HOW I SURVIVED AUSCHWITZ
SHE WAS MARCHED INTO A GAS CHAMBER AND EMERGED AGAIN TO TELL THE TALE. ALL THIS BY THE TIME SHE WAS SIX
SHE was five when she got her tattoo. Tova Friedman was in Auschwitz and her tattooist was another prisoner, a teenage girl.
“Her hands were shaking,” she says. “How could I forget it?” Tova (now 84) sits erect on a sofa across from me. We’re in the house of her daughter, Taya, in New Jersey in the United States.
She remembers that all the children at the German concentration camp in Poland were made to line up, and that some thought they might be getting an extra ration and pushed to the front. Tova remembers how the young tattooist with shaking hands worked, talking to her softly as she applied the letter and the numbers A-27633, one spot of ink at a time.
“To me she was old, but looking back she can’t have been more than 17, 18,” Tova says. “I still remember how I felt the pricks.”
She recalls the tattooist saying, “I’ll give you a neat number. If you ever survive you can
