Tova Friedman was born on September 7, 1938, in Gdynia, Poland. Following the outbreak of World War II, her family was forced into the Tomaszow Mazowiecki ghetto and then to Starachowice, where her parents worked in an ammunition factory. Tova would be one of just five children from the Tomaszow ghetto to survive the war. While hiding in a crawlspace above the ceiling in her home, she was found and captured in the middle of 1944 at the age of five, after which she was taken with her mother to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, while her father was sent to Dachau.

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In Auschwitz, she was tattooed with the number A-27633 and kept in the Kinderlager (“children’s camp”). She survived many close encounters with death, including being sent to a malfunctioning gas chamber on October 7, 1944 (other prisoners had detonated an explosive beforehand). She and her mother hid among the corpses in the “infirmary” while the Nazis were rounding up prisoners to embark on a death march, and they were liberated by the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945. Eventually, she and her mother were reunited with her father, and the family immigrated to the United States in 1950.

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Tova became a therapist, social worker, author, and academic. She taught at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and later served as the director of the Jewish Family Service of Somerset and Warren Counties in New Jersey. The story of Tova’s life was written in the 1998 book Kinderlager 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. She has four children and five grandchildren.