Friends reunite at survivors' get-together

About 300 people, most of them survivors of the Holocaust, gathered at a synagogue in Surfside to remember the past.The accent came from a few feet away, thick and Eastern European -- Hungarian, to be exact.

And it made Rose Svarc's head swivel.

Almost immediately, Svarc, 85, and Heddy Small, 82, began conversing in their native language. The two weren't sure if they had met before, though their families had been acquainted in what was once Hungary.

Both survived the Holocaust, and both were at The Shul of Bal Harbour in Surfside on Tuesday with about 300 other survivors who gathered to remember the Holocaust -- Nazi Germany's extermination of millions of Jews and other Europeans during World War II.

''We're still searching for relatives and friends, just as we did back then,'' co-chairman Joe Sachs told the crowd.

Tuesday's event, called ''Cafe Europa'' -- a term used by Jews who were split up after their internment in concentration camps and would traverse coffee houses throughout Europe in search of family and friends -- was sponsored by the Miami-Dade Holocaust Survivors Inc.

It was made possible, at least in part, by some of the $132 million Jews have received in war reparations from the Germans and the Swiss since 2001.

Jewish community leaders estimate there are as many as 2,500 Holocaust survivors in Miami-Dade alone, about 70,000 in the United States and another 70,000 or so in Europe.

Small, a petite woman with bright brown eyes, told of hiding in the ghetto, then spending time at the Auschwitz and Gleiwitz concentration camps.

''I can prove it,'' she said before pulling up the sleeve of her jacket. There, in deep black ink engraved on her arm was the tattoo A -- 10108, the number her captors gave her.

Small was in town vacationing for a few months from Cleveland. Svarc was visiting from Montreal.

''I thought to myself, somebody must be here from my hometown,'' Small said.

That hometown, according to Small and Svarc, is Uzhgorod, now part of the Ukraine. Once a part of Hungary, before World War II the town was in Czechoslovakia.

Svarc, also a survivor of the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen death camps, said she got chills when she heard Small's voice.

'I looked at her and said to myself, `it sounds so familiar,' '' she said.

Another couple who had not seen each other since 1936 were reunited at the gathering. Paul Gast, 73, and Leo Marin both lived in the Polish town of Lodz -- pronounced lodge -- went to the same school and worked in the same factory during the war.

''It's amazing really, unbelievable,'' said Gast.

''My dear friend who I went to school together with,'' said Marin, who chairs the March of the Living, a two-week trip that takes Jewish teens on tours of the camps and Israel. ``I gave him my card and we're going to get together next week. This isn't the place to talk with all the speakers.''

''Cafe Europa'' was the third gathering this year of survivors to commemorate Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. It's a remembrance of the Nov. 9, 1938 event when the Nazis intensified their anti-Semitic onslaught by attacking Jewish residents, businesses and synagogues.

That was a time Tuesday's crowd has sworn it would never forget. Guest speaker Rabbi Solomon Schiff, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Association of Greater Miami, made the point clearly.

''Survivor means those that are left over. But you are the incredible, defiant ones. You showed the whole world. You came out and made schools and shuls. You brought life where there was no life. You are the heroes of this century,'' Schiff said.

``Keep that memory alive so that this tragedy will never again happen.''

BY CHARLES RABIN [email protected]