Holocaust survivor Tova Friedman’s Auschwitz prisoner tattoo is still visible to this day, serving as a “never again” reminder as her Jewish grandchildren face a modern wave of antisemitism.
“It’s like a cancer. If you don’t stop it early, it metastasizes. It’s going to kill the body. It’s killing our country,” she told Fox News Tuesday.
“When I came to America at eleven-and-a-half, it’s like I came to the Promised Land, and it was just a fabulous experience. And here it is today. I am shocked, I am pained, I’m scared. I’m scared both for America, I’m scared for the Jews, and it’s very painful for our young people.”
Sitting down with “Fox & Friends,” where she warned of the evils to come unless the widespread prejudice changes course, she showed co-host Ainsley Earhardt her identification tattoo and recounted being a child at Auschwitz.
“I was a number,” she said. “They told me I don’t have a name. This is my name, and the name was very long – 27,633.”
Friedman also discussed widespread anti-Israel protests on college campuses that erupted following the unprecedented Oct. 7 attacks Hamas carried out on Israeli residential areas last year, with a warning that the vitriol that followed that day could lead to further catastrophe.
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“I have two children, two grandchildren in WashU and one in Cornell, and they’re scared, and I just can’t imagine living through this. I was too young.”
Though she wasn’t born when antisemitism began rising before the Holocaust, she drew similarities between that dark time in history to the chaos of today.
“If this isn’t contained, if they don’t think about it, what is going to be the end product? What is the end product of any hatred and prejudice? It is death to somebody. It could be death to themselves, death to their opponents. Because we didn’t stop Hitler like we had a chance during Kristallnacht. We could have stopped it, but nobody did. So I ended up in Auschwitz, and a million and a half of Jewish children were gassed,” she said.
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“That type of behavior and anger and hatred can only end up in tragedy. Tragedy for everybody. Not only tragedy for the Jews, God forbid tragedy for themselves, because it’s going to be a terrible clash. We have to find a way to stop it.”
Along with her mother, Friedman was liberated from Auschwitz at age six after a year of imprisonment. She now shares her survivor stories on TikTok with the help of her grandson and wrote a New York Times bestseller titled “The Daughter of Auschwitz.”
