The 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops is being marked at the site of the former death camp, a ceremony that is widely being treated as the last major observance that any notable number of survivors will be able to attend. Among those who traveled to the site is 86-year-old Tova Friedman, who was 6 when she was among the 7,000 people liberated on Jan. 27, 1945.
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00:00Finally, we arrived at Auschwitz, a gloomy Sunday with a sky
00:29obscured by smoke and a terrible stink hung in the air and there were rows and rows of
00:39naked women all around me.
00:44What are they looking for?
00:47I asked my mother, as I too was naked, and I tried to avoid the gleam of the German shepherds'
01:01teeth and their eyes.
01:04I was their height, so I can see them completely.
01:11I can still see their eyes to this day.
01:14My mother answered me, diseases, but if we are ill, she didn't have to finish.
01:26She pointed to the smoke right by the entrance.
01:33I knew at five and a half what that meant.
01:41We all knew.
01:43I recall thinking, I will never, I will never let them know how much they are hurting me.
01:54At five and a half, I had the rebellion in me.
01:59I will not show them, I will not let them know the pain they're inflicting on me.
02:06On an icy, windy day, I stood and watched helplessly as little girls from the nearby
02:16barrack were marched away crying and shivering to the gas chamber.
02:25They were covered with rags and some of them didn't even have any shoes and were walking
02:34barefoot in the snow.
02:37They were very young, as I was, six or seven, but starvation shrugged their bodies and they
02:49appeared even younger.
02:54They too became ashes.
02:58I knew nothing about partisans saving Jews from ghettos and camps.
03:06I knew nothing about the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, nor of the Allies and the D-Day, nor of the
03:16invasion of Normandy.
03:21At that time, we were victims in a moral vacuum.
03:29But today, however, we all, we have an obligation, not only to remember, which is very, very
03:41important, but also to warn and to teach that hatred only begets more hatred, killing
03:52more killing.
03:54Instead, our revenge has been to build a strong Jewish country and raise our families in peace.
04:06Eighty years after liberation.
04:09The world is again in crisis.
04:14Our Jewish Christian values have been overshadowed worldwide by prejudice, fear, suspicion, and
04:25extremism.
04:27And the rampant anti-Semitism that is spreading among the nations is shocking.
04:36It's shocking to all of us, to our children and our grandchildren.
04:43Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, is fighting for its very existence and its
04:54way of life.
04:58We mourn not only the fallen soldiers and the hostages, but also the turbulence and
05:10mistrust in our society.
05:15We pray for strength, resilience, and of course, hope.