President of Santa Monica College, Kathryn Jeffery, Ph.D. (R) talks with Mary Bauer (L), Holocaust survivor at a reception that was given after a talk on Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust that was given by Mary Bauer on Tuesday, March 26, 2024 at Santa Monica College in Santa Monica, Calif.(Laurel Rahn | The Corsair)

Mary Bauer was only a teenager when she and her family, along with all other neighbors marked by a star, were forced from their homes one early morning in 1944.

Allowed only one suitcase each, Bauer was packed alongside men, women, and children into cattle cars heading for Auschwitz, Germany like sardines. “When the doors opened up for the first time, we could see the sky, we could breathe the air. We didn’t realize what air we were breathing. It was full of smoke, and we did not know at that time where the smoke came from. Why is the air so smoky with the sky so blue?” Bauer said.

Eight decades later, at the age of 96, Mary has dedicated her life to sharing those defining experiences. Bauer’s work takes her to colleges across the country, and she is being featured in an upcoming exhibit for the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles, educating people on not only the experience of surviving a concentration camp, but the culture of Hungary as antisemitism swept through it. In hearing her story, Bauer’s experience has the chance to live on through those who hear her speak, including students present during her March discussion at Santa Monica College.

Bauer describes the normalcy of her life before the holocaust, memories of her large family, her peaceful life as a student, and how quickly it was ripped away from her. She remembers the immediate shift in the way she was treated, even by her best friend, after being forced to wear a golden star on her clothing, marking her as Jewish.

“She gives me a shove and says, ‘I don't want to sit next to a dirty Jew.’ Yesterday or the week before, I was a clean Jew, and now because of this, I am a dirty Jew,” Bauer says of her treatment in school.

Bauer’s story, and her continued struggles, did not end after the holocaust.

Following the end of the war, Bauer spent five years studying in Berlin before deciding to start a new life in the United States. Despite being poor, Bauer had been mesmerized by the jazz music she had heard on the radio and the images of American movies. With the sponsorship of a Jewish support organization, she and other displaced Jews made the journey in 1951.

She vividly recalls her “nightmarish” experience immigrating from Berlin to New Orleans, and seeing Southern racial segregation for the first time. “I was screaming, saying, ‘This is America?! This is not America!’ That’s impossible,” said Bauer. Upon raising her voice, Bauer’s own guides instructed her to “shut up,” warning that if she continued, she would be deported as a communist.

Even after surviving Auschwitz and moving forward with her life, Bauer was outraged and struck with the realization that models of prejudice are not exclusive to the Nazis, but a recurrent danger that threatens everyone across the world. Though the holocaust was over, she felt she had not escaped and was once again being silenced. While she was forced to stay quiet on that day in New Orleans, Bauer has spent the remainder of her life passing on her stories, and letting students across the nation read humanity’s tragic and messy history of prejudice by its light, saying, “And frankly, ever since that day, I’ve never shut up again.”

Referring to the racial segregation she saw that day in 1951, Bauer held up her golden star and said, “Creating sanctions against other people… This is where it’s all leading: to this, to my tattoo, to my experiences, to my many cousins not being alive, and to all of this history.”

Bauer warned students of the rise of antisemitism, and urged the crowd to be mindful and accepting of all people, regardless of race or religion. “I feel that is the reason I am here; to talk while I can. To make people open up their minds to the reality that we do have the power of changing and bettering ourselves,” Bauer said.

Featured