Surviving Auschwitz

In the waning months of World War II, a Soviet regiment entered Auschwitz-Birkenau, Adolph Hitler’s infamous concentration camp, and found seven thousand prisoners on the brink of death from illness and starvation. Among them were three young girls from a town in central Poland called Tomaszow Mazowiecki.       

Before being deported to Auschwitz, Tova Friedman, Rachel Hyams and Frieda Tenenbaum had already survived the Jewish ghetto in their town and two slave labor camps. Now, thanks to their Soviet liberators, they survived the Kinderlager, the children’s barracks at Auschwitz that were nothing more than a holding area for the gas chambers. When the regiment’s commander, Marshal Ivan Koneff, discovered the children—their limbs thin as toothpicks, most of them unable to walk—he broke down and wept.     

The date was January 27, 1945. Tova was 6, Rachel 7, and Frieda 10.

A quarter century ago, on the 50th anniversary of their liberation, Tova, Rachel and Frieda first told the world about their Auschwitz ordeal. Today, on the 75th anniversary of their liberation, they tell their stories again—although Rachel, who died in 2008, can no longer tell her story in person. It is to her, along with the million-and-a-half children who died in the Holocaust, that we dedicate this edition of Surviving Auschwitz.