Remembering the victims of National Socialism with Tova Friedman

The German Bundestag commemorated the victims of National Socialism at its traditional Ceremony of Remembrance on Wednesday, 28 January 2026. This year’s guest speaker addressing the Members of the Bundestag was Polish-American therapist and social worker Tova Friedman. Born into a Jewish family in 1938 in Gdynia near Gdansk, as a child she survived the German extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. She is one of the few remaining contemporary eyewitnesses to the fanatical racism and work of destruction perpetrated by the National Socialist regime. Together with her grandson Aron, Tova Friedman operates a TikTok account where she posts short videos to keep the spirit of remembrance of the Shoah alive among young people. The account has over 500,000 followers.

The ceremony was opened by the President of the Bundestag, Julia Klöckner, who gave a welcoming address to Parliament. The Bundestag’s Ceremony of Remembrance to mark the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism takes place each year on or around 27 January, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp by the Red Army in 1945.

A prominent voice in the fight against forgetting

Tova Friedman was initially deported to the Tomaszów Mazowiecki ghetto with her family at the start of the Second World War. At the age of five, she was deported along with her mother to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp by the Nazis. She was one of the youngest children known to have miraculously survived the extermination camp – first, due to a presumed technical fault in a gas chamber, and later, by hiding among corpses in the infirmary while the death marches took place.

After being liberated on 27 January 1945, she discovered that many of her relatives had been murdered. Tova Friedman and her family emigrated to the United States of America in 1950. She studied psychology, literature and social work in New York. In 1960 she married and moved with her husband Maier Friedman to Israel for ten years, where she taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After returning to the United States, she worked for over twenty years as a psychotherapist and director of the Jewish Family Service of Somerset and Warren Counties in New Jersey, where she continues to practice today. Tova Friedman is regarded as one of the most prominent voices in the fight against forgetting.

Music by persecuted composers

The musical framework to the ceremony was provided by solo pieces by composers who themselves were victims of National Socialist persecution. First, Meret Louisa Vogel, a flautist and student at the Berlin University of the Arts, played “Aubade Op. 19a” by Marius Flothuis (1914–2001). The Dutch composer was active in the resistance against the Nazis and, like Tova Friedman, following his imprisonment at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp survived one of the brutal death marches in the final phase of the Holocaust.

Later, pianist Igor Levit performed “Nocturne – Warsaw Ghetto” by Polish composer Josima Feldschuh (1929–1943). Feldschuh was already regarded as a great musical talent at the age of five. At this time, she lived with her family in the Warsaw Ghetto and escaped being deported to the Treblinka extermination camp. However, she died of tuberculosis at the age of 13 while on the run from the Nazis.