An award winning author, chemist, and Holocaust survivor will be delivering a talk at the University of Victoria on Monday, November 18th.
Inge Auerbacher is a survivor of the Theresienstadt or Terezin ghetto, where she and her parents were deported to in 1942.
See also: Half of Canadians cannot name a single Nazi concentration camp or ghetto (STUDY)
The windows of her family home in Kippenheim, a village in southwestern Germany near the Black Forest, were broken by hoodlums on November 10th 1938 – a night infamously remembered as Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass.
That night, police arrested her father and grandfather while she, her mother, and grandmother managed to hide in the shed.
“When we came out, the town’s Jewish men had been taken to the Dachau concentration camp. My father and grandfather were allowed to return home a few weeks later, but that May my grandfather died of a heart attack,” writes Auerbacher.
A few years later, when Auerbacher was just 7 years old, she and her family were deported to the Terezin ghetto in Czechslovakia where they endured some of the harshest human-imposed conditions to ever be documented.
Out of the 15,000 children interned in the ghetto, only about one per cent survived.
After Inge and her parents had spent three years at Terezin, the ghetto was liberated by the Red Army, and the family decided to move to the United States. Auerbacher obtained a degree from Queens University in New York and became a chemist.
Throughout her life, she has written and published several award-winning works documenting her experiences at Terezin and recovery afterwards.
Auerbacher’s talk at UVic is free and open to the public. It will take place at the university’s Bob Wright Centre on Monday.
Talk by Inge Auerbacher
- When: Monday, November 18th, 4:30 p.m. – 6 p.m.
- Where: University of Victoria, Bob Wright Centre, Room A104
