At 85, Tova Friedman has become TikTok influencers. Her videos deal with her experiences between 1944 and 1945, when she was only 6 years old and they took her to the Auschwitz extermination camp. The idea arose in 2021 when her grandson, Aaron Goodmanhe proposed to tell him through social networks adding already more than 75 million visits.

How did the idea start?

The idea came from his grandson, a fan of the social network, who realized that it is not only used for dancing or posting memes, but also as a way of spread ideas, messages and culture. That’s why he started posting these short videos with two goals, counter antisemitic discourse on the Internet and make the horrors experienced in the jewish genocide during World War II.

It all started because Aron Goodman asked his grandmother Tova Friedman for two minutes to ask her a question. Friedman did not think they were enough, but her grandson convinced him by telling him that people did not have a longer attention span and that they needed to focus on the story and warn people of where hate can lead if left unchecked or if nobody does anything about it.

Friedman explains that they realized that TikTok was a fabulous medium for reporting on the Holocaust, especially “for young people who don’t want to read books, who don’t like classes at school, who don’t like the way they teach teachers or whatever, who are bored with the Holocaust or haven’t even heard of it. It’s a medium where they listen to what you say and I try to answer as many questions as I can.”

From survivor to ‘influencer’

One of the most viewed videos, of which we show an excerpt in the video that heads these lines, is the one that shows the prisoner identification number that was tattooed on his arm in Auschwitz. Also showing black and white images of Friedman with other Jewish children in early 1945 while she the sleeve is rolled up to show the tattooed number.

A lot of people “can’t really get a chance to see a survivor, to see the story in his arm” and that is why through social networks and TikTok they spread their message and show the evidence of the Holocaust to people who deny it unjustifiably.