Solace of Survivors : Holocaust: Jews saved as youngsters from the Nazis gather to share their memories.

Anne Steinberg drove from Laguna Hills to the Fairfax District on Monday night to see a documentary that captured painful images of her past.

“Ach, why do they have to show so much of this stuff?” she muttered, stiffly turning away. She glanced back, then flinched again. The screen showed Nazis in 1938, on the eve of the Holocaust, smashing Jewish shops, gutting synagogues, dragging people from their homes.

Steinberg shared these memories with about 60 others at the Westside Jewish Community Center on Olympic Boulevard, at the first reunion of Los Angeles-area Kinder-- the children saved by the British from Hitler’s camps in a legendary, last-minute exodus called the Kindertransport.

While other nations (including the United States) were protesting through diplomatic channels or ignoring ignoring the unfolding horror in Nazi Germany altogether, the British government swung into action in late 1938. Between December, 1938, and the start of World War II the following September, about 10,000 children, 80% of them Jewish, were brought to England from Germany.

There was little formal ceremony about Monday’s reunion, just coffee, refreshments and earnest conversation among people who had shared an intense experience, however painful.

“ ‘Why am I alive and the others not?’ is the difficult question you ask yourself all the time,” said Fay Shaw, who watched the film with a sad, knowing expression. “I think this question to myself every day.”

Her searching expression dissolved into a shrug: “There is no answer. There is guilt. There is pain in the memory. But still, you remember.”

“This is remarkable, to look across a table and see someone else has survived from a whole time of your life that is gone,” added Paula Balkin, who had come up from San Diego for the reunion. She and Shaw, both from Leipzig, knew each other as children and met again last year in London at a worldwide reunion of the Kinder (pronounced Kin-der) , which provided the impetus for subsequent local gatherings such as Monday’s.

Times with fellow survivors, said Balkin, are a solace, offering “a feeling of belonging you do not get with others.”

For nearly all of them, the exodus experience was identical except for minor details: After being chosen through a chain of British and Jewish welfare agencies, the unaccompanied children were put on trains with nothing but a backpack or a suitcase. The trip to the German border was a nervous one: Would the Nazis interfere? One father rode with his daughter to the border, to make sure she was safe, and jumped off. She remembered him waving. The trains, from Vienna, Frankfurt, Cologne and other cities, went to ports in France and the Netherlands.

Then there was the boat to England, when the reality, and the homesickness, set in for many. In England, the children were lodged in various temporary camps, later with Jewish and Gentile foster families.

Balkin was among several people who said they are only now starting to face memories long locked away. “My husband has woken me from nightmares many nights,” she said. “My children have woken me from nightmares. But I did not talk about it.”

The awful dreams she and others described were of last embraces, trains forever pulling away. In their sleep, they search through concentration camps.

After reaching England, where few spoke the language, they clung to letters and postcards from home that one day just stopped coming. Said Shaw, who escaped with a sister: “My mother wrote only about my sister and I. ‘Do not worry about us,’ (she wrote). She did not think about herself.”

Shaw, whose maiden name was Mendzigursky, never again saw her mother or a second sister who stayed behind. She learned after the war that they had frozen to death on trains going to the Riga concentration camp. Her father managed to escape from a camp and joined her in England.

The full story for those present Monday began when Hitler came to power in 1933. Between 1933 and 1938, a succession of laws and decrees deprived Jews of citizenship and eventually turned them literally into outlaws. Children had to stay away from school. They heard whispered conversations of worried parents who had lost jobs.

Still, some families could not, or would not, fully grasp Hitler’s purpose until the explosive anti-Semitic violence of Nov. 9 and 10, 1938-- Kristallnacht .

“I watched it from my bedroom window,” Balkin said. “The synagogue was right down the street from our house and I saw it going up in flames. I saw our neighbors being taken out of their homes and beaten.”

After Kristallnacht , German Jews became frantic. They placed ads in The Times of London pleading with the English to take their children. They wrote to distant relatives in England or America. On Nov. 21, the British House of Commons spent 3 1/2 hours debating the problems faced by German Jewry. The Home Office agreed to skip the formalities of passports and visas for shipments of children. The first group arrived on Dec. 3.

Balkin, whose maiden name is Grunbaum, had an uncle who became active in the effort to evacuate children and made sure that those from his family got to go.

Her parents and the uncle crossed Europe in search of safety. Nazis caught her parents in Greece, the uncle in Budapest. “She wrote thousands of letters trying to find them,” said her American-born husband, Sam. “To rabbis, to the Red Cross.”

“My father died in Auschwitz,” Balkin said, her large blue eyes unblinking. “Just a few weeks before the end of the war.”

Allan Jalon, a Los Angeles-area writer, is working on a biographical essay on the German rabbi Joachim Prinz.