Monday afternoon, 4 p.m.: Exactly on the minute, Inge Auerbacher appears on the screen with a friendly smile.
“Good morning, Ms. Auerbacher!” The 87-year-old lives in New York, where it is 10 a.m. at the moment.
Inge Auerbacher survived the Nazi terror and will give the speech on the Holocaust Memorial Day in the Bundestag on the morning of January 27;
in Germany it is largely unknown.
We're still polite and formal.
But that should change in the course of the following, very unusual Zoom call.
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Inge Auerbacher as a child
Photo: private
A one-hour introductory meeting was planned.
But more than three hours follow, in which she sings songs on the screen, recites poems, laughs and cries, alternately speaks English and German with a Swabian dialect and sometimes a mix of both.
A good 6,000 kilometers away, she is visibly moved, holding gifts and memorabilia into the camera and occasionally making phone calls at the same time.
Above all, however, she tells her story with passion: Actually, it is one of three lives in which she had to experience the worst qualities of people, but also got to know their best sides.
»We were good Germans«
Inge Auerbacher was born on December 31, 1934 as the last child of more than 60 Jewish families living in Kippenheim on the edge of the Black Forest.
In her narrative flow, she jumps happily from the small village to the metropolis of New York, where she has lived since 1946, and back to Germany, more precisely to Stuttgart.
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There she attended the first class for six months before the Jewish school was closed in March 1941.
She still remembers her teacher Theodor Rothschild and calls him the "Swabian Korczak" because, like the famous Polish pedagogue Janusz Korczak, he devotedly cared for Jewish orphans.
Only then does she report on the darkest chapter of her life: Theresienstadt.
The German occupiers had set up a camp in an old military fortress in the small Czech town north-west of Prague, as a »model getto« for foreign countries.
There the National Socialists interned tens of thousands of people from the German Reich who were persecuted and disenfranchised as Jews, who were old or of a certain prominence.
There were also Jewish veterans of the First World War, such as Inge Auerbacher's father Berthold, who had been awarded the Iron Cross for a war injury, as his daughter proudly says to this day: "We were good Germans, real patriots."
Her doll Marlene was always there
For many people, the "age ghetto" became a transit station to the extermination camps in the East.
The hygienic and social conditions in the completely overcrowded camp were so appalling that more than 30,000 people in Theresienstadt died of starvation, disease and exhaustion.
In Göppingen, the Auerbacher family had already had to live in a "Jewish house" where the National Socialists concentrated Jewish people in order to cut them off from all other social contacts.
From there, Inge Auerbacher was deported to Theresienstadt with her parents at the age of seven after they had received an “emigration order” in August 1942.
Her "first life" ended abruptly, her relatively carefree childhood in southern Germany, which she associates primarily with memories of her beloved maternal grandparents and her doll Marlene.
Inge Auerbacher's "second life" began in Theresienstadt.
The girl was not allowed to take much with her on the trip.
According to the Gestapo order, "each transport participant" was only allowed "one suitcase or one rucksack."
But Inge didn't want to do without her doll, so "Marlene" accompanied her to the camp and later to New York
In Theresienstadt the Auerbachers had to share a room with the Abraham family from Berlin.
Their daughter Ruth became Inge's best friend.
The two girls, who were almost the same age, teased each other because Inge talked in German and Ruth spoke in Berliner.
Ruth's shocking fate is representative of the one and a half million children who did not survive the Holocaust: in 1944 she was deported to Auschwitz with her parents and murdered.
Ruth Abraham was only nine years old.
poetry against oblivion
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Stumbling blocks for the Auerbacher family
Photo: private
At this point in the conversation, the otherwise bubbly Inge Auerbacher's voice falters.
She jumps up, returns with one of her books, and spontaneously recites a few lines of a poem she later wrote for Ruth.
In it she captures the moment when Ruth's mother talks to the girl in the face of death in the gas chamber:
'Sleep, my child. I can't give you more Oh God, we won't live. But I'm holding you."
Inge Auerbacher has a special relationship with poetry.
She proudly tells of the many verses she has written, some of which have even been set to music.
It all started with a poem, a present from her mother Regina for her tenth birthday in Theresienstadt.
Gifts such as toys or sweets were out of the question in the camp at the end of 1944.
There was not even paper;
Inge's mother had to write the poem in tiny letters on the back of a scrap of printed paper.
At the end of the war in 1945, the Red Army liberated the Theresienstadt camp.
The Auerbacher family went back to southern Germany, but found no relatives.
13 family members had been murdered, including the beloved grandmother, who had been deported to Riga at the end of 1941 and shot there.
The Auerbachers wanted to get in touch with Therese, one of their grandparents' former maids;
the courageous German had provided them with food in times of greatest distress and at great risk and had hidden some of the persecuted's private belongings, including the family's photo albums.
The shadows of the camp
The family found out that Therese had survived the war, but was then accidentally shot by a US soldier through a closed door.
When Inge Auerbacher talks about this tragic fate, she falls silent.
For them, Therese is an example of a good person and a role model for free choice, for the possibility of making decisions that everyone has today.
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Auerbacher, Inge
I am a star: narrative
Publisher: Gulliver von Beltz & Gelberg
Number of pages: 104
Publisher: Gulliver von Beltz & Gelberg
Number of pages: 104
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The Auerbachers felt lost in their old homeland.
They made new friends with some GIs and eventually decided to emigrate to the United States, where some family members were already living.
When the troop transport »Marine Perch« reached New York in May 1946 after a ten-day stormy crossing from Bremen, Inge Auerbacher's third life began.
However, the shadow of her »second life« fell over this for many years. The girl had contracted tuberculosis in Theresienstadt, and the disease broke out again just three months after her arrival in her new home. Inge Auerbacher spent the next four years almost exclusively in the hospital and in her bed at home. Seriously ill and weakened, she had to endure numerous painful therapies, but her serious, even life-threatening condition hardly improved. Only a new drug ensured her almost complete recovery, so that she was finally able to go to school again in 1950.
Full of ambition, Auerbacher used the fresh start and graduated from school in a shorter time and with many awards before studying chemistry and working as a chemist in medical research and diagnosis for almost four decades.
Along the way, she began writing her story and traveling across the country speaking to school classes.
"You always have a choice!"
From the many encounters with children and young people, she still draws her life energy, which takes her to travel around the world.
She enthusiastically tells about a camping trip lasting several months from Frankfurt to Nepal with stops in Afghanistan and Iran.
Today Inge Auerbacher lives in Jamaica, one of the most ethnically diverse parts of New York. The practicing Jew gets along very well with her neighbors, a Hindu and a Muslim family. And she wants to see this peaceful neighborhood as a model for a better world, beyond all religious or ethnic affiliations.
At the end of our long video call, we are on first name terms and say goodbye like old friends: "Inge, have a safe trip to Berlin!" But before that, she gives the listener a few sentences to take with you.
They sound like her life motto: "I didn't stay alive for hatred.
people are people.
We all have the same blood!
You always have a choice!« And finally, looking at a tragic past, troubled present and uncertain future, she says: »One must always have hope!«