Bauer returned to the Cleveland State Community College on Wednesday, where she repeated her story to the students, and on Tuesday night she spoke on the campus of East Tennessee State University.
Promoting the keynote address, Cleveland State Community College said that Esther Bauer will recount her harrowing experiences as a Holocaust Survivor. “Esther’s bounding energy and joy for life is infectious and will leave you filled with respect and awe appreciation for the indestructibility of the human spirit,” and indeed those were the feelings of those attending.
Up until she was 9 years old, Esther had no problem with her neighbors. “They were nice to me all through the Hitler time,” she recounted., according to Cleveland Daily Banner, which published part of her speech. But it all changed when Hitler started targeting Jews with his notorious laws.
“Jewish children were not allowed to go to public schools anymore,” Bauer said. “Jewish teachers had to quit their jobs and see if they could get a job in a Jewish school.” After which came the ‘yellow star’ rule and her apartment was given to German’s.
“We had to move to a so-called Jewish apartment; there was no central heat, no water. It was horrible,” Bauer said. During her time at the Ghetto’s she befriended someone who worked in the kitchen. They ended up getting married just three days before he was sent to a different place and later died there.
The Nazis told Bauer that she could follow her husband, but after boarding the train, she found out that her destination would be Auschwitz.
“We knew what was going on at Auschwitz. You go under the shower, there comes out gas and you’re dead,” Bauer said. After reaching Auschwitz, all her belongings were taken from her by the Nazis. “I still had a watch from Hamburg, which I threw on the floor because I didn’t want the Nazis to get a working watch,” she recounted.
The screams of those people that were taken to the deadly gas chambers is something that has accompanied her throughout her life. In another interviewBauer stated that “the smell of the burning flesh I can still smell.” Just weeks later she was taken to a factory to help build airplanes, but she says proudly that “The only act of sabotage I was able to do was to make the rivets too short or too long. No plane that I ever built would fly.”
Talking of the surviving moment, when she found out that the Nazis were a thing of the past, Bauer said that “One day someone said the Nazis are all gone,” she remembered. “I couldn’t believe it, but it was true. This was the happiest day of my life, as you can imagine.”
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