As a girl of 7, Inge Auerbacher walked through the gates of Terezin concentration camp, clutching a doll. In 1945 when the camp was liberated by Allied forces, she left — emaciated and desperately ill with scarlet fever — still clutching that little doll.
Determined to make a film about child Holocaust survivors that would touch children of all ethnic and religious groups, Giora Gerzon seized upon Auerbacher’s story. A San Anselmo resident, he met the survivor through a mutual friend at the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
“The doll became Inge’s Pinocchio, and now it is a Pinocchio for the war,” said Gerzon, who was born in pre-state Israel and grew up among survivors. “This is a story children can relate to.”
The filmmaker has launched an educational foundation, Voices & Memories, which he hopes will help the world hear the voices of Hitler’s youngest victims through a film curriculum.
“We must hear the children,” he said. “They had a different experience. The hidden children of the Holocaust are also survivors. They lost their parents, they lost their identity, they lost their culture. Many will never know who they really are.”
Auerbacher, an attractive brunette who recently retired as a chemist, kept the doll until 1990, when she donated it to the Holocaust Museum.
Gerzon contacted Hene Kelly, director of the San Francisco Unified School District’s Holocaust education program, and convinced her that Auerbacher should come to speak to school children visiting the recent “I Never Saw Another Butterfly” exhibit here.
The show, which was on display at San Francisco City Hall, presented artwork and poetry by children imprisoned at Terezin.
Reaching Gerzon by phone, Kelly was so moved by the survivor’s impassioned pitch that she donated her own frequent flier miles to bring Auerbacher to the Bay Area. Auerbacher travels frequently from her home in Jamaica, N.Y. to speak about her experience, but this was the first time she brought “Marlene,” a replica of her old doll.
Gerzon brought his film equipment. He hopes the film he is making of her talk with the children — and their interaction with the doll — will prove to be an effective tool for teaching tolerance in the schools.
Gerzon and his wife, Shirley, have plunked down more than $150,000 of their own money to finance this project.
He chose to focus on Auerbacher because “she is able to bring a different message to children, not just to tell of the horrors,” he said. “The children are the winners. They are survivors. That’s what this foundation is all about.”
On the day of the filming late last month, Auerbacher sat with third-graders from San Francisco’s John Swett Alternative School in a gallery at City Hall. The children — white, Asian, African-American, Latino — came to tour the “Butterfly” exhibit.
“I am afraid of flying, but I came on a plane to see you because you mean very much to me,” she told them.
She explained what it was like to enter the gates of Terezin. She tells about the guard who tore a jeweled pin from her coat, screaming, “You won’t need this where you are going.” And of another guard who grabbed her doll from her arms, ripping its head off to check for contraband.
She got the doll back, and kept it throughout her internment at the Czech camp. The doll slept on the wooden bunk that Auerbacher shared with another child.
“We got splinters from those beds,” she told the wide-eyed children. “My partner was a little baby, so the bed was always wet.”
A girl let out a yelp as Auerbacher told how she contracted lice, and lost her hair.
The survivor also described how adult internees at the camp pilfered scraps of paper, drawing and writing supplies so the children could create works of art — an offense punishable by death.
Still, “we tried very hard to be children. We would tear the buttons off old garments that had been thrown in the garbage, and we drew a checkerboard and played checkers with the buttons.”
She had a best friend, Ruth, who had the same kind of doll. Just before Ruth and her parents were put on the train bound for Birkenau. Ruth gave her friend all of her doll’s clothes.
“Ruth didn’t make it,” Auerbacher said, looking down, as tears filled the eyes of two little girls.
“You mean she died?” whispered a freckle-faced, blue-eyed boy.
Hands flew up when she asked who would like to hold the doll.
Gerzon filmed the children as they cuddled it one by one, regarding it sometimes intensely, other times tenderly.
A boy stared at it seriously, as if it held a secret. He examinedthe doll’s feet.
Later, he told a visitor how the shoes looked so foreign, from another time and place. He imagined such shoes on Inge’s feet as she walked around the camp with her doll.
Auerbacher asked the children to hold hands and say to their immediate neighbors, “I love you because you are my friend.” They giggled shyly, then repeated what she said. It was the teacher’s turn to tear up.
Even after the Allies defeated Hitler’s armies, the Nazis did not give up: “They threw hand grenades into the camp as they fled at the end,” Auerbacher said.
Leaning toward the children, she pleaded, “Don’t let hatred and bad things ever happen again. You can stop it.”
Her message is important to Gerzon, a veteran commercial and documentary filmmaker, The first to be hired by Steven Spielberg for the Shoah Project, Gerzon logged 560 hours behind the camera filming interviews with Holocaust survivors.
He grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and “ate, breathed, slept the Holocaust” with survivors. But while “the older survivors are victims, children don’t see it that way,” he said.
Through Auerbacher, children saw compassion triumph in small but powerful ways.
For instance, Auerbacher’s mother, a nurse, was in charge of the women’s infirmary, “and the women know how this doll is like a child to Inge,” said Gerzon. “So they get together shmatas and things, and make a boy doll, and they give the doll to Inge’s mother to give to Inge for one birthday.”
When he returns from a Pesach trip to Russia, where he is researching Jewish communities, Gerzon will begin pounding the pavement to get more funding for his educational project.
Said Kelly, “You can tell kids that one and a half million children died in the Holocaust, and it doesn’t really register.
“This registers. For them, the most effective thing is one on one.”