http://ozarkspub.vo.llnwd.net/o37/KSMU/audio/mp3/holocausts_5984_0.mp3
A survivor of the World War II Holocaust, Inge Auerbacher, visited Drury University Thursday. Before she gave her lecture, she sat down with KSMU’s Jennifer Moore to share her vivid childhood memories.
Inge Auerbacher was a three year old Jewish child living in Kippenheim, Germany, when Kristalnacht took place in 1938, known in the West as the “Night of Broken Glass.” “Well, it was just, really, before my fourth birthday,” she said. “We were observant Jews. My grandfather was quite religious, and he went to the synagogue in the morning to say his morning prayers. He was taken from his prayers and sent to the Dachau Concentration Camp,” she says.
The local synagogue was desecrated, she says, and the sacred Torah rolls were ripped to pieces. The other Jewish men and boys ages 16 and older were rounded up and sent to concentration camps, she says.
She recalls hiding in a backyard shed as the rioting continued for an entire day.
“All the houses, Jewish houses were broken into. They threw rocks through the windows, [and] broke all the glass,” she remembers.
Her father was allowed to return after several weeks in Dachau.
In 1942, Inge and her parents were deported to the Concentration camp Terezin, in then-Czechoslovakia, where her life became a series of barracks, hunger, and barbed wire.
“We were in a special section of disabled war veterans,” she says. Her father had been injured fighting in the German army in WWI.
“Most of the time, we were running around in the garbage dump, trying to find some potato peelings you could still cut off a little bit, or a potato, or a turnip,” she says. Her family didn’t see eggs or milk for years.
One item that made the journey with Inge was a toy doll her grandmother had given to her.
“She was the only item that I could keep,” Inge says. “I found out some years ago that that model’s name was ‘Inge.’ So, when my grandmother gave her to me at age two, she gave the ‘Inge’ doll to her only grandchild. But I didn’t know that, so I named her after the famous movie star, Marlene Dietrich, with blonde hair and blue eyes. That’s what my doll looked like,” Inge said.
The doll was a collector’s item, manufactured specifically for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
Inge had a childhood friend in the Terezin camp who was sent to her death at the gas chambers in the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp. That friend gave Inge her doll’s clothing—a dress her friend’s mother had sewn from rags—before she was led away.
Inge says although racism and intolerance are very strong forces, she believes that love and tolerance are stronger yet.
She says she lives in Queens, New York, where her three immediate neighbors are Hindu, Muslim, and Christian families, and they’re all close friends.
“In order to fight racism and intolerance, get to know somebody else. Become friends with someone else. Getting to know somebody, you know, opening your heart to another human being—I think that is very important,” she says. Inge Auerbacher donated her doll to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Today, she travels the world to remind people what racism and intolerance can lead to.
For KSMU News, I’m Jennifer Moore.