Holocaust survivor Inge Auerbacher wishes for “reconciliation of all people”

Commemoration of the victims of National Socialism on Thursday in the German Bundestag. At the start of the event, Bundestag President Bärbel Bas called for vigilance: “Knowledge of history hasn’t prevented a third of the German population from thinking that the Jews might have too much influence after all, that 70 percent think Israeli politics are totally or partially wrong In the Middle East, quote, it is just as bad as the policies of the Nazis in World War II and that the pandemic is acting like a fire accelerator on the hatred of Jews that is already rampant and a few anti-Semitic trolls online. It’s a problem in our society, in society as a whole. Anti-Semitism is among us.” At the memorial hour for the victims of National Socialism, the 87-year-old Holocaust survivor Inge Auerbacher spoke about her memories and called for reconciliation. Auerbacher was deported with her parents to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942 when she was seven: “As far as I know, I am the only child who returned from Stuttgart among all the deportations. 20 people from our family were murdered by the Nazis. Three years in Theresienstadt concentration camp, four years in bed because of the serious health consequences. Eight years of missing school. Four years of stigmatization of the Jews for wearing a star. Stigma because of the nasty illness that prevented partners from marrying me. I was never allowed to wear a wedding dress. I’ll never be a mom or a grandma. But I’m happy. And the children of the world are mine.” // “I close with a heart’s desire: hatred of people is something terrible. We were all born as brothers and sisters. My deepest wish is the reconciliation of all people.” On the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the memory must not fade, everyone agrees. Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, together with the President of the Israeli Parliament, Mickey Levy, and Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, laid wreaths at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. On January 27, 1945, Red Army soldiers liberated the Auschwitz survivors in occupied Poland. The National Socialists had murdered more than a million people there.