To my youngest son, Shani, who has been instrumental in helping me write my memoir, and without whose dedication, patience and love, this book would not have been written. And to his wife, Joanna, who has kept us both going with her support, suggestions and encouragement.
To my aunts, Ita, Elka and Helen. As my father’s only siblings who survived the war, you will always be part of my soul, as will be my three cousins, Pearl, Ben, Marty, and their children and grandchildren.
To Frieda, who helped clarify some ghetto details and who hosted me and our small group of Tomaszów child survivors on January 27 for many years to reminisce and celebrate our liberation from Auschwitz. And to her aunt Sophie, who elucidated some details about my family as I was too young to remember.
To Estelle, my first close friend and confidante in America. Our conversations have spanned seven decades and hopefully many more.
To my Hebrew-school classmates in my first few weeks in America, Simcha and Risa. Thank you for welcoming me and for seventy years of friendship.
To Rebecca, Toby and Florence — my greenhorn friends. Together, we negotiated our new American culture as teenagers and I have appreciated your friendship ever since. Rebecca, I miss you terribly.
To Bonnie, with whom I shared several years at the Girls’ Club. Thank you for sharing holidays with my family.
To my very special friends Ruth and Yaakov. You have embodied Ben-Gurion’s dream to “make the desert bloom” in Mitzpe Ramon, Israel. You have been by my side through all our ups and downs and I cannot imagine my life without your love, support and encouragement.
To my friends Irris, Dalia, Ruth, Netta and Gabi. Thank you for enriching my Israeli experience and for the many years of friendship.
To Julie, Vera, David, Joy and your partners in New Jersey. Thank you for sharing my joy in Israeli folk dancing and your continuous friendship through the years.
To Pat and Dan, and Ruth and Eugene. When new friends feel like old friends, it’s a gift.
To my local Jewish community and the Conservative Temple. Thank you for making me feel at home for so many years.
To Jewish Family Service, I am grateful to everyone with whom I have worked and for the opportunity to have served both as a director and as a therapist. Special thank-you to Steve, Linda, Ruth, Nancy and Susan, who enabled me to be an effective director, and to my special friend and colleague Beatrix, who has taught me so much. To Jerry, the director, and to Joan and Jean Marie, thank you for making it possible for me to continue being productive.
To Sir Ben Kingsley, thank you for writing such a heartwarming forward to my biography and for spending time with me. Your portrayal of Holocaust characters is unforgettable and we, the survivors, are grateful and indebted to you.
To Dr. Lillian Kaplan, my psychiatrist, who was the first person with whom I felt safe enough to cry. You will never realize the great impact you had on my life. You died too early and I miss you greatly.
To Dr. Michael Nissenblatt, my oncologist and healer, who promised me a long life and kept his promise.
To Michael Walenta, the general manager of WGVU-TV Public Media, Ken Kolbe, assistant manager, and Phil Lane, product manager, for our amazing experience filming in Poland that enabled me to find and share with my daughter the haunts of my past, including my bunk in Auschwitz and the basement apartment where I lived with my mother after the war. Your sensitivity allowed me to relive those experiences without any trauma.
To Milton Nieuwsma — it was your guidance and support that sparked in me the will to write my memoir. The first book we wrote together started my journey.
To my tattooist in Birkenau, your kind words to a frightened six-year-old resonate even today: “I’ll give you a very neat number. If you ever survive, you can buy a blouse with a long sleeve and nobody will know what happened to you”. It has been seventy-eight years since you were murdered, but I still remember you.
I am indebted to the late Dr. Michael G. Kesler for the extensive research in his book The Remnant on the Displaced Persons camp in Landsberg am Lech, where we both resided.
To all the synagogues, churches, schools, organizations and especially the Institute of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Raritan Valley Community College. Thank you for inviting me to share my story of the Shoah. The audience letters I received showed that my story resonated.
Malcolm and I are indebted to the publishers on both sides of the Atlantic for placing their trust in us and for helping us bring this book to fruition. It has been a joy to work with both Katy Follain of Quercus Books in London and Peter Joseph of Hanover Square Press in New York. Their passion for the book has been inspirational.
We could not have done this without the negotiating skills of our agent, Adam Gauntlett, at Peters Fraser and Dunlop, and his colleagues in the international department, Becky Wearmouth, Lucy Barry and Antonia Kasoulidou.
To Malcolm, whose vision inspired this book. I would never have accomplished this without your determination to see it to completion.
Malcolm’s Acknowledgments
It has been a privilege to help Tova bring her incredible life story to such a potentially large international audience.
But it would have been a far more difficult task without the assistance and support of some wonderful people.
First, I must thank Milton Nieuwsma, journalist, television producer and author of Surviving Auschwitz: Children of the Shoah, for the most vital connection of all. Milt introduced me to Tova before I traveled to Auschwitz for the PBS NewsHour to cover the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation. Throughout the preparation of this book, Milt has been a rock of support, wisdom, and a great sounding board.
I am indebted to Therkel Straede, professor of contemporary history at the University of Southern Denmark, and a leading Scandinavian expert on the Holocaust. Therkel pointed me toward the most pertinent literature that enabled me to place Tova’s memories in a historical timeline. His attention to detail was critical in terms of fact-checking and correcting my initial errors.
I am grateful for the hand of friendship offered by Professor Yoel Yaari, a neuroscientist at the Hebrew University Faculty of Medicine in Jerusalem, whose mother, Bella Hazan, was a courier for the Jewish resistance in Poland during the Nazi occupation. She was tortured by the Gestapo, never gave up her secrets and survived two and a half years’ incarceration in Auschwitz. Yoel has been a font of critical information and I’m glad that he applied a brain specialist’s precision when analyzing my prose.
Pivotal components of this narrative would have been impossible without the perspective of Dr. Tony Bernard of Sydney, Australia, whose grandfather was a member of the Judenrat in Tomaszów Mazowiecki, and whose father, Dr. Henry Bernard, was a member of the Jewish police force in the ghetto at the same time as Machel Grossman. Before he died, Dr. Bernard sat down with Tony and recorded his life story. The resulting tussle with his conscience has been turned into a remarkable book called The Ghost Tattoo, published by Allen & Unwin in Australia.
Special thanks are due to Dr. Justyna Biernat of the Spaces of Memory Foundation, working to chronicle the dark past of Tomaszów Mazowiecki. Justyna furnished me with some key documents, maps and photographs, which brought much of the occupation back to life. The foundation relies on donations to survive, and Justyna would welcome contributions and purchases of her excellent short history, Black Silhouettes, at www.pasazepamieci.pl.