Tova Friedman (born Tola Grossman) spent her first six years of life forced to cope with vicious antisemitism in Poland, made far worse after the Nazi occupation of Poland that began in September 1939 — which then became even more horrifying when Tova and her parents, Machel and Reizel, were sent to the Nazi extermination camp known as Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944.

Yet Tova and her parents survived every stage of the Nazis’ attempt to wipe out the Jewish people.

In the prologue of her memoir, “The Daughter Of Auschwitz,” Tova explains that “Auschwitz imprinted itself in my DNA. Almost everything I have done in my postwar life, every decision I have made, has been shaped by my experiences during the Holocaust.”

Shortly before Tova and her mother were liberated by the Russian Army, a woman entered the children’s barracks, where, Tova explains, “there were so many children in my block, I couldn’t count them. Forty, fifty, sixty, maybe. The oldest were nearly teenagers. I was one of the youngest and smallest. We all had smudged, dirty faces and sunken eyes, ringed black from sleeplessness and starvation. We were mostly clad in rags that hung from our bones.”

The woman, who Tova didn’t recognize initially, also “looked terrible. Her features were distorted by malnutrition. Her face was little more than a skull covered in parchment-thin skin. Her eyes had retreated into their sockets. But her body was puffy. Starvation did that to a person.”

The woman was Tova’s mother who, as we will read in the book, had appeared in the nick of time to, as she had done on other occasions, save her daughter’s life. “Mama lifted my spirits by saying we had a chance of living, if I followed her instructions.”

Perhaps Tova’s closest call with death came when her mother was unable to protect her. Tova recalls that “In the history of the Holocaust, of all........

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