"Behind Her Eyes": Holocaust survivor focuses on hope

Tova Friedman JEFF MORRIS PHOTO

By Jeff Morris

It’s very easy to sum up “Behind Her Eyes,” the latest documentary from brothers George and Teddy Kunhardt and their Life Stories production company: an extraordinary film about an extraordinary person.

The film had its premiere Jan. 11 at the Bedford Playhouse, with its subject, Tova Friedman, on hand for a post-screening Q&A session. 

Friedman is one of the few Jewish children to survive the Holocaust, and at 88, she still possesses the vibrancy and hopefulness one might expect to find in someone less than a quarter of her age. That youthfulness may be why she has found a devoted following on Tik Tok.

In the film, Friedman sums up what she’s now trying to accomplish.

“I’m trying to undo what Hitler tried to do,” she says. “I’m not just a survivor — I’m thriving in a way.” 

She is grateful that she has these years.

“A million and a half children were murdered, for no reason, while the world was quiet. And I always felt that, since I survived, I should do something with that time — till the very end, really,” she says. “I’ve been a therapist for at least 25 to 30 years, and I’ve realized, all we have to do is talk to each other; that’s the only thing to do.”

But that’s the latest part of her story. The beginning is truly remarkable. Born Tola Grossman in 1938 in Gdynia, Poland, her family moved to Tomaszow Mazowiecki, Poland as soon as World War II broke out. She was one of five thousand Jews forced to live in a ghetto, where the population steadily decreased due to starvation, shootings, and deportations. After several more relocations, with her father deported to the Dachau concentration camp, she and her mother were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in June 1944.

Incredibly, though they were separated, her mother managed to keep track of her whereabouts, and she somehow survived starvation. Not only did both survive until they were liberated by the Red Army, they were reunited and able to return to Poland, with her father eventually returning from Dachau. But nearly all the rest of their extended family were killed.

The film traces her story, from that early childhood when the constant threat of starvation, imprisonment, war and death seemed normal because it was all she knew, through her incredibly close and sometimes fraught relationship with her mother, her relocation to America, Israel, and back again, her 60-year-marriage, and her reinvention as both a therapist and a sought-after public speaker. Eventually, it is her grandson, Aron Goodman, who recognizes how valuable her story is to a new generation and sets up a TikTok account, where she now has nearly 520,000 followers and over 75 million views. And that appealed to the Kunhardts as well.

George, who lives in Bedford, and Teddy, who lives in Chappaqua, have an interview series called The Thread that highlights people who have led meaningful lives.

“During our research and outreach, a member of our team suggested we take a look at Tova Friedman and the following she had built on TikTok,” says George. “After watching just a few of her videos, we were immediately struck by her presence and the clarity of her storytelling, and we invited her to sit for an interview.”

When her episode was released, George says, the response was overwhelming.

“It quickly became clear that her story needed more space, so we decided to continue filming with her and develop the material into a short film. There are many documentaries about the Holocaust, so from the beginning we knew the challenge was making something that felt distinct. TikTok became our way in.”

Teddy says they were especially drawn to the intergenerational storytelling between Tova and her grandson, and to the way she recounts her firsthand experiences of the Holocaust with such precision and emotional honesty. “From the lessons she learned from her mother to her memories of liberation and coming to America, we wanted to capture her story clearly and make it accessible to younger audiences,” he says. “Our goal was for viewers to truly understand what she lived through, while leaving the film feeling energized and compelled to make a difference.”

During the Q&A session at the Playhouse, Friedman said in deciding to make the film, she first “interviewed the interviewers” and found she could trust them. 

“I really wanted to know what kind of people they were, because I’m telling them some intimate things.” She found they were a “wonderful group of people” who were very kind and sensitive.

George says making the film took about three years, start to finish, though not consecutively.

“Once we decided to expand the original interview into a film, we knew it would require multiple filming days with Tova, and there was real value in spacing those conversations out over time,” he says. 

Friedman’s take was somewhat different: “I didn’t realize that the film was going to go on and on and on,” she said. “I thought you talk about Auschwitz and I’m done! I didn’t realize they were going to talk about later on, what I did, coming to America. I don’t even remember talking about it,” she recounted, with appreciative laughter from the audience.

Her remarks were in line with a characteristic impatience she revealed in recounting some of her experiences with the American process of therapy, which she noted can go on for years. 

“One of the things I don’t encourage is to wallow in something to such a point where you can’t function,” she said. She recounted a couple who came to her who wanted to have a baby, but felt they weren’t ready. They were 37 and 38. She asked them when they thought they’d be ready, and they said “Oh, we have to talk about it …” “I said, ‘You know, by the time you’ll be ready you may be dead!’”

Another couple came to her because they were fighting over the fact she left for work first in the morning; he slept later and wouldn’t make the bed. 

“One day, I turned to the guy and I said, ‘Make the frikkin’ bed already!’ And he looked at me — I didn’t use the word frikkin, I used something else — and he looked at me and he said, ‘OK.’” Friedman encapsulated her overall philosophy on therapy. “As I get older — I don’t care if I lose my license, I’m 88 — I sort of say to the person, ‘Oh, come on. You’re not going to make this into a problem. Really?”

“Behind Her Eyes” manages to pack Friedman’s life story, with an incredible array of period film clips and photos, into 40 minutes. 

“The most difficult part of the process was keeping the film under 40 minutes,” George says. “We easily could have moved faster if we were making a feature length film, but classroom use was always central to our thinking, and forty minutes felt like the right length for that audience.”

He says the film, along with all of the raw interviews, will be available on their website, www.lifestories.org, later this spring. 

“Everything we produce is made freely available to the public. Anyone can request to screen the film in their community, school, or place of worship by visiting the website and submitting a request.” 

Teddy says the greatest risk of our time is losing a human understanding of how moral life is lived under pressure, describing the Life Stories mission as “to make sure future generations can hear directly from those who faced those moments and lived through them.”

Friedman summed up her message this way: “Think about what you have done, and try to leave this world a little bit better than you found it. That’s all there is.”

Jeff Morris has been a reporter for The Recorder since its inception, and previously wrote for The Record-Review, The Lewisboro Ledger, and business periodicals, and even edited jokes for Reader’s Digest.