Wiping away stains of a troubled past

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After the war, they staved off the nightmares the way so many others did -- by building an American life that was neat, clean, unblemished. Bryna Kane, the oldest of their three children, woke up many mornings to the smell of Lysol.

"It was a sheltered childhood," she said. "I couldn't cross the street by myself."

She was expected to excel, and she did, studying biochemistry and then becoming -- like her grandmother in Poland, her namesake -- a physician.

The other was born into trouble.

When Maricela Pedroza was 2, a coyote brought her across the border with a fake birth certificate. Her father landed in prison, her mother in a cloud of drugs. By 13, she was smoking and drinking with the Long Beach street gang Barrio Pobre. The gang members called her "Danger." Before her 16th birthday, she was pregnant.

Today, Kane, 53, lives in an affluent and leafy enclave of Long Beach and wears a Rolex. Pedroza turned 23 on Thursday; she lives in an apartment building with graffiti etched into the elevator doors, and her car got stolen last week. "An unlikely pair," Kane said with a smile.

One thing brought them together one recent morning: a tattoo on Pedroza's wrist, three small dots in the shape of a triangle, shorthand on the street for "My Crazy Life" -- a life they wanted to put behind her.

They both knew something about tattoos.

Kane's parents met after the war at a dance in Los Angeles for refugees. They settled into a tight-knit community of Jews -- many of them Holocaust survivors and new immigrants known affectionately as "Greeners" -- first in Hollywood and then in Long Beach, where her father became a cantor and a rabbi at Temple Beth Shalom.

Many of her parents' friends had numbers tattooed on their arms, tattoos that had been applied forcibly by the Nazis. Some wore long-sleeved shirts. Others kept them exposed, a reminder of fortitude, of defiance.

"I was always fascinated by them," Kane said.

She saw more tattoos as an adult, with the rise of the gang culture.

"I don't want anyone to think it's the same thing," she said. "But there is a similarity. You have a mark, and it's permanent, a reminder of the past."

After medical school, Kane completed a residency in dermatology and, in 1998, opened the Laser Skin Care Center and Dermatology Associates in Long Beach. Her partner, Edward Glassberg, had done early research on applying laser technology in dermatology. Together, they bought a laser designed to remove tattoos.

"It was just sitting there on the weekends," she said.

They launched a program called Erase the Past; so far, they've helped remove the tattoos of 4,000 at-risk young people, 80% of them former gang members. The service is free, though patients are required to do community service in exchange.

"A lot of these kids are just like me. Their parents are immigrants," Kane said. "It's just that they weren't given the direction, the foundation of love that I was."

For Pedroza, the street life felt so important back then, and it seems so silly now.