San Diego, CA (special) -- Last Sunday's Yom HaShoah ceremony at the Lawrence Family JCC was both a commemoration of those who perished in the Holocaust and a celebration of those who survived. The family of Rose Schindler, president of the New Life Club of Holocaust Survivors, stepped forward to illustrate both the sorrow and the joy.

Schindler said she was 14 years old in April of 1944 when she and her family of 10 were transported in cattle cars to Auschwitz from their home in Seredne, a town then in Hungary but now part of the Ukraine. "The doors opened and in jumped a prisoner who was helping us out of the car," she said. "Maybe he was an angel; I don't know. But he asked me how old I was. I told him I was 14. This prisoner told me to tell the guards that I was 18 years old. At the time, I didn't know why but as it turns out he saved my life."

Roxanne Schindler Katz speaks at podium as mother Rose Schindler and others listen

From the train, the family of Rushka Schwartz (as Schindler was then known) was herded to the selection area. Her father and brother were told to go to the right--to life. Her mother, three sisters and a younger brother were told to go to the left--death.

"My two older sisters were ahead of me in the line and the officer asked me how old I was," Schindler related. "Without any hesitation I said I was 18. My older sister, who thought it would be better if I were sent with my mother, interrupted. She said to the SS officer, 'No, she is only 14.' I insisted I was 18; I don't know why. The officer told me to go with my sisters. That was the last time I saw my mother, my younger sisters and brother."

As the hushed crowd of several hundred sat under a tent that had been set up to shield them from a warm sun, Schindler continued: "We were taken to another area of the camp. We reached the building where the showers were. We went through the ordeal of undressing and having all the hair shaved from our bodies and head, and the SS were watching and photographing us. 

"We were taken outside and assembled again...It was dark and getting cold. A huge fire was burning in the distance. The stench from the smoke was intolerable. We didn't know what they were burning. It wasn't coal. It wasn't wood. My sister asked a guard who was standing nearby: what was that noise that was coming from the open fire. The soldier answered they were burning hair that they shaved off our heads. My sister Judy said 'Hair does not make noise.' The soldier said they were burning crippled and disabled people and we didn't ask anymore."

Schindler was assigned to a wooden bunk bed which she shared with eight other people. The next morning she went outside her barracks and saw the "fences of barbed wire and guards with dogs. Masses of people like zombies were wandering with no place to go. As I looked around, I heard my name called. A man approached me in a striped uniform. At first I didn't recognize him. He was my father. His head was shaved, his beard was shaved. I had never seen him like this before. We talked. The first thing he asked: 'Is your mother with you?' We both broke out in tears. 

"My father kept saying, 'stay together with your sisters and if we should survive, tell the world what is happening to us.' We agreed to meet the next day. This time my father brought my older brother with him. The following morning I went to meet them again. I never saw my father or my brother again."

Schindler's daughter, Roxanne Schindler Katz, later picked up the narrative during last Sunday's ceremony. She said that her mother was in Auschwitz five months before leaving in a work detail with her sisters -- a work detail that, sick and frail, she stole herself into when she saw that her older sisters were part of it. Had she remained at Auschwitz in such sickly condition, she might not have survived.

After liberation, Schindler and her two sisters went to their home town to see if anyone had survived, then to Prague. Schindler became part of a group of 732 children under the age of 16 who were gathered up from displaced person camps and taken to new lives in England. Another of the 732 youths was Max Schindler, a boy her own age, who had survived since 1942 in seven different concentration camps. The couple was married in London in 1950, five years after liberation. 

When they immigrated in 1952 to the United States, they had "less than $100 in their pocket," said their daughter, who was born in 1954. Two years later they moved to San Diego, hearing it was "a wonderful city...where there were many opportunities for work." The family settled in the Allied Gardens and Del Cerro area, eventually increasing to four children. They opened a store called Roxie's Fabric, named for the daughter who was now narrating their tale.

Katz said her parents "were always open and honest with us...If ever my brothers or I had any questions about the war, my parents would sit us down and explain what they could remember. They never said 'I don't want to talk about it.'" When she graduated high school, she spent a summer in England and Israel, meeting relatives and her parents' fellow Survivors.

But the most impactful trip was taken by the family in 1995, when they toured Eastern Europe. They saw Theresienstadt where Max had been liberated, and he helped a tour guide explain what had happened there. In Prague they visited a cemetery where Schindler's sister was buried in 1960, after the Holocaust but nevertheless one of its casualties. They went to Schindler's home town of Seredne, and talked with oldtimers who remembered her parents and older sisters. And then they went to Auschwitz.

"My father and I were worried how my mother would make it through this day," Katz said. "My mother was not sure that her feet would hold her up." They saw exhibits of rooms filled with suitcases, hair, brushes and combs, eye glasses, clothing and other items that had been stripped from the prisoners on arrival.

"We saw the barracks, the lookout posts, the barbed wire and the smallest gas chamber -- the others were destroyed by the nazis to cover up their cruelty," the daughter said. "We climbed up to the top to the main watch tower. From there we saw the rows and rows of cement slabs with the remainders of the chimneys which were one time the barracks.

"My mom pointed to the main train tracks and the dirt platform between them. She said, 'That is exactly where I was unloaded from the cattle cars.'"

Katz concluded her talk, saying: "I, as second generation, have revisited a small piece," she said. "This is my promise to you: I will keep your memories alive."

At each year's community Holocaust commemoration, there is a ceremony in which Survivors whose histories are in some ways similar to Schindler's and in some way unique, light candles in memory of the estimated Six Million Jews who perished. Usually an additional candle is lit for other victims of the Holocaust--the gypsies, communists, deformed, and those who tried to oppose the nazi madness. 

Typically, someone from the Christian community is asked to light that candle, and this year the honor went to George Mitrovich, president of the San Diego Ecumenical Council, who also gave a short speech. "In acknowledging the presence of evil, we cannot lose our sense of goodness and decency and of the need for love," Mitrovich said. "For in the end, it is love that will save us, love that will hold us together, love that will bring us together as one in the community."

There also is a candle that is lit for the estimated 1.5 million of the murder victims who were children. For this ceremony, all the grandchildren of Rose Schindler and other Survivors present--the Third Generation--were asked to come forward and light the candle together.

Shannah and Nicole Katz--twin 9-year-old daughters of Roxanne Schindler-Katz and Norman Katz as well as the granddaughters of Rose and Max Schindler--were among those who came forward to participate in the solemn occasion. Both girls were wearing the T-shirts of the Tifereth Israel Youth Chorale which beautifully sang Kol Yisrael Arevim, a song urging all Jews to take responsibility for each other.

Shalmi Balmore, director of education at Yad Vashem, Israel's famed Holocaust Memorial and Museum, said when World War II came to an end in 1945, most of the world celebrated, but not David Ben-Gurion, the future founding prime minister of Israel. The Jewish people had been decimated; there was no future for them in Europe; their way to Palestine was blocked, and awaiting them there was the implacable hostility of Arabs. What was there to celebrate?

About a year later, Balmore said, Ben-Gurion visited a displaced person camp in Europe, where he addressed the Survivors. "He told the Survivors: 'I really have nothing to offer you. In Israel there is going to be a war...We are going to be attacked from all sides. I don't have it within me to call you over, to make you participate in yet another war.' The Survivors told him, 'We will walk there if we have to. We will walk to Israel. If there will be no trains and no trucks, we will walk there!' 

"It was after the visit to the Survivors at the DP camps that Ben Gurion inserted into his diary: 'Today I know that we won. If these people who went through all hell are so determined to come to Israel nothing will stand in our way.'" Balmore paraphrased. 

With Isaac Hirschbein, son of Survivors Hadassah and Beno Hirschbein, serving as emcee for the ceremony, it began with a United States Marine Corps Color Guard smartly parading the colors-- a reminder that not only in Israel are the Survivors officially appreciated. 

Cantor Arlene Bernstein of Congregation Beth Israel led the audience in singing "The Star Spangled Banner." Assemblywoman Susan Davis presented a resolution adopted by the state Assembly in commemoration of the Holocaust to Gussie Zaks, who had addressed the Legislature on the subject a few days before. Brian Bennett, chairman of the San Diego Human Rights Commission, read a proclamation by Mayor Susan Golding on the subject.

After the candle lighting, Cantor Joseph Furmansky of Congregation Beth Sholom sang "Sprandt," a mournful song about a shtetl burning, and later still there was a prayer service jointly led by Rabbi Dana Magat of Congregation Beth Israel and Rabbi Aaron Gold of Ner Tamid Synagogue. Retired Cantor Bernard Pollack brought that service to an emotional high point with his moving chanting of "Ani Ma'amin," a song in which Holocaust victims professed their belief in God even as they were being led to their deaths, and of "El Moleh Rachamim," the traditional
Jewish song of mourning.

As some would say the Holocaust concluded with the founding of Israel in 1948, so
too did this Holocaust ceremony conclude on the most hopeful of notes. Cantor Alisa
Pomerantz-Boro of Tifereth Israel Synagogue led the audience in singing "HaTikvah,"
the Israeli National Anthem.