This past week I visited the campus of the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, SD. I wanted to hear a child Holocaust survivor speaking there about her experience in a centration camp and get an impression of what life must have been like in the 1930’s and ’40’s for Jews. It was overwhelming. Inge Auerbacher survived the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia where she and her immediate family were sent. Other members of her family, like her grandparents were not so lucky, or other people the family met at the camp. It’s hard to understand the meanness in people’s hearts that force other people into terrible situations or cause them to suffer. And recent world events bring those horrors into focus in current history.
Auerbacher was involved in a short film of her return to where she lived as a young child from birth to maybe 6 years old before being forced into hiding and then to a concentration camp. This piece is only an introduction to the 25 minute one she showed the university students and others who attended. As she stated, she is 82 this year, and soon those affected by the Nazis who killed them and did such harm will soon be dead, and that immediate telling of history will be lost.
The sad thing is the hate that supports such behavior appears to still be alive and well and will probably continue to exist in the current history and foreseeable history until somehow it and the souls who insist on being haters are both eradicated from the world.
Jerry Mennenga
Sioux City, Iowa
-
- INGE AUERBACHER, child Holocaust survivor of Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, shows the Star of David that was sewn to her clothes as a child while in a Nazi concentration camp as she talks about her experience with students and others during National Tolerance Week in Sioux City, Iowa while at Farber Hall at the University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD Monday, April 3, 2017. (Photo by Jerry L Mennenga©)
-
- INGE AUERBACHER, child Holocaust survivor of Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, talks about her experience with students and others during National Tolerance Week in Sioux City, Iowa while at Farber Hall at the University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD Monday, April 3, 2017. (Photo by Jerry L Mennenga©)
-
- INGE AUERBACHER, child Holocaust survivor of Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, talks about her experience with students and others during National Tolerance Week in Sioux City, Iowa while at Farber Hall at the University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD Monday, April 3, 2017. (Photo by Jerry L Mennenga©)
lostinsiouxland 