On Sunday evening, 95-year-old Dan Auerbach made his way to former Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy’s Tel Aviv apartment to tell the story of how he and his parents survived the Holocaust.
Against the backdrop of Holocaust denial and inversion in the wake of the 2023-2025 Israel-Hamas War, Holocaust education is more necessary than ever, Levy said.
“October 7th was not only the opening shot of a regional war against Israel, but it was also the opening shot of a global war against the Jews,” Levy said.
That’s why, Levy said, it is particularly important today to bear witness to the testimony of the few remaining living Holocaust survivors.
Auerbach, born in Žilina, Czechoslovakia, in 1931, enjoyed a happy childhood with Jewish and non-Jewish friends he still remembers by name.
'I didn't see, but I heard it'
“My first touch with the Holocaust,” he said, “was in the middle of the night. My mother is crying, and my father is standing at the door. Two men took my father.”
Auerbach’s father, an electrical engineer, was sent to a work camp. Later, Auerbach, his mother, and his sister were taken to Syrets concentration camp, where he encountered the SS, ”very cruel people.”
“I did not see it, but I heard it. I heard the people crying. You have to understand that if a small boy heard an adult man cry, it is very hard. Very hard.”
In Syrets, he was reunited with his father. For a while, the whole family was together again, until circumstances changed once more.
Auerbach recalled that one day, all of the prisoners were gathered together and arranged into several lines. His mother suggested that her sister join another line, hoping separation might increase their chances of survival.
“The line with my mother’s sister, her husband, and their boy went to the transport. We never saw them again.”
All her life, Auerbach’s mother regretted that choice. Even as she was dying in an Israeli hospital, she asked, “Why did I tell her to go to another line?” He had no answer.
Auerbach and his mother were transported to Auschwitz. There, they spent half a day in a cattle car before moving on to the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
“It was silent,” in that stationary cattle car, Auerbach said. “But you don’t know what kind of silence. It was a heavy silence. Nobody knows what would happen…Pray. Pray. And people prayed. Silent, but they prayed.”
Upon arriving in Theresienstadt, Auerbach described a chaotic scene in which several big, strong nurses arrived and took the children for a shower. However, the children’s mothers were wise to the Nazi shower trick and put up a fight against the nurses. Once they heard real water running in the shower, they calmed down.
In Theresienstadt, Auerbach lived in a children’s dormitory away from his mother and became part of the Nazi pantomime of Jewish resettlement. He recalled being forced to participate in a theater performance with the other children and having to stand outside in the freezing cold, wearing only his costume and no warm clothes.
He also recalled that all the children were given nice white shirts one day and told to play outside in the garden and make lots of noise.
When he went to play, Auerbach saw a new shop filled with delicious-looking food in the window.
“It was a miracle! All of a sudden, there is a shop with cakes! A round cake with marmalade in the middle. I remember how it was.”
When he tried to enter the store, the adults told him it was closed.
While playing, Auerbach spotted a few unusually fancy, shiny black cars all driving together just outside Theresienstadt. He later learned that this was a delegation from the International Red Cross.
“They wanted to see how beautiful life is in Terezin.”
The next vignette was somehow even more grim: the death march arrived in Theresienstadt from Syrets, and along with it was Auerbach’s father.
“I didn’t recognize him.”
He was very sick, but the family was reunited. Eventually, his father’s health improved, and he survived. Before that, Auerbach witnessed the sickness, suffering, and death of countless people, watching them taken away for burial in what later became a cemetery.
The final moment that Auerbach described, before the liberation of Theresienstadt, focused on Russian officers imprisoned there by the Nazis. “Every time I talk about this, I don’t know whether or not to tell this part. But I will tell you.”
Sometimes, Auerbach explained, they would take a Russian officer out and shoot him or hang him publicly.
“We, as little boys, would come to see this. I do not know why. Really, I do not know. But we went to see it. Today, it is impossible to believe it. But it happened.”
Auerbach mentioned several times that he does not like talking about the Holocaust. He was convinced he would have nothing relevant to share when Zikaron BaSalon approached him, according to the organization’s director, Sharon Buenos.
Frankly, Auerbach could easily have avoided participating in Zikaron BaSalon. And someone as resilient and determined as he is would not have made it to 95 with such grace and wit if he let others tell him what to do.
But he chose to tell his story on Sunday. Even though he did not want to and did not have to. And when someone like Dan Auerbach speaks, we have to listen.