Holocaust survivor speaks in Las Cruces

March 26 at ASNMSU Center for the Arts

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On her 16th birthday, May 28, 1944, Esther Basch was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Nearly 80 years later, on Sunday, March 26, Basch, now 94, will be in Las Cruces to tell her story.

 “Soon all Holocaust survivors will be gone,” said Rabbi Bery Schmukler of Alevy Chabad, which is sponsoring Basch’s presentation. “It is an honor and privilege for us to be able to bring survivor Esther Basch to Las Cruces, so she can share her first-hand account with us. We hope for the entire community to come out in her merit and to learn from her story.”

The event will begin with a VIP reception at 3 p.m., following by Basch’s presentation at 4 p.m., at the ASNMSU Center for the Arts, 1000 E. University Ave.

Tickets to the presentation only are $18 for adults, $15 for seniors and $5 for students.

Tickets are $180 if you wish to attend and be a sponsor of the VIP event, which includes two tickets to the presentation. Corporate sponsorships are $500.

Basch was born in Sevlus, Czechoslovakia, which is now the village of Vinograd, Ukraine. Nazi forces occupied the town in 1944, sending many of its Jewish members to concentration camps, including Basch and her parents. After they were unloaded from a cattle car at Auschwitz, which was located in Nazi-occupied Poland, Basch never saw her parents again.

Basch remembers twice being in groups at the camp that were reviewed by Josef Mengele (1911-79), known as the Angel of Death, a Nazi physician and SS officer who performed medical experimentations on prisoners at Auschwitz.

After the camp was liberated in 1945, Basch made her way to Palestine and then to Canada before settling in Brooklyn, New York. She married and had four children. Basch now lives in Prescott, Arizona, and has eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Visit www.chabadlc.org and https://m.facebook.com/TheHoneyGirlDocumentary?_rdr.


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