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Esther Bejarano: Active against neo-Nazis
Photo: Axel Heimken / picture alliance / dpa
It was only recently that concerts and conversations with her were canceled, and she was active until she was old.
Esther Bejarano died on Saturday morning in Hamburg at the age of 96.
Meron Mendel, director of the Anne Frank educational facility, announced this on Twitter.
The Jew had survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and stood up for those persecuted by the Nazi regime.
She appeared on the International Auschwitz Committee and as a singer.
Born in Saarlouis in 1924, Bejarano was brought to Auschwitz concentration camp in April 1943 as a Jew. There she played the accordion in the girls' orchestra of the camp, which accompanied the march of the labor columns through the gate every day. In November 1943 she was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp and was committed as a forced laborer in the Siemens camp. In 1945 she was able to flee on one of the notorious death marches of the concentration camp prisoners. After the war she emigrated to Palestine / Israel and returned to Germany with her family in 1960. Since then she has lived in Hamburg.
Bejarano joined the association of those persecuted by the Nazi regime - the Association of Antifascists.
In 1986 she founded the Auschwitz Committee for the Federal Republic of Germany, which organizes educational trips to concentration camps, eyewitness talks in schools and events against forgetting.
As a singer, she has been on stage with the rap group Microphone Mafia from Cologne since 2009.
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