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“You have to understand that if a small boy heard an adult man cry, it is very hard. Very hard.”
By Shula Rosen
Ninety-five-year-old Holocaust survivor Dan Auerbach sat in a Tel Aviv apartment Sunday night and recounted his story of survival as former Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy listened and recorded the testimony, The Jerusalem Post reports.
Levy said the need to preserve survivor accounts has intensified in the aftermath of the 2023–2025 Israel-Hamas War, amid what he described as rising Holocaust denial and distortion. “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.
Auerbach, born in 1931 in Žilina, Czechoslovakia, described an early childhood marked by friendships with both Jewish and non-Jewish classmates before the war disrupted his life.
His first memory of the Holocaust came at night when men arrived at his home and took his father, an electrical engineer, away to a labor camp.
Later, Auerbach, along with his mother and sister, were sent to Syrets concentration camp, where he encountered what he called “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.”
For a period, the family was reunited in Syrets before prisoners were separated into lines.
Auerbach recalled his mother urging her sister to move to a different group in hopes of improving her chances. Those relatives were placed on transport and never seen again. His mother, he said, carried regret over that decision for the rest of her life.
Auerbach and his mother were later sent to Auschwitz and then transferred, after half a day in a stationary cattle car, to Theresienstadt. “It was silent,” he 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.”
In Theresienstadt, he was housed with other children and recalled staged scenes meant to mislead a visiting International Red Cross delegation, including shops filled with food that were not real and children dressed in clean white shirts and told to play outside.
Near the war’s end, a death march from Syrets brought his father back to the camp. “I didn’t recognize him.” The family survived until liberation.
Auerbach said he generally avoids speaking publicly about these experiences but chose to participate in the Zikaron BaSalon gathering.
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