Wren Rook The Daughter of Auschwitz The Girl who Lived to Tell her Story (Childrens Adaptation).

by Tova Friedman, Manuel Sumberac (illustrator)

In this powerful middle grade adaptation of the bestselling adult memoir of the same name, New York Times bestselling author Tova Friedman recounts her experiences as one of the youngest survivors of the Holocaust.

At the tender age of five years old, Tola Grossman was sent to a Nazi labor camp. As World War II was breaking out around them, the only thing Tola and her parents were left with was the instinct to survive at all costs. Tola’s life became a series of miraculous close calls, from being saved from a gas chamber to successfully hiding from the Nazis as they were rounding people up. 

In this evocative account of one young girl’s survival, Tova Friedman chronicles the atrocities she witnessed while at Auschwitz and, ultimately, the sources of hope and courage she and her family found to persist against all odds.

Genres: Nonfiction, Holocaust, Memoir, Middle Grade, World War II, Biography Memoir, History

224 pages, Paperback

Published August 29, 2024

About the author

Tova Friedman is eighty-four years old and lives in New Jersey, USA. She is one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz and uses her vivid memories to write and speak against anti-Semitism and prejudice. She was the director of a nonprofit social service agency for twenty-five years and continues to work as a therapist.

Reviews

[Allyson Thomley · Rating 4 out of 5]

My only criticism of this book is that I wish the opening made it more clear and obvious that this is a first-hand account. There have been several historical fiction novels written for young people that expose the horrors of the Holocaust (Devil’s Arithmetic, Number the Stars, Someone Named Eva), yet knowing that the author actually lived the atrocities described is a powerful thing. Truth be told, the narrative style in this book is not the most engaging; it is very matter-of-fact and direct. But it IS true and written in a way that is accessible for young people.

As a teacher and a mother, I have a hard time deciding what age it would be most appropriate to share this with. For more sensitive individuals, I would wait for 8th grade and above.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing the advanced digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

[Kyla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heartbreaking and honest portrayal of a Jewish girl’s experiences in the Nazi concentration camp. She is only five years old when she is taken with her mother to live in Auschwitz. Tova tells her story with great detail about starvation, abuse, and fear, describing the many times she narrowly escaped death. Important eyewitness account to the Holocaust.
Recommend.
Thank you to Netgalley for the chance to review this book.

[malin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Das Buch hat eigentlich 100/5 Sternen verdient.
Ich finde dieses Thema so unfassbar wichtig und vorallem darüber aufzuklären.
Die Emotionen und Gefühle wurden so sichtbar gemacht das es mich wirklich zum nachdenken gebracht hat. Ich würde mir wünschen das dieses Buch in den Lehrplan kommt. Es beschreibt die Lage tausend mal besser als jedes Geschichte Buch.
Ich bin gerade wirklich sprachlos obwohl ich so viel Gutes über das Buch sagen möchte.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

So heartbreaking.

[Starcatbooks]

HarperCollins/Quill Tree Books, Pub Date April 1, 2025

Tova Friedman here recounts her own story as one of the youngest children to survive Auschwitz’s during the Holocaust, framed as a retelling to a friend she has met and trusts in New York, after World War II.

The book is an ostensibly middle reader version of Friedman’s adult book of the same, told from Tola’s (Friedman’s original name) point of view, first-person narrative, during the events of her life starting before the war. However, I had a hard time believing this is actually written for middle readers, not because of the content of the book itself (which is graphic and doesn’t hold back on the details of what Tola experiences before and during her stay at the death camp), but because of the language itself.

I worked at Houghton Mifflin as a line editor and developer in middle reader English textbooks as my first job in publishing and learned a great deal about language levels for reading comprehension for different age groups of children and how word charts are applied to text for children’s books. This book constantly uses words that are far beyond middle readers and brought me out of the story over and over again.

I must say that as a bookstore owner now, I can’t recommend this book for middle readers; young adults, yes, but middle readers, no. And that’s a shame, because it’s about Tova/Tola, told from her point of view, detail by detail about the death camp, Auschwitz, about her daily experiences with the guards, with others in the camp, with her mother, with the deprivations, starvation, cruelty, murder, and psychological torture the Nazis subjected both adults and young children to on a daily basis. The surety Tova/Tola had every day, ingrained into her as “normal,” that she would die at any moment. And the terrible normality for such a young child that this was her entire life: death all around her, death for herself.

And yet, the target audience will have a hard time reading this because of the actual language used. I hate circling around to that again, but there it is: it’s all about language with middle readers books. If a child can’t understand the words, they will put the book down. Not all: I was one of those children that lived with a dictionary at my elbow, even as a middle reader. But I was also neurodivergent, reading way above my level and a definite book geek.

I wish this book were written at middle reader level; I’d recommend it in a heartbeat. It’s such an important story; every child (every person!) should know about the Holocaust, and I feel the details in this books are necessary for the impact of the narrative. Some parents won’t want their children exposed to the fact that children were killed, that adults as well as children were shot, naked, starved, and thrown into pits like firewood. And yet it must never happen again, and to know that fact everyone, including children, need to know exactly what the Nazis did to Jews and marginalized people.

Though written for middle readers (despite the language level problems), I’d recommend this book to upper middle readers who are verging on young adult, as well as young adults. Tova’s story needs to be heard by this generation.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first thing Tova remembers is hiding under the table where she felt safe. She would go there whenever she heard the boots when the Germans walked by their home. One day the front door was knocked down and the family was forcibly removed to ghetto. They lived in the ghetto until they were no longer useful to the Nazis. They were put on cattle trucks with thousands of others and sent to the concentration camps. Tova's mother, while terrified, was a loving and protective mother who did everything she could to train her daughter to survive. She was taken away from her parents and lived in a barracks with other children. There was always two to a “bed.” One da Tova woke up to find her bedmate dead. Finally the concentration camp was “freed” by the Russians. Tova ends up going to the Unite States with her parents in 1950. They continued to face antisemitism and struggled to reassimilate Tova went to school even though she didn’t know English. The school wasn’t comfortable having Tova as a student. The students didn’t know what to make of her.

This true story by Tova Friedman, who was one of the few child survivors of the Holocaust, recalls her story when forcibly taken as a five year old child with her parents to Auschwitz. It is a story of remarkable courage, bravery, endurance of the horrible suffering. I followed Tova’s life throughout the book and found myself crying at the horrors of living in a concentration camp as a child. I think this book should be read by everyone as I believe/hope that they will realize the holocaust was real.

Disclaimer: I received an arc of this book from the author/publisher from Netgalley. I wasn’t obligated to write a favorable review. The opinions expressed are strictly my own.

[Marnie Diem · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are so many books out there about the Holocaust and the survivor's experience. What sets the Daughter of Auschwitz apart is that Tova, the main character and author, who goes by Tola in the story, well, her story begins when she is just a toddler.

Beginning as a three-year old in a small Polish suburb, we follow Tola from her cozy home with her parents and their large families, to a cramped apartment in the ghetto. The ghetto has one thing consistent to their apartment, Tola's "safe place" is under the table, and once in the ghetto, that becomes her own space - where she sleeps, plays, and spends much of her days. Slowly, the world around Tola disintegrates - first the Nazi's take her father's family, then her mother's, then, after a horrific episode of hiding, they finally take Tola and her parents. They survived multiple ghettos only to end up in a concentration camp. At this point, Tola was just five years old.

And that's what sets this story apart from others - the story is told by a survivor and activist, and begins when she is just a toddler. Tova shares her memories with just enough detail to express the incomprehensible reality she experienced as a very young child to chill readers, without drawing out the horrific details, often found in YA and adult Holocaust reads.

This is going to be a must read for middle grades.

[Lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the middle grade adaptation of her powerful memoir, Tova Friedman recounts her experiences as one of the youngest survivors of the Holocaust in this moving and emotional book. Sent to a Nazi labor camp at the age of five, Tola (and her parents) must do their best to survive the various horrors and brutalities of the camps, and their lives are a series of close calls with death, pain, and grief. Chronicling the horrors she witnessed at various camps including Auschwitz, Friedman brings the visceral, emotional, and powerful story to life in incredible detail. Her prose is well-written and structured, and the book does not shy away from the more gruesome and tragic details despite being meant for a younger audience. A must-read for students of history and a great supplemental text in the classroom, this adaptation matches the depth of emotion and intensity from Friedman’s original memoir, and both are incredibly powerful and worthwhile must-reads. In grappling with and explaining these larger topics for a younger audience, Friedman pulls readers into the book and makes it real, not just a history event and tragedy from eighty years ago, and this is truly a brilliant and well-executed middle grade adaptation of a memoir.

Thanks to NetGalley, HarperCollins Children's Books, and Quill Tree Books for the advance copy.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Several months back, my husband's workplace had Tova Friedman as a speaker. Due to short notice and other circumstances I didn't end up going, but he said the auditorium was so packed people were sitting on the floor. I heard that she had written a book about her experiences and I wanted to read it. I ended up finding the middle grade edition of her book in my local library branch, so I decided to read that one (my mom read the full version so now we can compare notes).

This is a horrifying history, a personal experience of the Holocaust from a child's point of view. I don't think she pulled a lot of punches here, as there are a lot of descriptions of corpses and shootings and the despair sometimes felt by the victims, sometimes even after the war had ended. But I don't think it is inappropriate for the age level. These terrible things happened, and we should all learn about it in the hopes of creating a world where it will not happen again. (How are we doing on that? I'm really not sure.)

This is well worth the read, to keep this history alive.

[michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are very few first hand accounts of the horrors of the Holocaust. There are even fewer that were written for kids in middle school or high school. This is a must read and better than Anne Frank in terms of actually understanding what was going on. Additionally, the young people’s edition reads so well. You can see the horrors through her eyes. The fear, the luck, the fortitude. Absolutely amazing.

I did not read the original so I do not know how it compares, but I often find that the versions stripped down for teens hit all of the necessary notes. In today’s political climate, making sure that the story gets told, that people understand. In her epilogue, Friedman comments on how so few people were aware of the atrocities that happened. I see that in my own experiences in a rural southern town. With so few survivors left, I am especially glad she told her story this way.

* Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins for a digital review copy. All opinions are my own.

[Kelly Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading about the Holocaust experience is always extremely sobering, and I am reminded of the opportunity I had to visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.

I will never forget the images that were on display, along with the piles of tiny shoes, the human hair, and other haunting mementos.

If this is still ingrained in my memory, the experience of a Survivor is unfathomable.

But what hit me the hardest was Tola's age at the start of the book. Just 4 years old. I was blown away, not only because of her strength and fortitude, but by the strength and utmost courage of her mother. Behind every close encounter and harrowing experience, her mother's watchful eye and wise, life saving advice carried her through until the end.

I always recommend The Boy on the Wooden Box to readers who are interested in the Holocaust, but I will add this to my list.

Tola/Tova's story must be remembered.

"My life is a gift that I cannot waste. So is yours."

[Kami Mauldin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A more be powerful story will be hard to find. Tova is a Jewish woman who was 6 years old when World War II ended. She and her mother were both at Auschwitz and her father at Dachau. Tova has written her story to help young people know the horrors that once plagued the world and help keep those horrors from becoming reality again.

The book begins with the hardship and unique suffering of being a refugee in the United States after the war. She shares with her new friend the whole story of her life after being invited to a thanksgiving celebration. There is just no way to relate or understand the horrendous events that Tova had to survive, but I’m thankful she did and that she’s sharing her story with the world. I read this on my own, but will read it with my 10yo son in the near future. This needs to be remembered and used to help shape our own history with kindness and not persecution.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

[Karen Reeder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! Just wow! I have read many WWII stories and they are always emotional. This hit even more emotionally for me with the main character being only 5 years old when she was sent to a concentration camp. Everything that happened to her, her family, and so many others is so heart wrenching.
I really like how it starts with when Tola is 12 and trying to fit in as a Holocaust survivor in an American school. So often we think of the horror of what the survivors went through during WWII, but what about what they continued to go through for the rest of their lives! The book is so powerful and so moving to read. I am thankful that Tova has taken the time to write this in a way that children can consume and feel so many emotions. Please share it with your children so that Tova’s story can help more people remember.

[montogma25 · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Daughter of Auschwitz is a heart wrenching memoir written by Tova Friedman about the author’s experience as being one of the youngest survivors of the Holocaust. The book documents what life was like for Tova and her family when they were sent to live in ghettos, work camps, and later Auschwitz. I have read many books about people who survived the Holocaust, but very few of those stories were written by child survivors. This is why this book is so important. I am very grateful to Tova for all of the time, care and hard work that she put into this book. I would recommend this book for 8th grade readers and above. Also, I would like to thank Netgalley and Quill Tree Publishing Company ( imprint of HarperCollins Children's Books) for allowing me access to an early coy of this book to review.

[Danielle Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Daughter Of Auschwitz is a heartwrenching recounting of a young girl's experience in the Polish death camp during the Holocaust. This particular book is based off the adult memoir, repurposed for a younger audience. Knowing this, I would like to someday read Tova's adult memoir to see how the two books differ.

The Holocaust is such an important event for people to learn about, and memoirs are especially needed so society doesn't forget the atrocities that happened to millions of humans.

I have read quite a few fiction and nonfiction books regarding survivors of the Holocaust. This one falls in the middle for me personally. Tova brings a rather unique perspective, because there weren't many child survivors.

[Kira K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoughts:
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily. No matter how many holocaust stories I read, I will always be appalled by the pain and suffering inflicted. This is a particularly hard read with Tova being so young throughout her experiences but I think that makes it even more important and powerful a read. As this is a middle-grade adaptation of her book, the historical events and Tova’s experiences are adapted in age appropriate ways without watering down or minimising the reality.

Favourite Quote:
“We should have had a happy life there, and maybe I would have had brothers and sisters too. But history had other plans for us.”

[Diana Strand · Rating 5 out of 5]

This will be a hit with my many middle schoolers who love both memoirs and World War II novels. That being said, I won't recommend it to my sensitive readers as Friedman's experience as one of the few child survivors of Auschwitz is heart-breaking more than once. It is a gripping story of survival, especially the lengths her mother went to in Auschwitz and how much her parents continued to sacrifice after the end of the war. Friedman tells her story to a classmate once she immigrates to the US, and this entry into her story should help my students to connect as well.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC of this important story.

[Dolores Hackett · Rating 5 out of 5]

This middle school adaptation of Tova’s story takes you along with her on her unthinkable journey. This unfathomable time in history is shared from a wiser older version of the narrator, who has survived against all odds. Resilience and strength are apprentice on every page, even when hope is scarce and a young child has to come to terms with the reality of her soon-to-come death. I encourage teachers and children alike to read this book!

[Margie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an important book as it is the story of a young girl who lived to tell her story about surviving the Holocaust. Originally written for adults, this version for children makes her story accessible for younger readers. It is often frightening and painful to read about what Tova Friedman experienced before, during and after her time in concentration camps. This is a first person account and therefore needs to be read, deserves to be read.

[Sandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to the author, Tova Friedman, for the advance copy.
Was heart wrenching to read. What a frightening time for this young girl.
I plan on allowing my 11 year old granddaughter read this version of the holocaust. I had to explain to her what it was all about, as she new nothing about the atrocities of this.
Wish they would teach about this subject in schools.

[LS Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you for making this biography approachable for a younger audience who need to continue to hear stories about the Holocaust, especially from first-hand sources. Some information felt too edited, but I know that was done to make it acceptable for middle grade readers. Still a great book for any collection.

[Kimberly Erin Yeager · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a beautifully written memoir. I cannot imagine the courage young Tola had. Her mother’s courage and wisdom also amazed me. This young girl has such a horrible childhood and she walks you through that, but as you read you can sense the resilience she also carries. I learned much from this story. Thank you Tova for sharing your story.

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very detailed and informative look at a Jewish Holocaust survivor's life during World War II. This is the young adult or youth version of the book and I recommend this for supplemental reading for students in 6th grade and older. Sensitive topics of course but there is no questionable content that would be inappropriate for young readers.

[Leonie]

f*ck isreal.
kinda ironic being chased from your home and put into a concentration camp and then glorifying a state that has done the exact same thing but i guess its not as important because those were only muslims right?!

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Im always pulled toward books about the Holocaust and this one was well done. Knowing that it is nonfiction and a first hand account of these atrocities made it hit even harder. This is an adaptation for middle school. I now want to read the original novel.

[Lauren Smith-Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started this book two hours ago and did not put it down until I had read every single word.

This is a harrowing story of love, family and sheer survival during a time of unimaginable horror. Tova’s story is moving and heartbreaking at the same time and I was moved to tears

[Stacy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book for kids to learn more about the Holocaust. Written in a way that explains it at their level and explains the history they probably aren't familiar with.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This would be best for Tween or Older Children's.

[Sharon White · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author, who is in her 80's is able to so vividly recall the events, and share the feelings is quite remarkable. I can't wait to get this in the hands of our middle school students!

[Brenda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Audiobook

Heartbreaking to learn about her story.