Beyond the Yellow Star to America by Inge Auerbacher

• New York Public Library 1996 Choice, Books for the Teenage Reader

• Kansas State Reading Circle Choice, 1996/97

• Yavner Award from The New York State Dept. of Education, 2000; Ellis Island Award, 2000 By Inge Auerbacher

“This is a first rate, moving autobiographical account of life as a refugee and what it takes to step beyond past pain and create a meaningful life... A truly wonderful complement to the Diary of Anne Frank.” VOYA Magazine.

“...simple, deeply effective prose...students studying the Holocaust will benefit from Inge’s per­spective and empathize with her experiences.” Recommended for junior high school students. — KLI­ATT Magazine

Inge Auerbacher’s first book, I Am A Star, Child Of The Holocaust, won the coveted award, Merit of Educational Distinction from the International Center for Holocaust Studies of the B’nai Brith Anti-Defamation League. It covered her childhood years up to 11 and her internment in the Terezin Concentration Camp in Czechoslovakia, ending with the Allied Liberation in 1945.

Now, Inge’s second book, Beyond The Yellow Star To America, carries the reader into Inge’s world of an immigrant in America at once dealing with her own psychological and physiological growing up and the real, external world of being an outsider to American culture. With vibrantly clear images, Inge tells her story through a series of sequential vignettes reinforced by many pho­tographs from her collection.

The pre-teen, teenage and adult reader will immediately understand her problems dealing with group acceptance, self-esteem, and peer pressure; how­ever, her relentless drive to succeed and wonderfully close relationship with her parents will take an understanding of her special scars from having been totally degraded when a child of The Holocaust.

Following a brief historical background, we arrive with Inge in New York Harbor in 1946, aboard the Marine Perch, an American troop transport ship, and travel with her through her life’s turning points against the 1940s, 50s and 60s settings of New York’s East Side, Brooklyn, and Queens. We revisit Europe with her. The hot and cold factions of her Americanized relatives; the resolve of her parents to achieve in the American economic mainstream in spite of the physical odds against them during their first steps to independence; and Inge’s private on-going physical nightmare fills the reader with pride in the positive qualities of the human spirit and its determina­tion to survive.

But, Inge’s American years are not just survival years as is often the story of Holocaust victims. Her resulting personal, psychological fuel from the past drives her dynamism and ideals of today for the betterment of Mankind. She is an activist for humankind. She is both an esteemed chemist/medical researcher and an accomplished motivational public speaker for brotherhood through education and com­munication, against bigotry and other manipulative tactics that divide humanity into isolated groups.

Her biographical novel of Mary and Martha DeSaussure,  Running Agianst the Wind, is also published by Royal Fireworks Press.

Inge Auerbacher was born in Kippenheim, Germany. She is a child survivor of the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. She studied chemistry at Queens College of the City University of New York, and worked for many years as a chemist in research and clinical work. She is the author of six books in nine languages, mainly for children and is a speaker in the US, Germany, and Canada. She has received numerous awards for her writing and her work in promoting tolerance and human rights and has appeared many times on TV and radio both in the USA and in Germany.