DUNMORE - It started with little things.
She and other Jews were barred from the pool she loved.
Then she wasn't allowed in the park where she grew up playing.
After nine years in school, she was told she wasn't allowed to go anymore.
"Every week there was a new law," Esther Bauer said.
Ms. Bauer recalled to a crowd of about 200 people at Penn State Worthington Scranton Wednesday night what it was like being Jewish in Nazi Germany - from growing up in Hamburg, Germany, to the day she, her parents and 750 Jews from her city were sent to a ghetto in what was then Czechoslovakia.
Her father, once a principal at an all-girls Jewish school, died after three weeks of shoveling coal.
After two years in the ghetto, Ms. Bauer married a Czech man who three days later was shipped to a concentration camp where he died just after being liberated. Ms. Bauer and her mother were sent in different transports to Auschwitz concentration camp, where her mother died.
"I will never forget the smell of Auschwitz. It was just horrible," the 88-year-old woman said in a faint German accent.
Later on, she and 1,000 other women were transported to Freiburg, Germany, where they built airplanes in a factory 12 hours a day, enduring leather belt beatings from Schutzstaffel, commonly known as SS, officers and surviving on a hunk of bread for breakfast and watery soup for lunch and dinner.
"We were so hungry, we ate the grass in the morning on the walk to the factory," she recalled. "You just can't imagine how hungry you can be."
In April 1945, she was then transported to another camp in Austria. American soldiers liberated the camp a month later.
"That, of course, was the happiest day of my life, as you can imagine," she said.
She emigrated to the United States and went on to marry again and have a son, traveling frequently back to Germany, reconnecting with friends and fellow survivors. She's been featured in films and was even awarded two medals from the German government for the work she's done.
The recognition made her feel torn. Her mother was awarded a medal from the German government in 1934 for her services as a nurse during World War I, and 10 years later the Nazis killed her in Auschwitz.
But Ms. Bauer said she's not bitter.
"I don't have hate. Hate makes you sick; hate makes you ugly," she said.
Ms. Bauer now lives with her boyfriend in a senior living center outside New York City. She travels the world talking to students and audiences about her experiences and telling the leaders of the future to learn from the mistakes of history.
"They have to see to it this never happens again," she said after the lecture.
Contact the writer: ksullivan@timesshamrock.com, @ksullivanTT on Twitter