A journey through the eyes of a Holocaust survivor filled a crowd eyes’ with tears.

Inga Auerbacher is still haunted by the three million children who were victimized by the Holocaust.

“The year 1938 was when everything changed,” Aucherbacher said. “The beginning of the reign of terror.”

Auerbacher relived her childhood for the audience from the first ten years of her life.

On November 9th through the 10th, a massive riot broke out that changed the way Christians and Jews lived together.

“I wasn’t even four years old at the time and I still remember it as if it were yesterday,” Auerbacher said.

The Jewish homes were broken into with bricks. The riot was called Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass.

Auerbacher was forced to wear a yellow star on her clothes with the words “Jude” on it.

The star was supposed to make her feel like an ugly person, Auerbacher said.

She and her family were deported in August of 1942.

She was seven years old, the youngest in a transport of about 1,200 people.

When they got on the trains, people would just watch them marching on and off and did not care what was happening.

Auerbacher said nobody tried to stop it from happening.

“The population just stood by as they were taking away their neighbors,” Auerbacher said.

When Auerbacher arrived in Terezín, a transit camp where people were taken before they were sent off to be killed, she was holding on to her doll Marlene.

The doll she brought with her kept her going throughout the years of horror and can now be found at a museum in Washington.

The site she stayed at was sealed off from the outside world.

Here, her only companions were death, fear, and hunger, Auerbacher said.

She was covered with lice and boils.

“I was allowed two showers a year, with permission,” said Auerbacher.

Many children ended up getting very sick from the horrible living conditions.Auerbacher got scarlet fever while in the concentration camp.

35,000 people died from malnutrition and disease during their stay in Terezín.

“Food was so precious, it’s almost sacrilegious to throw almost anything away,” Auerbacher said. “That’s how I still feel today.”

The Holocaust left Auerbacher so sick from malnutrition that she spent two years in the hospital recovering.

“I was very sick, but I made it. I was very strong,” Auerbacher said.

Of the 15,000 children in Terezín she was part of the 1 percent who survived.

“One May 8, 1945,I ripped the star off when I was liberated from the concentration camp,” Auerbacher said.

After her years in the concentration camp, Auerbacher said she never lost her faith in God.

Auerbacher has been back to her camp a few times.

The first time she went back to visit Terezín was in 1966.

The crematory at the camp is now a memorial site.

While visiting Germany she also went to her mother’s hometown to thank those who helped her family.

“I will never forget or forgive those who were a part of the Nazis that did this to me,” Auerbacher said.

Shannon Satterlee can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected]