Survivors

"Do you know what repressed memory means?" World War II veteran Preston Daisey asked the crowd of about 200 John Carroll School seniors, faculty and guests in the school auditorium Tuesday morning. Before anyone could answer, he said, "There's no repressed memory for me." Daisey, an 82-year-old former U.S. Army soldier from Towson, was one of 12 people asked to speak about their experiences with the Holocaust. The program was part of a 12th-grade project on the Holocaust and genocide organized by John Carroll English teacher Louise Geczy.

Denver--Every year for the past 20 years, 16 men have gathered together for a sacred ritual in their hometown of Carrasco, Uruguay, on Dec. 21.They aren't celebrating the winter solstice. They are commemorating their rescue from a mountaintop in the Andes where they had been stranded without food or water in sub-zero temperatures for 72 days.The college rugby team members, who had been en route to a game in Chile when their plane crashed on a snow-covered volcano at 11,500 feet, survived by eating the dead.

The story Sol Smith was telling seemed long ago and far away from the neatly appointed living room in a Stevenson townhouse development and the well-dressed audience that filled it. But his words resonated with recent headlines of political campaigns and post-Cold War new world orders.For a week before Sunday's observance of Yom HaShoah, the day of remembrance of the Holocaust, the Baltimore Jewish Council sponsors small gatherings in homes in which audiences hear the tale of a person who survived the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish people.

NEW YORK -- Survivors and relatives of those killed in the Staten Island ferry crash are ready to give a judge an earful today when he sentences two men responsible for the October 2003 accident. Federal Judge Edward Korman has signaled that he may slap former skipper Richard Smith and former ferry director Patrick Ryan with less jail time than prosecutors want. The two men pleaded guilty to manslaughter for the accident that killed 11 and injured scores. A report by the chief probation officer recommends three months behind bars for Smith, who apparently fainted at the helm of the Andrew J. Barberi and admitted he was impaired by medication.

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration will reconsider a controversial plan to reduce the benefits of federal retirees' widows and widowers, Leon Panetta said yesterday."

More than 750 people gathered yesterday in Baltimore to remember one of the worst occurrences of the century, the murder of some 6 million Jews by the Nazis.The Yom Ha'Shoah program at the War Memorial focused on the 1.5 million children who were slaughtered and was particularly poignant for survivors who brought their offspring and grandchildren. Many survivors were themselves youths when they were torn from homes and families they never saw again."In the whole state of Maryland, there are [only]

Like other survivors of the USS Meredith, sunk by the Japanese near Guadalcanal during World War II, Walter A. Roley never saw the faces of his saviors.The 31-year-old sailor caught only a glimpse of a plane circling above the rafts he and 96 other men clung to for three days in chilly, shark-infested waters.Forty-nine years later, Mr. Roley, now 80, walked up to the men who saved his life -- Allan Rothenberg and C. G. Lawler -- at the Holiday Inn in downtown Baltimore and hugged them."It's a wonderful feeling to finally meet the men who saved your life," said Mr. Roley, a tugboat crewman who spent only eight minutes aboard the Meredith before it was bombed.

More than a dozen survivors of two fatal fires in a city-owned apartment building filed suit yesterday against Baltimore and its housing authority, alleging that officials knew the building was not fire safe and did nothing to fix it. The lawsuit, filed in Baltimore Circuit Court, seeks $9.75 million on behalf of 15 residents and former residents of a building at Lakeview Towers, two connected high-rises at 717 and 727 Druid Park Lake Drive, across from...

She was less than 5 years old then, but Martha Weiman says she can remember the anti-Jewish graffiti on her parents' carpet and drapery store in the small town of Bocholt, Germany, and her father sick and beaten after two months of captivity at Buchenwald concentration camp. Later, she said, came the cramped quarters aboard a British freighter that allowed her, her parents and two brothers to escape Nazi Germany. "I was aware of lots and lots of upheaval," said Weiman, 72, "and a lot of those things came back to haunt me later in life."

They grew up in adjacent towns in Hungary. As teens, they spent 13 of the most intense months of their lives together. And over the past half-year, they've spoken on the phone more times than either can count. Yet as of this morning, Margit Feldman still can't quite place Eva Weiss, who is, in the profoundest sense, one of her oldest and dearest friends. "Your mind does things to you," says the 74-year-old resident of Bridgewater, N.J. Feldman's lapse, if such it can be called, is understandable.