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Tova Friedman is one of a handful of children who passed through Auschwitz and lived to tell the tale. Friedman, who was 1 when her hometown was invaded by German forces and 6 when the Soviet army liberated her, told her story at the East Brunswick Public Library May 27.

"In Auschwitz, the people who survived are the people who had somebody with them -- a friend, neighbor, anyone who was next to you became your friend," Friedman said about her mother, whom she credits with her survival. "Surviving alone was impossible because you were living in a nightmare."

The first miracle Friedman described took place Sept. 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland and one week before her 1st birthday. Her house was bombed during the invasion, but she and her parents were on a train to visit her grandparents. Everyone in her house during the time was killed.

Friedman then talked about her first memories as a child of hiding under a table in a Polish shtetl. The shtetl had 15,000 Jews, including her grandparents. As an adult, Friedman realized that these memories are from the ghetto in the shtetl -- 15,000 Jews lived in four buildings, surrounded by a "human fence made up of Poles, Slaviks, and Ukranians."

"When the war broke out, all of our friends and all of our neighbors did not mind that all the Jews were stuck into those six buildings and stayed stuck," Friedman said. "The buildings were four stories high and there were 15,000 in those buildings."

Friedman concluded from her memory and visiting the apartment in the past few years that she was under a table because there was no room for children.

"Wherever the kids were, we were playing under the table, ate under the table -- I couldn't imagine how three or four families could live in the apartment with one bedroom," she said. "The kids must have slept everywhere."

Although rumors circulated throughout the ghetto, including Friedman's father's disbelief that the Nazis could gas other human beings, nothing became completely clear until the liquidation of the six buildings. Friedman's parents were among those who dug a giant communal grave; her father dug the grave that his own parents would end up in. After almost the entire ghetto was killed, Friedman and her parents were three of 23 people left to clean up the execution site, a churchyard, and scrub the buildings that were soon to be left behind.

"Every time [the Nazis] moved people they wanted nothing to be left," Friedman said. "God forbid the Red Cross should come. My father and mother and younger people and myself buried pieces, whatever bodies we could find. We cleaned up the rooms and mostly buried the bodies that were shot by the church. And my father said the Kaddish, which is interesting -- in this utter and complete nightmare, he still believed in God."

Friedman and her parents were then sent to a labor camp, where her parents were sent away during the day to work and the children were left alone, with no food and no parents.

"I didn't understand the concept of religion -- I knew you had to be killed because you were Jewish," Friedman said.

The second miracle Friedman described took place in this labor camp, where Friedman and her mother hid in the ceiling of a barrack while the Nazis came in and shot wildly around the room.

"She put her hand on my mouth so tightly that weeks later I had black and blue around my mouth," Friedman said. "I knew I wouldn't be crying, but it was just in case. There was screaming and there was shooting. They began to shoot everywhere, randomly, not knowing that people were in the ceiling. Bullets went right past me, and it was a miracle I was not hit."

For months afterwards, Friedman's parents forbade her from stepping outside the barracks, until the camp was liquidated and the remaining prisoners were packed into cattle cars and shipped to Auschwitz.

"I question myself, 'why was it that I didn't get shot right there?'" Friedman said. "They got rid of us (children) as quickly as possible. The only thing I could say is that they had no orders."

After Friedman and her parents arrived in Auschwitz, her father was taken to Dachau and Friedman was sent with her mother to Auschwitz. Once inside, they were examined and their heads were shaved. All the while, Friedman thought she was the only child left in the world.

Time passed in Auschwitz, and Friedman came down with a case of scarlet fever and diphtheria. She was sent to the Auschwitz hospital, where there was no medicine, but she recovered. When she left the hospital, Friedman was taken to the gypsy camp, which became the children's camp, and she was separated from her mother.

For the rest of the war, Friedman spent her time in Auschwitz. In yet another miracle, Friedman said, her transport to the gas chamber was turned around -- apparently, the wrong group had been sent.

The final miracle of her time in Auschwitz took place in the few days before liberation, during which Friedman and her mother reunited and Friedman's mother's quick thinking saved both of them. In a desperate elusion from the Nazis during their liquidation of Auschwitz, Friedman and her mother hid under dead corpses in the camp's hospital as Nazis visited each one to determine if they were dead or alive. As they left the building, Friedman and her mother emerged from under the bodies, to find that others had done the same. Several days later, on Jan. 27, 1945, the Soviet army liberated Auschwitz.

"There's a movie of me walking out of Auschwitz because a Russian soldier filmed it," Friedman said. "He saw the children and he could not believe it. He took pictures of us showing our numbers."

Friedman credits her detailed memory of her survival to her mother, who talked to her at every opportunity about what was happening.

"I was with my mother almost to the very end," Friedman said. "She didn't lie to me. When she said to me that we were safe, I knew we were safe. When she said to me that this is terrible and dangerous... I knew. I think because she verified everything that I saw, I remember it. All by yourself, your memory gets vague after awhile. But if someone is with you, then you know it happened."

Out of 5,000 children in her home shtetl, Friedman was one of five who survived the Holocaust.

"Can you imagine an entire army trying to destroy every living Jewish child?" Friedman said. "This was the war against the Jews and against the Jewish children."