Tola was six in the autumn of 1944 when she and the other children were given an incredible breakfast one morning. Theirs was the last children’s block, and after they ate, they were led outside. Two female members of the SS began walking the group toward an unspecified destination, and whispers began to circulate that they were headed for the gas chamber. Tola wasn’t afraid; in her experience, death was the necessary fate of all Jewish children, and she accepted that perhaps it was just their turn.

As they walked, Tola heard her mother suddenly call out to her, asking what was happening. Tola calmly called out, “We’re going to the crematorium,” which elicited the frantic cries from women gathered on the other side of the wire. The children were indeed led to the anteroom for Crematorium III and were instructed to go inside and take off their clothes for a “shower.” The older children began sobbing, refusing to believe the ruse. As the children huddled together for warmth in their thin towels, they were surprised to hear the soldiers arguing with each other. After a long wait, they were ordered to get out and return to their barracks. As they walked back by the women, Mama called out again, asking Tola what had happened. Tola explained that the officers had gotten the wrong block and added, “They’re going to take us another time.”

Tola had once again escaped death, and even as an adult, Friedman hasn’t been able to determine what exactly saved her on that day. There was no other children’s block remaining that Nazi officers could have mistaken Tola’s group for. Of all the millions of Jews who were led to gas chambers during the Holocaust, these children were part of an exclusive few who lived to tell the tale. Through her research, Friedman believes that it’s possible that the work of Heinrich Himmler saved her; on November 2, 1944, he decreed that there would be no further gassings using Zyklon-B, an order that defied Hitler. 

On the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Friedman returned to Crematorium I, believing that she was “tough enough to cope with a place replete with nightmarish personal memories.” However, after a couple of minutes, she found the experience overwhelming and had to leave quickly.