welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. never has it felt more important to remember the lessons of the greatest crime of the 20th century, the nazi genocide of thejews. crime of the 20th century, europe is again witnessing a war of aggression, anti—semitism is on the rise and young people, according to the surveys, have an alarming level of ignorance about the holocaust. well, my guest today is tova friedman, one of the youngest survivors of the auschwitz death camp. now in her 80s, she's written a memoir and is using social media to tell her story. so is the world ready

to listen and learn? tovah friedman, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. it is a great pleasure to have you with me here in this synagogue. i am mindful that it is 77 years since you, as a six—year—old girl, were finally freed from auschwitz. why have you chosen to tell the world your story in the form of a memoir now? well, i've been speaking for a very long time, since i was about a5, 50 years old, i've been speaking about it. but i always wanted to write because writing is a different experience. and i can tell things that i cannot tell when i'm speaking for 45 minutes to a group.

this is like — i can think about it and bring, bring out the essence of what really happened. i sort of looked around and i saw the world is... it's really a mess, i hate to say that. anti—semitism and hatred, and left against right, and right — itjust... refugees are wandering the world trying to find a home, everywhere from country to country. and i said, "you know, this is a good time for..." ..in my age also, because i am at an age where i can't wait too much longer to tell my story. so everything together worked to make it the right time for me. there are so many powerful moments and vignettes in your story. one i'm very struck by is... ..is the tattoo, which every

person, everyjew, every inmate of auschwitz was stamped with a number. right. by the nazis. you still have that stamp? absolutely. i don't know if it's possible... i never want to forget it. i want to show it to the world. can you show it to me? yeah, of course. i see it. it didn't even fade. i see it. just the way it was. see, i mention it because you tell the story of how, after liberation — i believe it was by the time you got to the united states — there was a doctor who said, "you know what, i can fix that for you. i can erase it." right. and you refused, and you were actually angry. i was 12. and i remember saying to the... it was a doctor, a very kind person, who was going to give me a gift. he wasn't going to charge me. and he even said, you know, "you'll have such a tiny scar that by the time you grow up, there won't be even any." i said — you know what i said to him? i don't think... "if i had it right here, i wouldn't take it off.

i did nothing wrong. and i want the world to know." from the very beginning, i had this thing, this innerfeeling — the world has to know what happened. they have to know. you can't kill, destroy so many souls, children and elderly... it would be silent. and then i didn't want to forget those people. i used to say to — in my head — "i'll remember you. i'll remember you." what is extraordinary is that you have pursued this remembrance, even though when you went through the experience of not just auschwitz, but life in the ghetto in poland, before auschwitz, you were a tiny child. i mean, the whole thing began for you in your first year of life.

right. you had three and a half years in the most terrible conditions, in one of the worst smalljewish ghettos in poland. you were then transported, first with your parents, to a labour camp, and then to auschwitz itself. and as i said, you were in auschwitz at five and six years old. right. it must be very hard, in a sense, to remember. a lot of things i don't remember. but the things i remember were so... ..imprinted on my mind, you could not help but remember it. you know, the body feels it. a child's body feels it. the hunger, the cold, the being alone without your family. the feeling that... .."i will never see them again." and then, oh, go on with your life, whatever the life was there. what you also evoke, along with the hunger, the loneliness, and the fear, is the anguish of your parents, and that to me is very moving. again, going back to

the ghetto, even before we get to auschwitz, you describe certain scenes that you remember with a child's memory, for example, of your mother faced with one of the nazi selections. right. who, at the time, had two of your cousins, her nieces... right. ..clinging to her. her sister's two children. yeah. and they were clinging to her. yeah. hoping that she would take them through. exactly. and it's the sister who pushed them over to my mother, because my father had working papers, so he was going to be saved. he was on a line with those that are going to not be killed. she was on the line to go to her death. your mother... so, she shoved them and they read... they got it. they were only three or four. they got it. they understood it. and they read it to my mother. yeah. and she had this decision to make, which she had trouble living for the rest of her life. because... for the rest of her life. because she, in that split

second, decided that the safest thing to do for herself and her daughter, ie, you... exactly. ..was not to accept the presence of her two nieces. right. not to save them, because she wanted to protect you and herself. exactly. and she had to live with it. and she had such a terrible time. she cried all the time and she said, "i killed my nieces. "i could have had them with me. we could have had a family." because she lost all her brothers and sisters. not one came back. not one family member came back. we waited three years in poland. nobody, not even a distant cousin, nobody. and she said, "oh, those two kids, i could have had them." and i said, "mom, this was just a split second." there was... "how would you have saved them in auschwitz?" and the truth is that your mother did so much... right. ..to protect you as best she could through all of the horror of auschwitz.

right. and one of the ways she did that was by, in essence, training you, training you not to look at those nazi officers in the eye. perfect. not to ever make any gesture that would draw attention to yourself. i love that word "training". i didn't think of it, but it's an excellent word. i kept saying she protected me by telling me the truth, and she was training me so that when i am alone without her, i will know how to behave. do you know, i never, throughout the entire war, had eye contact with a nazi. that's how she trained me. i remember seeing them from here down. oh, and their hands. always looked down. and their hands, as they were holding the strap of the dogs. it's the dogs that i remember very well. i've not been able to

touch a german shepherd. and even, even at the very end, there's another extraordinary twist, because the germans, as they were rushing to destroy what they could of the evidence, and get the last inmates out of auschwitz, they were going to take everybody on this so—called death march. exactly. what she did was extraordinary and so clever because she decided to hide you... right. ..in the infirmary, which, of course, most of the nazi soldiers had already quit, they'd left, but some of the patients were still there. and actually, some of them were dead. and some of the nazis came back. just look at the madness. they came back. where do they come to? to the infirmary, to make sure that the dead are really dead. and if they saw a moving person that was incapacitated but alive, they would shoot that person in bed. she put you, in essence, in the bed, covered up... right. ..with a dead body.

right. when she said to me, "don't breathe, so that the blanket will be visible." and she taught... she... i knew what she meant. she only had a minute. yeah. the whole thing was just a minute. but i knew that i was supposed to breathe into the floor. yeah. and i turned my mouth into the floor, so that if i had to breathe, there'd be no, no, no sight. so, this is the training. this is the self—protection that she taught me throughout the whole year we were together. all the time. how to save myself, in case i'm alone. you saw the gas chambers, didn't you? because you actually... of course. you were taken. again, in one of these things that is really... the only word one can use is miraculous. you were marched with a bunch of children... children, the whole barrack.

..to the gas chamber. you were going to be murdered. you were going to be gassed. without a question. and then, for some reason, which we will never quite... i don't know. yes. they decided that that day... yes. ..they were not going to put the gas into the shower heads... that day, for whatever reason. yeah. i don't know. i remember the whole incident very well. but — and i remember them telling us to go back, and i was under the impression that it was the wrong barrack. something went wrong, and that's what i was under the impression. but maybe it's. .. maybe it's another reason. how do you make sense of the fact that you survived, when we know that something like one and a half million jewish children did not? there was no sense. there was no rea... to me, there was no reason. there was luck.

really, luck. it feels for me so important to talk to you because you can bear witness to arguably the greatest human crimes of the 20th century. you were a witness. you were a child, but you were a witness. you even... iam. i am a witness. you are a witness. i am a witness. you know there are some people in this world who still claim there were no gas chambers, there were no crematoria. i want to tell you something. mental institutions are full of people who think they're christ, they're god. i regard these people as if they are in a mental institution and they took on something. they can say anything they want. i don't talk to them. i don't respond. i ignore them. your mother, when, injanuary

�*45, auschwitz was liberated by russian soldiers... yes. your mother and you spent weeks still there, and then you were, in the spring, sent back to poland. we went back, yeah. i think your mother said as you were leaving auschwitz, i think she said to you... ..as you were called then tola, not tova. tola, yes. i don't like that name. your name at that point was tola grossman. she said, "tola, remember. remember this place." she also took me around to show me things. she took me around and she showed me soap... ..made from human fat. and i remember she said to me, "shall we take it?" isaid, "no, i'm not even touching it." she wanted to remember. she wanted the world eventually... she never talked about it publicly, by the way.

mm. and she only spoke to people who were there. earlier, when we were talking about your mother, you talked about the way in which some of her memories, particularly what happened with her nieces, was something she could never get over, and she died young and i think she died mentally very troubled, of course. very, very, very troubled. now, people talk about survivor's guilt after the holocaust, after places like auschwitz. right. is it a phrase that means anything to you? how would you describe...? i don't feel like that. i feel in a sense a survivor's obligation, the obligation to tell the story... ..and to lead a life that is meaningful because why am i saved if i'm wasting it? so, most of the people that i personally know — except my mother — the survivor's guilt was...

..to give something back to society for having been saved. that's the people... my mother, though, was not interested in anything. and what about jewishness? after all of this experience, where you, yourfamily, your people were murdered en masse, for you personally, you know, that question so many jews who survived asked themselves, you know, "where was god in auschwitz?" did you have an answer for that and did yourjewishness become more important? i have no answer. i didn't know anything. i didn't know whatjewish was. i knewjewish meant death. it went together in my head. don't forget, i'm a little girl... sure.

..after liberation in dp camps. israel sent a lot of teachers to the dp camp, teaching the orphans, the children, to read, to read hebrew, and to know about the country, about israel and so forth. and i remember saying to myself, "i'm going to study it. i've got to know what this was." if i lost everybody because of that, what is it? so i began to study thejewish religion, and i'm still doing it, all these years. you said earlier that one thing that makes you determined to use your voice and to describe your experience is the feeling that anti—semitism hasn't gone away. 0h! that many of the lessons... it's getting worse, and i don't know what lessons. i'm looking at humanity right now — have we learned anything? i don't know if what i'm saying will have an effect. i hope it will

sometime, some place. one thing that germany as a country has tried to do... yeah. ..is to confront its own past. i wonder if their efforts, and it's involved education, it's involved different efforts to recompense those who suffered under the nazis — has that made any difference to you in terms of your willingness to accept germany's efforts to make amends? a very difficult question because i can't forgive.

no money — no money — can pay for the death and the killing and the loss of family, the loss of a nation. but germany has been very good to israel, helping israel in many ways financially. really, in some way, israel is my salvation. i am less scared and i can sleep better at night knowing that israel is there, because if something really happens to thejews around the world, they'll be there. but on a personal level, on a personal level, very hard for me. very, very hard. what about justice? you know, because not just in this genocide, but in more recent genocidal moments — for example, in rwanda and other places — there are now mechanisms in place to try and deliverjustice. now, after world war ii, after hitler's death and the demise of the nazis, there were the nuremberg trials, senior nazis were executed. even today, so many years after, there are a small

number of cases continuing against former nazis who are now more than 100 years old. does justice mean very much to somebody like you after...? no. absolutely not. and many of the criminals got away to argentina and brazil and places like that. no. the reason i'm saying no is, look around the world now. are those people who are perpetrating all kinds of things in africa, are they afraid ofjustice? no. you are making your effort notjust with the book, but also, incredibly, you've become something of a sensation on social media, particularly tiktok. .. oh, well, that's my fabulous grandson. i know. and you have more than 200,000 people who follow you. 50 million have seen it. they don't follow it, but they looked at it. i mean, if the world is to change, then surely

the most important thing is to reach young people... absolutely. ..with education, with messages about what we can and should learn from the past. do you think your story and the way you tell it, can and is reaching young people? i really hope so. i speak a lot to young people and especially now with tiktok and so forth. we get a lot of questions from people who've never heard... young people. 15—, i6—, 17—year—old people from albania, you know, australia, places like that. they are waking up and they're asking questions. we get sometimes as many as 200 questions a day. that means somebody is listening. the kids are listening. maybe their generation will be better than the one we have right now.

very, very, very scary. scary, because your story and what we know of nazism tells us that evil can thrive in human societies and, frankly, in the years since the nazis, we've seen evil in other forms, too. you're right. when you look back at your family's history and your own childhood, what do you think was the root of that evil that you confronted? it's... people have been trying to answer this question. i don't know. maybe... ..the german people thought that if they get rid of those jews who were in every walk of life, in arts and music

and in politics, everything, that their own life would be better. i'm wondering whether it's in our nature to think that if we get rid of our neighbour, we'll be happier. what did we do? what did my family do to be murdered? they were coming to a synagogue like this, this is an orthodox synagogue. they came to a synagogue like that. they prayed. they made shabbat. they ate kosher. iam kosher, too. and what is it exactly that we did to deserve to be annihilated? i have no answer. if you do, please... i don't, but i am fascinated to end our conversation with this question for you, as you sit here with me in this synagogue and as we reflect

on everything that happened to you and your family, and the fact that, 77 years on, you are so full of life and passion and commitment and a determination to do better. can you say that you feel optimistic about the human condition or not? depends on the day. some days i feel great, when i read such wonderful things during covid — what people did for each other, how they helped each other and so forth — and then i turn the channel and somebody�*s killed somebody else and so forth and so on. very... but i'll tell you what. without hope, it'd be hard to wake up in the morning. so, yes, i have hope. i do. i have hope. from the faces of the children, when i speak to them, yes, i do, because, otherwise, nothing would be worth anything.

and life is worth it. and i love it. i can't think of a better way to end. tova friedman, it has been a pleasure to have you on hardtalk. thank you very much. thank you. hello. whilst weather conditions have been fairly quiet for us, across the atlantic we have seen a hurricane batter parts of puerto rico, dominican republic and turks and caicos, the first major hurricane with winds gusting over 113 miles an hour and again closer to bermuda for thursday and friday but could maintain its hurricane

status as it slams into the east of canada and aided and abetted by unusually warm sea waters in the northern atlantic. and instead of spinning towards us, it could head towards the arctic seeing some very warm air there too. back to our shores we've had cool conditions but things getting mildlder with south—westerly winds developing ahaed of this weather front. it does mean it's going to take a few days before that warmer air really gets in because it's going to be a chilly start to wednesday, six degrees across some eastern areas, mist and fog, mildest towards the east and the west. but here, the breeze, the cloud and outbreaks of rain, western isles coming and going all day long. some outbreaks of rain developing and to the west northern island it will turn a bit damper later in the day. isolated showers, scotland, northern england but mostly uk having a dry day, mist and cloud through eastern england. sunny spells elsewhere into the afternoon. best of which are on the coast and feeling a bit warmer than recent days with the temperatures up a degree or so. winds lightest to the south and east of the county on wednesday afternoon. strongest towards the north

and west and it's the western isles we could see gale force winds develop of the day is out. those winds strengthen across scotland and northern ireland as we go in to wednesday night. wednesday night. wednesday into thursday outbreaks of rain developing quite widely although there will be a bit of rain shower, so not much rain towards the northeast of scotland. into cumbria and the isle of man and around that rain ban a pretty mild night in store, 12 to 14 degrees. a bit fresher further south, odd mist and fog patch but a dry and bright start for most on thursday for england and wales. turning cloudy with outbreaks of rain northwest england, north and west wales through the day. that morning to the southeast of ireland staying that way in the south and east of scotland but northwestern parts of scotland and the rest of northern ireland should freshen up later on. to the southeast of that rain band to west wales by the end of thursday, it's going to be another reasonably mild if not warm day, 21 to 20 degrees. malia get squeezed out as our weather front meanders slowly and erratically to the southeast corner heading into friday could bring rain to cardiff and also london showing up on the capital for the fresher for all by monday but many places will be dry.

welcome to newsday, reporting live from singapore. i'm karishma vaswani. the headlines: as the future of ukraine hangs in the balance, the un secretary general warns of a winter of discontent. exhuming the dead. we report from one city in eastern ukraine where the bodies of civilians are being dug up. further protests across iran over the death in custody of a young woman accused of breaking the islamic dress code. and a hollywood comeback. the golden globes return to television screens after being dropped due to a lack of diversity. live from our studio

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