WARSAW, Poland – Tova Friedman hid among corpses in Auschwitz amid the chaos of the last days of the extermination camp.
At that point, just 6 years old, Friedman-born Friedman instructed her mother to lie absolutely still in a bed in a camp hospital, next to the body of a young woman who had just passed away. While German troops fleeing the genocide went from bed to bed to shoot someone still alive, Friedman barely breathed under a blanket and passed unnoticed.
Days later, on January 27, 1945, she was among the thousands of prisoners who survived to greet the Soviet troops who liberated the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
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Now 82, Friedman was hoping to celebrate Wednesday’s anniversary by taking her eight grandchildren to the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial, which is under the supervision of the Polish state. The coronavirus pandemic prevented the trip.
This photo provided by the World Jewish Congress, Tova Friedman, an 82-year-old Polish-born Holocaust survivor, holding a photo of herself as a child with her mother on Friday, who also survived the Nazi death camp Auschwitz in New York , December 13, 2019. (World Jewish Congress via AP)
Instead, Friedman will be home alone on International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Highland Park, New Jersey. A warning message from her about the rise of hatred will nevertheless be part of a virtual observance organized by the World Jewish Congress.
Across Europe, the victims were remembered and honored in various ways.
In Austria and Slovakia, hundreds of survivors were offered their first doses of a coronavirus vaccine in a gesture that is symbolic and life-saving, given the threat of the virus to older adults. In Israel, about 900 Holocaust survivors die from COVID-19 out of the 5,300 infected last year, the country’s Central Bureau of Statistics reported Tuesday.
Pope Francis warned from the Vatican that distorted ideologies “could eventually destroy a people and humanity”. Meanwhile, Luxembourg signed an agreement in which he agreed to pay compensation and restore dormant bank accounts, insurance policies and looting of art to Holocaust survivors.
Institutions around the world, including the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum in Poland, Yad Vashem in Israel, and the American Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, have planned online events. The presidents of Israel, Germany and Poland were among those who intended to make remarks of reminder and warning.
The online nature of this commemoration is a stark contrast to how Friedman spent the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation last year when she gathered under a large tent with other survivors and dozens of European leaders on the site of the former camp. . It was one of the last major international events before the pandemic forced the cancellation of most major events.
Many Holocaust survivors in the United States, Israel, and elsewhere find themselves in a state of previously unimaginable isolation due to the pandemic. Friedman lost her husband in March last year and says she now feels very alone.
But survivors like her also found new ties with Zoom: Ronald Lauder, the world leader of the Jewish Congress, arranged video events for survivors and their children and grandchildren during the pandemic.
More than 1.1 million people were killed by the German Nazis and their henchmen in Auschwitz, the most notorious place in a network of camps and ghettos aimed at destroying the Jews of Europe. The vast majority of those killed in Auschwitz were Jews, but others, including Polish, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war, were also killed in large numbers.
In total, about 6 million European Jews and millions of other people were killed by the Germans and their collaborators. In 2005, the United Nations designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, in recognition of Auschwitz’s iconic status.
Israel, which today numbers 197,000 Holocaust survivors, is officially its spring anniversary day. But events are also being held on Wednesday by survivors’ organizations and memorial groups across the country, many of which are attended virtually or without members of the public.
While anniversaries have moved online for the first time, the survivors’ quest is to tell their stories as warning words.
Rose Schindler, a 91-year-old survivor from Auschwitz, originally from Czechoslovakia but now living in San Diego, California, has been talking to her school groups about her experience for 50 years. Her story, and that of her late husband, Max, also a survivor, is also told in a book, “Two Survivors: Keeping Hope Alive While Surviving the Holocaust.”
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After being transported to Auschwitz in 1944, Schindler was selected more than once for immediate death in the gas chambers. She survived by escaping each time and joining the work details.
The horror she experienced over Auschwitz – the mass murder of her parents and four of her seven siblings, the hunger, shaving, lice infestations – is hard to bear, but she continues to talk to groups, only by Zoom.
“We need to tell our stories so it doesn’t happen again,” Schindler told The Associated Press in a Zoom call from her home on Monday. “It’s amazing what we went through, and the whole world was silent while it was going on.”
Claudia Roth, Vice President of the German Parliament, commemorates the International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday 27 January 2021 (Claudia Roth) on the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. (AP Photo / Markus Schreiber)
Friedman says she believes it is her role to ‘sound the alarm’ about growing anti-Semitism and other hatreds in the world, otherwise another tragedy could happen. ‘
The hatred, she said, was evident when a mob inspired by former President Donald Trump attacked the US Capitol on January 6. Some insurgents wore clothes with anti-Semitic messages such as ‘Camp Auschwitz’ and ‘6MWE’, which stand for “6 million was not enough.”
“It was completely shocking and I could not believe it. And I do not know what part of America feels that way. I hope it is a very small and isolated group and not a penetrating feeling,” Friedman said Monday.
The mob could not shake her faith in the essential goodness of America and most Americans.
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“It’s a land of freedom. It’s a land that has taken me in,” Friedman said.
In her recorded message that aired Wednesday, Friedman said she compared the virus of hate in the world to COVID-19. She said the world today is a virus of anti-Semitism, of racism, and if you do not stop the virus, it will kill humanity. ‘