Holocaust survivor: It 'never occurred' to me I’d have to worry about my grandchildren

All right. Let’s go ahead and bring in Tova Friedman. She’s a Holocaust survivor. Her videos explaining her experience as a Nazi prisoner during the Great War in the atrocities she witnessed. We’re teaching a whole new generation now about the Holocaust on TikTok, of all places. Aaron Goodman is her grandson. He joins us today. He’s a freshman at Washington University in Saint Louis. Also has a perspective to share on the campus protests. Tova, we could speak with you all day. Candidly. What I’d like to do first is on this Holocaust Remembrance Day, ask you to share with us as quickly as you can what you recall the most about the Holocaust. You you want me to know what I recall? I recall horrible things. It’s too difficult to even explain it to you. All I can say is I recall the death of children, little babies, some of my friends who were shot, some of them in front of me, and the death of my grandmother shot in front of me. The kind of things that no human being should live through or recall or see or experience. I try to tell it to this generation to to sort of be careful that this can be the end product of all this hatred and anger and and anti-Semitism. It’s a very difficult time for, I think, all the Jews all over the world. And and it’s a it’s a very slippery slope as well because we saw in Nazi Germany in the 1930s the the normalization of anti-Semitism and that was key for the Nazi party to indoctrinate young people into into their master plan for destroying the Jewish population, at least in Germany, if not across Europe. So Aaron, when you see this rising again on college campuses, what do you think? Well, it’s all them trying to intimidate us. And that’s something that I’ve been saying that we can’t be intimidated by these protests, by them yelling at us intifada, and that they want us dead. That’s something that I’ve been saying. We can’t let them intimidate us. And it hurts to see people, especially at a university or at university level. It hurts to see students attacking other students. People who used to be your friend no longer support you. And you have to hide your your religion, your faith. Tova, on the day that gets very scary when you know when, when professors, some of the professors take the side of these students tovah. Does it shock you that today your grandson is sort of being faced with some of the same challenges in the form of virulent anti-Semitism that you faced so many years ago? Did you ever think on the day you were liberated from the camps and when the Nazis leader surrendered, you know, in France and Germany that this would happen? No. It’s extraordinarily shocking, frightening, disappointing. When I walked out of Auschwitz with my mother at the age of 6, 1/2, it sort of never occurred to me that somehow in my lifetime I would experience something like that. And when coming to America, you know, the country of the promise, I was 11 1/2. It was oh, here I am, I’m safe and I’m safe forever and so is my family. And that what I have to worry about my grandchildren and how they feel in in the colleges, it’s it’s it’s too shocking and too painful And I just hope that there are more people who are going to be for us than against us. All right. You know, Aaron, very quickly, if we could just to button this up, we pointed out that you’re a freshman at Washington University in Saint Louis. We haven’t heard about any protests going on in that campus. Do you, as you as a Jewish student, feel safe there? Well, Washi was one of the first schools to actually allow Jewish students to enter, and we have had countless protests where community members come on campus, they come on campus and they intimidate students. They’re yelling at us. Like I said before, Washi is no different. Every university is having these protests and this intimidation, right? Yesterday there were five students speaking from Columbia University and and they were just, they had this dual feeling. They were, they were scared, they were shocked, they were intimidated. But they were not going to give up. That was the theme of last night’s rally near the Columbia University. They were not going to give up. They were not going to leave the campus, not the classes. They will graduate. They will take the exams. They will do everything as if life is normal. But the fear is there. But there is also a lot, a lot of courage, you know, with the, with the Jewish students. Yeah, I would say that life is anything but normal for so many people. Well, Tova, like I said earlier, we could literally speak to you all day, but we’ve got to let you go. You’re really a beacon of hope and light and beauty for Jews all around the country. Thank you for what you do, including myself. I recommend everybody watch your content online. It’s very important. So thank you so much to you both for taking time with us on this Holocaust Remembrance Day and Week. Thanks, folks. Appreciate it.