Yes. If you didn't transfer your characters they are lost.
Uh, I am pretty sure the transfer was automatic if we are talking about the "North America" server merge. I didn't have to do anything to move any of my characters, and I had multiple on East, Australia, and West servers. Granted I was active during merge, but don't know if it's different if you were inactive for X amount of time.
The only thing that was "deleted" would be your character name changing if there was another person with more hours with the same name on a different server, and Nexon gave a free name change to those affected.