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In Auschwitz, my mother taught me three rules.
Not stories. Not prayers. Rules. The kind that kept you alive.
Rule one: Never make eye contact with a guard.
Rule two: Never show that you are sick.
Rule three: Never, ever, lose your bowl.
I was five years old. I memorized them the way other children memorize nursery rhymes.
The bowl was a small tin thing. Dented. Scratched. It held whatever thin soup they gave us once a day. If you lost your bowl, you had no bowl. If you had no bowl, you had no ration. If you had no ration, you understand.
I guarded that bowl with everything I had. I slept with it. I held it against my chest during roll call. I knew where it was every second of every day.
Then one morning, I fell into the latrine.
There is no delicate way to say this. The latrines in Auschwitz were wooden boards with holes cut into them over a pit. The holes were large. I was very small. I was in a hurry. I slipped.
I went in up to my neck.
The smell. The cold. The rats. I do not need to describe it. Your mind already knows.
My mother tried to pull me out. She could not. I was slippery and she had no strength. None of us had strength. We had not eaten properly in months. She called out. Other women came. Together they pulled me free. Someone found a hose. They sprayed me down in the cold air while I stood there shaking.
I did not cry. Rule number one in Auschwitz was the same rule everywhere, do not attract attention.
But I got sick. Very sick. The kind of sick that comes from rats and filth and cold water and a body that has nothing left to fight with.
And I remembered Rule Two, never show that you are sick.
I hid it from everyone. From the guards. From the other children. Even from my mother, because I knew if she knew, she would do something. And doing something in Auschwitz got you killed.
But someone saw. I do not know who. I do not know why they helped me instead of reporting me. I never knew.
They took me to a room, a makeshift hospital. I lay in a bed, a real bed, not a wooden bunk, for the first time since we had arrived.
I do not remember much of what happened next. The fever blurred everything. Days passed like smoke.
When I came out, I still had my bowl.
I had held it even in the latrine. Even in the fever. Even in the dark when I did not know where I was or what day it was.
My mother looked at me when I came back. She looked at the bowl. She did not say anything. She just nodded, the way she nodded when something had gone the way it needed to go.
People ask me what survival looks like.
I tell them, sometimes it looks like a five year old girl climbing out of a latrine in a death camp, covered in filth, shaking with cold, still holding her tin bowl.
Because she knew that the bowl was the difference between eating and not eating. Between living and not.
Because her mother had told her. And she had listened.
I am Tova Friedman. I fell into a latrine in Auschwitz at five years old.
I came out still holding my bowl.
Tova.
#NeverForget #Survival #DaughterOfAuschwitz #ShesStillHere #TheirNamesLiveOn
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