One of the BBC’s most popular programmes is HARDtalk, which usually stars the doyen of interviewers, Stephen Sackur. It is televised most week days and lives up to its name, for Sackur is relentless in his questioning of the great and the good. People such as Noam Chomsky and Nelson Mandela have appeared on the show.
While usually giving no quarter, Sackur sometimes shows a softer side, and such was the case recently when he interviewed Tova Friedman at the Lauderdale Road Synagogue in Maida Vale, London. Friedman is 84, and is publicising her book The Daughter of Auschwitz, the memoir of the part of her childhood spent in the eponymous and notorious concentration camp. She was still only six years old when prisoners were liberated from it at the end of the war. Before Auschwitz, life, if you could call it that, was eked out in a ghetto for three and a half years, during which time her father at one stage hid her in an attic so that she would not be rounded up with other children. After the ghetto came a labour camp, but eventually Tova and her mother were sent to Polish Auschwitz, while her father was sent to German Dachau: the family was one of the few that were reunited after the war.
At the age of five and a half Tova’s head was shaved in Auschwitz, and her arm was tattooed with a number, which she has always refused to have removed, because ‘the world has to know.’ She told Sackur about the way in which her mother trained her to survive, but also about the guilt the poor woman had to live with after she made her small nieces return to their mother in the queue that led to certain death. Her mother was concentrating on saving her own child, and knew she could not save anybody else. But she never recovered from the necessity of making that decision, and died comparatively young.
Friedman does not really understand how she escaped death. She thinks she was just extraordinarily lucky, for of the 5000 children in the ghetto, there were only five left at the end of the war. She routinely endured hunger, cold, and desperate fear, and is still very much afraid of German Shepherd dogs. Once she was actually standing naked in the gas chamber when the machinery malfunctioned, while on another occasion she and