Recalling the Holocaust

Hundreds of freshmen and sophomores seated in the Marble Hill School for International Studies auditorium leaned forward, and watched Esther Bauer, 88, a Holocaust survivor living in Yonkers, walk to the front of the room. 

Gasps reverberated across the auditorium as Ms. Bauer began discussing how her life in Hamburg changed once Adolf Hitler came to power when she was 9. 

Ms. Bauer’s all-girl class at the Jewish school, where her father was the principal, dropped from 42 students to three that year. Soon, Ms. Bauer’s family was forced into barracks in Czechoslovakia, where she met her first husband. He was moved three days later, and Ms. Bauer agreed to follow him because she was told he was deployed to build another ghetto. Instead, she was brought to Auschwitz, one of the most notorious concentration camps.

Ms. Bauer lived off a daily piece of bread and cup of coffee. Each night she was reminded of the threat of the gas chambers when she heard trucks drive screaming crowds to the showers and a stench wafted out. 

Later, Ms. Bauer was moved to a German camp where she and other girls “grabbed the grass and ate it because we were so terribly hungry” on their daily march to a 12-hour shift of building airplanes. Between the beatings and abuse, the only “act of sabotage” Ms. Bauer dared to commit was to make her piece of steel too short or too long since it was hidden under other parts of the airplane.

Ms. Bauer was liberated and immigrated to New York. However, her first husband and parents died in concentration camps.

“For the first 20 years, I couldn’t talk about it. For the next 20 years, nobody wanted to hear about it. Now I speak whenever I’m asked,” Ms. Bauer said. “I tell them at the end that they have to see to it that this never happens again.” 

Students asked, and discovered, Ms. Bauer never got a number tattooed on her because in Auschwitz, “we were either supposed to be killed or taken out of camps to work.” She told them she had “no faith whatsoever” because “if there is a God who let this happen, I would kill myself.” Yet, she said she never lost the will to live and learned that regardless of heritage, “there are good people and bad people.” 

Several students, including sophomore Leidy Pichardo said “having someone talk to you about it, helps you feel the pain” and understand the Holocaust in a way that books can’t.

Abraham Alawe, a sophomore, said he was grateful to hear Ms. Bauer speak, especially because “he had a connection to the Holocaust.” His grandfather in Morocco was drafted into the French Army, where he was captured for assisting Jews in World War II. Abraham’s grandpa managed to escape by crawling through a sewage pipe, but died shortly after that.