Students should go to Holocaust survivor lecture

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Many students do not go to events, like lectures and talks on campus, unless it is for a grade. Unfortunately, this prevents students from meeting people of great character with diverese perspective on the world, such as Inge Auerbacher, one of the few child survivors of the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia,  who will be speaking in Memorial Hall on Wednesday.

I admit, if it wasn’t for required journalism events, I would not show up to the majority of lectures I have attended. However, Auerbacher sharing her journey is crucially important and students should be lining at the door to hear her story.

Auerbacher is a child survivor of the Holocaust and a successful woman, despite her childhood tragedies. As a survivor of the Holocaust, she has survived tuberculosis and went on to have a career as an author, speaker and respected chemist.

Related: ‘Women of the World’ brings Holocaust survivor to Memorial Hall

According to the Inge Auerbacher website, Auerbacher was born in Germany and spent three years, between 7 and 10 years of age, in the Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. Out of 15,000 children in the concentration camp, about one percent survived. Auerbacher and her parents were deported in August 1942, when she was seven years old; the youngest in a transport of about 1,200 people.

Soon the number of survivors, like that of Auerbacher, will dwindle and none will be left, no one to tell their story. According to Tablet Magazine, the number of survivors still alive today, across the world, is probably in the low hundreds of thousands.

There is not an exact number of the Holocaust survivors, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“A growing number of these individuals, who registered their names and historical information over the last 15 years, are now deceased,” according to the USHMM website.

While World War II ended 70 years ago, the number of Holocaust survivors is decreasing each day. It is important to hear Auerbacher’s story for your children, your grandchildren and for the generations to come. We must pass on the stories, and personal accounts of what it was like to live in a concentration camp.

The Student Activities Board brought Auerbacher to campus as part of the “Women of the World” lecture series. Auerbacher will be speaking in Memorial Hall at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, so grab a seat and learn from her experiences, it might be the only chance we have left.

Jamilyn Hall is the assistant opinions editor of the Kentucky Kernel.

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