The Daughter of Auschwitz: The Girl Who Lived to Tell her Story (Children’s Adaptation)

Tova Friedman (text), Hilary Freeman (co-author), Manuel Šumberac (illustrator), The Daughter of Auschwitz: The Girl Who Lived to Tell Her Story, Hachette Australia, August 2024, 219 pp., RRP $19.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781526366658

Tova Friedman (née Tola Grossman) is the author of The Daughter of Auschwitz, her memoir of having been one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz concentration camp. This is the younger readers’ edition, but it is no less moving for having been adapted for a younger readership.

The prologue is set in 1950 in New York, five months after she and her parents arrive in the US. It is Tova’s 12th birthday and her mother has prepared her first ever birthday cake. Life is not easy for a Jewish child whose English is not good and whose appearance marks her out as different, but she has made one friend at her new school and it is to Lilly that she tells her story.

Born in 1938, Tola is only two when Nazi soldiers herd thirteen thousand Jews into the ghetto in Tomaszów Mazowiecki. Crammed into a tiny apartment, she hears her grandparents being rounded up and shot and other neighbours and relatives being taken away. Tola and her parents survive initial inspections and she and her mother find themselves in Auschwitz.

Separated from her father, her mother’s survival instincts save Tola on several occasions and luck also plays a role. Sent to the showers at the gas chambers, for some reason the extermination doesn’t proceed that day. She also manages to escape being sent on the death march towards the end of the war when her mother hides her under a still-warm corpse.

They are liberated by the Soviet army, but life is still perilous. Even back in Poland there is rampant hatred and anti-semitism, resulting in vitriol and physical attacks. But her father has survived Dachau and the reunited family is smuggled across the border to a displaced persons camp in the American section of Berlin. After Tola spends several months in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis, they are allowed to emigrate to the United States.

The epilogue has been written after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and Tova (who changed her name to the Hebrew word for ‘good’) has spent her later years speaking publicly about her experiences and now has over 500,000 followers on her TikTok site. Her plea is for peace, tolerance and acceptance.

This book is a great way for young readers to understand what the Jewish people went through before and during the Second World War and to realise that there is no place for anti-semitism in today’s world.

Reviewed by Lynne Babbage

Scroll to Top