Inge Auerbacher was 7 when the Nazis forced her family to leave a small German village near Stuttgart for the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.

It was August of 1942, well into World War II, and her family had already abandoned their home village of Kippinheim to live with her grandparents.

They were assigned to a transport, and she was given a number — 408 — before being crammed onto a crowded passenger train and hauled away.

Auerbacher’s transport had about 1,200 people in it. Only 13 would still be alive 13 years later.

The transport arrived in Boskovice after about two days’ journey, where Nazis told those aboard to leave their blankets and belongings and march two miles to the Terezin camp. The forced march was particularly hard on the elderly, she said.

“We’re marching, and many of the people couldn’t march two miles into the camp,” she said. “They were dropping by the wayside. They were whipping us. My parents put me between them so that I wouldn’t be whipped. I was 7 years old at the time. The youngest in the transport of close to 1,200 people.”

Troublingly, for Auerbacher, the march happened in the middle of the day. She said others saw what was happening, but did nothing to help.

“It happened in broad daylight,” she said. “People saw us. Nobody did a thing — nothing, like we were phantoms in the night.”

‘The bystanders are equally guilty’

Choices were a consistent theme for Auerbacher’s roughly hour-long talk to a near capacity crowd in the Foster ballroom in Mississippi State University’s Colvard Student Union.

Early in her talk, when she described the beginning of the Nazi roundups of Jews, Romani and other minorities, as well as the disabled and homosexuals, Auerbacher expressed anger at the people who stood by and watched, just as those who watched her transport march to Terezin.

In one picture she showed during her talk, a girl watched as others were being taken away.

“I spoke to her and said to her, ‘What did you think as your friends were being taken away?'” Auerbacher said. “‘I just wanted to look.’ And that is the problem with people. The bystanders are equally guilty.”

A Christian woman, she said, gave her lunch one day after the Nazis forced Jews to wear yellow stars with “Jude” — German for Jew — embroidered on them.

“She did not want to be a bystander,” Auerbacher said. “She wanted to do something and wherever I speak, I remember that good woman, who has no name that I know of. She is one of my heroes of my story. I’ve never forgotten her and I know she’s looking down from above.

“Had more people done something, I think this whole tragedy would not have happened,” she added.

The choices, of course, weren’t limited only to those who watched the Holocaust as it unfolded.

Auerbacher was born to a Jewish family in Dec. 1934, in Kippinheim. Her father was a World War I veteran who was wounded during the war and earned the Iron Cross for his service for Germany.

A Nazi doctor delivered her in her village home. Despite that, she said, the doctor took “very good care” of his Jewish patients.

“Later on, he did some terrible things,” she said. “Killing innocent people — most likely the euthanasia program with physical and mental difficulties. He was jailed for many years.

“Now, you have choices in life, to be a good person and stay that way, or become a bad person,” she continued. “That’s up to you. Forgiveness laid low means nothing to me. Once the deed is done, it’s done. You can’t take that back. But you have choices.”

Life in Terezin

Auerbacher lived a hellish life in Terezin. She said the camp was set up in a former army garrison town. At one point, she said 6,000-7,000 people lived in the camp before the Nazis told them to leave and crammed up to 16,000 people into the concentration camp at a time. She said 140,000 people went through the camp, and two-thirds of them were shipped away to be killed. Many died of malnutrition.

The camp pumped in water from a polluted well, and Auerbacher said outbreaks of disease, such as typhus and scarlet fever, were common. Showers with the polluted water were permitted “maybe two times a year,” and children “played” by searching for scraps of food in garbage piles. Rats and other vermin infested the camp.

The Nazis provided food for the prisoners. Auerbacher said they got a black liquid that was described as coffee but strong enough to clean clothes, a potato, turnips, murky soup spooned out of barrels and a bread ration.

“It was not enough to die, not enough to live,” she said. “It got so bad that we ate dandelions so we had something — a vegetable, something green.”

The Soviets liberated the camp in May of 1945, when Auerbacher was 10 years old. She lost 13 family members — aunts, uncles, cousins and her grandmother, in the Holocaust.

Auerbacher was sick after leaving the camp and took some years to recover. Despite only having six months of schooling before being shipped off to Terezin, she went to high school, where she finished in three years instead of four and went on to become a chemist.

The Holocaust is still near to Auerbacher’s heart, and she constantly advocates for people to remember it and to take steps to prevent something like it from ever happening again.

The most important step, she said, is to care for others.

“We think it’s not happening to us, so why should we care?” she said. “Yes, we should care, because the next person, it could be us.”

Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.

READER FAVORITES

• 

  Justices upholds aggravated assault, attempted robbery conviction

  By Cadence Harvey • 2 days ago

• 

  Historic Preservation: West Point’s historic Northside School poised for new future

  By Braden Simmons • 2 days ago