- Tola Grossman, aged 6, a Polish Jew, was in a Nazi extermination camp in 1945
- Now 84-years-old and widowed she writes a memoir about the experience
- She describes how her malnourished mother helped her to survive death
On January 25, 1945, panicky shots rang out across the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Six-year-old Tola Grossman — a Polish Jew — could already identify types of gun by their sounds.
She noted chaotic bursts of machine gun fire, pistol pops and rifle cracks as she cowered in her barracks with around 50 other children.
Tola heard her German captors shouting and their dogs growling as — unbeknownst to the children — they prepared to flee the approaching Russian army.
In a memoir that bears witness to the full horror of the Holocaust, the 84-year-old widow (now called Tova Friedman, who changed her first name to Tova when she moved to America and her surname when she married) recalls the moment the barracks door burst open.
‘We all jumped,’ she says. ‘In walked a woman I didn’t recognise. She looked terrible. Her features were distorted by malnutrition. Her face was little more than a skull covered in parchment-thin skin. Her eyes had retreated into their sockets. But her body was puffy. Starvation did that to a person. It made their flesh swell. Tufts of dark brown hair sprouted from beneath a piece of cloth fashioned into a scarf in a futile attempt to seal in some warmth.’
‘Tola, it’s me. Mama,’ said the woman, crouching down to take her child’s face in her hands. ‘I was incredulous,’ remembers her daughter. ‘I hadn’t seen Mama’s face for so long that I had forgotten what she looked like.’
Tola felt a wave of relief sweep through her. But she was not safe yet.