SANFORD - In an emotional presentation mixing horror and hope, Dr. Debbie 长 recounted her parents' struggle through Nazi concentration camps during her presentation at the Fourth Annual Holocaust Remembrance Event presented by 中央卡罗莱纳社区学院.

长, who spoke at the college on April 21 through an arrangement with The Center for Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education of North Carolina, is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors who later spent years as refugees, wandering through postwar Europe before being admitted to the United States and settling in suburban Chicago.

Her mother survived the Lodz Ghetto in Poland before being moved among three Nazi concentration camps beginning with the notorious Auschwitz. Her father survived a death march from the Bor copper mines in Yugoslavia, when hundreds of Hungarian Jews were shot or died from exhaustion, before enduring three concentration camps in Germany.

Projecting photographs from behind a laptop, 朗首先介绍了她的父母, 爷爷奶奶, 叔叔阿姨, describing their lives on the eve of World War II and their fate in the Holocaust.

Only her parents and one grandmother survived.

As she showed one photograph of a Jewish child sitting behind a fence in the Lodz Ghetto, 长 pointed out the Star of David attached to the young boy's coat. She explained how they were forced to wear the star on their front and back, so Nazis "could see a Jew coming and going."

When she finished the story, a restrained gasp rose from many in the crowded Dennis A. 柳条市民中心礼堂.

长 traced her mother's journey from the ghetto into packed cattle cars pointed toward the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. As her mother and grandmother entered the camp, they were pulled apart and pushed in different directions.

Her mother, then in her early 20s, quickly learned what was happening around her.

"When she was finally taken to a barracks,朗说, 我妈妈问那里的一个人, “这个营地发生了什么?? 我妈妈在哪里??'

"And her campmate pointed to the chimneys of Auschwitz-Birkenau and said, “你妈妈在烟里.'"

This time, the gasp was no longer restrained.

长 followed the story with brief audio clips of her mother describing her experience at Auschwitz for a documentary about Holocaust survivors. In one, she recalled comments made by Elie Weisel, a Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor.

"Elie Wiesel called Auschwitz the 'Planet Auschwitz,'" 长's mother said in the recording. "Because Auschwitz doesn't belong to a civilized world."

Though the Holocaust took place more than 70 years ago, the lessons remain relevant today with domestic news about vandalism in Jewish cemeteries, threats to Jewish community centers and aggression toward other groups.

长 says she is dismayed to see a rise in antisemitism and attacks against ethnic groups and immigrants. 同时, 她并不感到惊讶, acknowledging that hatred has always been an unfortunate part of the human experience.

尽管如此，她仍然抱有一线希望.

“看到很多人这样做令人振奋, 很多好人, 尤其是年轻人, stand in support of immigrants and other minorities in recent months,她在演讲前说. "Their resistance to acts of hatred and their responses to such events as cemetery vandalism are a potent sign that education and experience make a difference."

长 has been researching her family history and searching for surviving family members for more than 50 years. 但现在, with the Holocaust generation passing into history, she feels a particular urgency to keep their memory alive.

"The torch has been passed to me and the other children of survivors," she said. "We are not only witnesses to the traumas inflicted on our parents, we are also to some extent carrying the trauma within us. It is both a burden and a great responsibility to carry their stories forward."