Inge Auerbacher: The Yellow Star

In September 1941, the Nazi regime forces all Jews in Germany and occupied countries in Europe under the Nazi regime to wear a yellow piece of cheap cloth shaped like a star with the word Jude (Jew) in bold to identify them. Any other identifying marks were prohibited by the Nazi forces. All Jews had to wear the yellow star everywhere and any refusal will be punishable by death. To many Jews this was a sign of humiliation and degradation and to make it even worse, all Jews had to pay for their yellow star. Jews from the age of six and old must wear the yellow star. This continued until the fall and defeat of the Nazi regime and liberated the occupied lands and rescue the remaining Jews from hundreds or probably thousands of concentration camps
She was one of the few survivors of the Holocaust in WWII. She was born on December 31, 1934 in Kippenheim south of Germany near the border of France. In August 1942, she was seven years old when she was sent with her parents to a Nazi concentration camp in Terezin, Czechoslovakia. She stayed there for nearly three years until 1945 when the Soviet army liberated the camp as she was one of very few survivors of the Terezin concentration camp. She remembered many of her friends who were sent to Auschwitz’s to be killed in the gas chambers. Many of her relatives were slaughtered by the Nazi. After the war ended, her parents couldn’t bear staying in Germany. They immigrated to America in May 1946. Due to her health condition she was hospitalized for two years in New York until she recovered from malnutrition that she suffered from during her stay in the Terezin concentration camp. Though she lost years of her life without schooling, she started going to school to follow her passion to be a chemist. She used her horrifying experience as a Holocaust survivor to write poems and books and to deliver lectures to the young generation. Her testimony to PennState channel on April 18, 2014 was the most recent of hers . Her poem I am A Star was written in a book as a lesson of tolerance and forgiveness. She received many awards for her contribution to the society and the