With the help of her 17-year-old grandson, a Holocaust survivor is sharing her tragic story as a child in Auschwitz. The duo is spreading her story to millions through TikTok — or, as her account is called, "TovaTok."
Tova's grandson, Aron Goodman, started sharing his grandmother's story via TikTok as a response to recent growing antisemitism. He grew up hearing about Tova's time in the concentration camp and believed that the truths of her story needed to be spread.
"I noticed a lot of antisemitism on social media as well as (the fact that) my curriculum in my school for the Holocaust wasn’t adequate. There was no Holocaust as part of the history discussion,” Aron said in an interview with Today. He shared that he originally started on YouTube by posting a short film, and when he posted on TikTok, he started getting lots of questions.
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Tova was taken to Auschwitz in Poland when she was only 5 years old. The number A-27633 was tattooed on her arm and is still slightly visible to this day. In a video, she shared that she had never been to school at the time and didn't know any numbers, but she quickly memorized what became her "name."
"Because I knew it was the difference between life and death," she expressed.
Tova explained that children were almost always killed immediately. "They were the targets of the Germans, of Hitler, because they were useless," she said, adding that the Nazis also feared them because they could grow to survive the horrific events, and survivors could share their experiences with the world.
Tova was with her mother when they were taken to the concentration camps. After falling ill, she was separated from her mom and sent to a different part of the camp. They were reconnected a few weeks before liberation.
Tova, who was one of 5,000 kids taken from her hometown in Tomaszów Mazowiecki, Poland, was one of only five who survived. Even though sharing her story sometimes gets overwhelming, she believes that it's necessary to continue sharing her experience.
“Those innocent children who were murdered because they were Jewish and some of the ways they were murdered, it’s so hard for me," she shared. “Yes, it is overwhelming, but it is extraordinarily necessary.”
Aron has been an essential part in helping his grandmother share her story. “Wherever there’s Jewish presence there is always hate and antisemitism,” he shared. “For the most part, we have had a lot of people saying, like, ‘Thank you for showing me this.’ ‘Thank you for teaching me about this.’”
“It’s not only about me. It’s about the Holocaust and the terrible things that prejudice and hatred of the other can cause,” Tova explained. “The Holocaust is a war (about) what can happen unless humanity sort of looks at each other, people look into their own souls and think about the hatred that they feel.”
Though Aron is going away for college next year, he still hopes that he can continue to help his grandmother share her story with people all across the world.
