It was 63 years ago today the armed forces of Nazi Germany unconditionally surrendered to the World War II allies, but the remembrance of a good day in Europe can’t come without recollection of the years of fear, persecution and genocide leading up to that day.

A child survivor of the Holocaust recently shared her story of growing up Jewish with a death sentence in Nazi Germany with NewsChannel 7.

Inge Auerbacher was only three when the Holocaust began for her November 9, 1938, on Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass.

Inge and her parents survived the first major round of Nazi attacks on Jews, but life would never be the same.

The family left their home in Kippenheim to live with her grandparents, Inge was forced to go to a new all-Jewish school, and soon after, her beloved grandfather passed away.

“Both of a broken heart spiritually and physically. He couldn’t believe what was happening,” Inge said. “His beloved Germany? No way. He was going to die in his own bed. He was not going to emigrate anywhere.”

By 1941 Nazis distinguished Jews from all others, forcing them to wear yellow stars on their sleeves, adding to the discrimination, persecution and fear.

“My father always said, sit in such a way that you can naturally cover up your star.”

Soon after things would only get worse for Inge, her family and all other Jews.

Inge’s grandmother was the first in her immediate family to meet her unfortunate fate with thousands of others when she was shipped to Riga, Latvia.

“They were sent to the forest and they were shot,” recalled Inge.

It wasn’t long after Inge and her parents got their orders to be shipped east too. There destination was Terezin in Czechoslovakia.

“The transports began again in ’42 when I was sent away and I became number 31-408 XIII.”

“Marching into the camp they were whipping us and my parents put me between them to try to keep me from the blows,” Inge said.

Terezin was a transit place. It’s like a place where you put cattle before you kill them,” she said. “Anybody who went to Terezin had a death sentence. Everybody – especially the children.”

Every Jew was targeted for extinction. Of the nearly 1200 Jews who originally came to Terezin with Inge, most left the ghetto for a killing center in the east and were never seen again.

“At the end of three years there were 13 survivors,” Inge recalled.

Miraculously, three of the 13 was an unheard of, intact family unit – Inge, her mother and father. The rest of her family was not as lucky.

“We lost at least 13 immediate members of my family – aunts, uncle, cousin, my beloved grandmother – and perhaps 20 all together,” she said.

Of the 15,000 children who were transported to Terezin during the war, Inge was among the one percent who survived.