As part of St.Ninian’s commemorations for Holocaust memorial Day we were honoured to welcome an amazing woman… Inge Aurbacher.
Inge’s story
Inge Auerbacher the only child of Regina and Berthold Auerbacher, was born in 1934, a year after the Nazis came to power. She lived in a small village in southern Germany where her father had his own textile business.
On the night of November 9th, 1938, just before Inge’s fourth birthday, countrywide acts of terror and destruction were carried out against Germany’s Jews. Inge’s father was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. After his release a few weeks later, the family realized the need to leave the country, but they had nowhere to go. They moved to her mother’s home town. Inge could no longer attend the local public school. In 1941, she was forced to wear the yellow star. In late 1941, Inge, her parents and her grandmother were told to report for “resettlement.” Her father, a disabled World War I veteran, obtained a postponement, but her grandmother was sent to Latvia where she was murdered.
On August 22, 1942, Inge and her parents were arrested and deported. Forced to leave all their possessions behind, they were sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia. Conditions were horrendous. Always hungry, Inge and her parents constantly lived with the fear that they would be deported to the death camps in Poland. In the spring of 1945, the Germans began building gas chambers in Theresienstadt, where they planned to kill all the remaining Jews. But on May 8, 1945, Soviet troops entered the ghetto and ten year-oldInge and her parents were freed.
Of the 15,000 children who had been imprisoned at Theresienstadt, only 100 survived and Inge is one of them.
We would like to thank Inge for coming to the school and for being so gracious as to hand out awards for pupils S1-S6 who had successfully taken part in our creative responses competition.
As time moves on our opportunities to meet witnesses to these atrocities , to ask them questions and to feel their passion, diminishes. Inge left us with her story, some hugs and plenty of inspiration “it is your job to be everything today for those who are not here” and who can argue with that.
On Wednesday 27th a group of pupils will be attending the Scottish National Holocaust Memorial Day event at Falkirk town hall where we will be able to meet us with Inge again.
Pictures of the event
