goodman, grew up hearing about Friedman’s childhood in the Auschwitz concentration camp and started sharing her story more widely on TikTok about a year ago. (Friedman admits she had never heard of the social media app before the pair started her account, TovaTok.) Aron says he began the project as a response to the rise in antisemitism over the past few years.
“I noticed a lot of antisemitism on social media as well as (the fact that) my curriculum in my school for the Holocaust wasn’t adequate. There was no Holocaust as part of the history discussion,” the 17-year-old from New Jersey tells TODAY.com. “I started on YouTube with a short film following my grandmother in Auschwitz and then I started posting that on TikTok, and when people started asking questions, I thought that people might actually be interested.”
A year after Friedman was born, World War II began. When she was 5, Nazis took her to the infamous prison camp in Poland and tattooed the number 27-6-33 on her arm. Of the 5,000 children from her hometown of Tomaszow Mazowiecki in Poland, she was one of only five that survived.
