Survivors

WESTMINSTER -- The Carroll County Liquor Board is deliberating action against a local bar owner whose establishment has come under fire for various infractions in the past year.Officials said Barry Snyder, the co-owner of Survivors Inn, "vacated the premises" after announcing to the public that his HTC bar was going out of business, but telling the liquor board he was only going on vacation."He [Mr. Snyder] put a sign in his window on July 22 saying that due to a lack of interest in the Westminster area, he was closing his business," said Ronald Lau, the administrator for the liquor board who presented the case.

TIMBER RIDGE CAMP, W.Va. -- Miles from here 11 years ago, Lisa Soto sat in her highchair. She was 18 months old.Her 3-year-old brother pushed the chair against their kitchen counter so he could climb up and get a box of cereal."

When Morris Rosen, a Baltimore volunteer in the Red Cross national center for tracing Holocaust survivors, was asked how to pronounce the name of a Polish town on a search request recently, a dark-haired 15-year-old girl he fancied more than 50 years ago came to mind.She was the sister of Harry Nordon, a Holocaust survivor from Queens, N.Y., who was searching for his family separated by the war. "I know that man," Mr. Rosen exclaimed to the startled staff. They had grown up together in the same town.

ENTERPRISE, Ala. --After the sudden pitch-black darkness, there was chaos, then screaming. And when that subsided, the still-jittery students of Enterprise High School recalled yesterday, young men and women they had grown up with were nowhere to be found, even as everyone else was climbing shakily to their feet. Eight students were killed Thursday afternoon, victims of a powerful tornado that tore apart their school soon after students were told to hit the floor. Concrete from a collapsed interior wall rained down on them, even as they huddled together for safety, authorities said.

LONDON - The worst of news in wartime almost always begins the same way, with a knock on the door. For each soldier's death in Iraq - whether it be one of the 1,423 Americans killed as of Friday, the 75 British, the 19 Italians, the 16 Poles, the two Dutch, the single Latvian - a circle of survivors exists. Each survivor reacts differently to the knock. The survivors know Iraq is holding elections today, and that months or years from now, it might be clear what changes the elections will have brought.

On June 9, 1975, Roselda Katz Cole died of cancer. When her daughter Diane recalls that time -- still as painfully close as a thought -- she speaks of the devastation of losing the guide to her future as well as a friend with whom she shared great joy.Soon after her mother's death, Ms. Cole decided to heal in fresh surroundings, leaving her home in Baltimore for a new job in Washington. Restless, searching, the 23-year-old woman filled her empty hours by gobbling up anthologies of poetry andlistening again and again to the Brahms horn trio.

After Dorothy Langmead was herded into a vault in Randallstown bank and shot to death, her husband Michael didn't know how he was going to make it through the night. He stayed up until 2 a.m. talking to his sister at the kitchen table."Finally, I took the coat that Dottie wore to work that day into the bedroom and went to bed with it," he remembers.Later, he says, "I didn't want to change the bedsheets. They had the smell of Dottie on them."On Oct. 26, Mrs. Langmead and three other bank employees were shot as they lay helpless on the vault's floor.

Food was scarce at the Nazi concentration camp, but the work was relentless. Morris Kornberg toiled day after day in a 1,500-foot-deep, pitch-black coal mine. His weight plummeted to 60 pounds, almost half what it is today. The starvation diet and hard labor stripped him of not just his girth, but also of his will to live. "When I was in Auschwitz, I gave up," he said. "I didn't want to live anymore. Whatever they were going to do to me, I just wanted it over." And yet today, even as he recalls watching hundreds of his fellow prisoners kill themselves by running into the electric fence around the camp, he can't explain why he didn't do the same.

It is common for Holocaust survivors to visit schools and make presentations to students. But at John Carroll School recently, about 30 seniors turned the tables, giving a 40-minute presentation that included a video montage and poetry as a tribute to 14 Holocaust survivors who came to the campus. "Our presentation is our way of giving back to the people who survived the horrible Holocaust," said John Kline, an 18-year-old Jarrettsville resident. "What I learned this semester about what they went through helped me realize how special life really is. And I think it had a powerful impact on us and the survivors."

Far more dramatically than any picture from Auschwitz, Turner Broadcasting's "Survivors of the Holocaust" reveals the true horror unleashed by Nazi Germany during World War II.The horror is not simply that people died, or that men could be so brutal. The real horror is that the people who died were no different from the rest of us; that a supposedly civilized nation simply let it happen; that those who survived were no less victims than those who died.And why did all this happen? Simply because some people hated some other people -- not unlike the present circumstances in Bosnia, where untold thousands have died for the crime of being born members of a certain ethnic group.