Photo by Jim Muchlinski Holocaust survivor Fred Amram signs books inside the William Whipple Gallery at Southwest Minnesota State University Monday night with his wife, Sandra Brick.

MARSHALL — The Nazi German Holocaust happened almost a century ago, but it’s still a foremost memory for Fred Amram.

As a German born child survivor of the Holocaust, Amram shared many of his earliest memories Monday evening with an audience of more than 100 people at Southwest Minnesota State University. He emphasized that the Nazi death camps resulted from a systematic persecution of Jews that dated back to Adolph Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.

“It happened because nobody cared,” Amram said. “What people do matters. Nobody did anything, so 6 million Jews were killed.”

He said public apathy extended to the United States and other countries in the 1930s. Opinion polls from the time period showed that a large majority of people did not want to accept Jewish refugees. Had they been accepted, they wouldn’t have faced concentration camps.

Amram was born at a Christian hospital in Hanover, Germany in September 1933. The city’s Jewish hospital had been shut down a few months after Hitler took power and Jews were not allowed to use the public hospital.

Some of his earliest childhood memories relate to a neighborhood park. He recalled that he mistook having his own Jewish bench as a privilege, but that his mother knew it as a ominous sign.

Jews were eventually banned from the park. He also remembers being denied service in an ice cream parlor and being prohibited from taking trips on a trolley car to the zoo.

“I didn’t know what to think, ” Amram said. “I thought I’d been a good boy, but for some reason I could no longer ride the trolley.”

He has childhood memories of worshiping in an historic Jewish synagogue, which was burned to the ground in 1938 as Nazi driven persecution in Germany and Austria accelerated.

“I watched the turrets burning,” he said. “I saw the glass melting. The next day they came back to blow up what was still left.”

His presentation included an anti-Jewish propaganda poster from 1930s Germany, which portrayed Jews as ugly and dirty. They were pictured simultaneously as money-driven swindlers and Communist sympathizers.

Amram emigrated with his parents after World War II, staying first in Holland and then Belgium before being granted refugee status in the United States.

He sees connections between the Holocaust and the segregation that existed in the United States prior to the civil rights movement. He said a difference occurred because of how black citizens such as Rosa Parks defied authorities in a way that raised public awareness.

“I saw the same thing as far as segregating people.” Amram said. “It was black and white instead of Jews and Aryans. The only difference was the color of their skin.”

During a question and answer period, Amram said Jews in 2022 are more accepted in the United States than they were in the 1930s, but that he’s concerned about an increase in anti-Semitic behavior and anti-Jewish messages on social media.

Audience members noted that Amram’s successful career as a college professor and storyteller shows how oppressed people can potentially withstand genocide,

“I’m amazed that they (Amram’s family) were able to get refugee status in the United States,” said Anita Gaul, a history professor at Minnesota West Community and Technical College.

“Anti-Semitism was rampant in the 1930s. Quotas on refugees were a barrier to millions who faced persecution.”

SMSU Associate Director of Diversity and Inclusion Erin Kline said Amram’s presentation gave students and area residents a rare opportunity to hear a firsthand account of a dark chapter in world history.

“This was a once in a lifetime opportunity to hear from a Holocaust survivor,” Kline said. “We’re very happy that we could bring him to our region.”