Man Still Searches for Holocaust Victims : Survivors: A retiree seeks whereabouts of siblings who fled Nazi persecution. Other Jews and families gather in Los Angeles to remember and honor those who helped escapees.

Sam Shatz stepped off a Greyhound bus in Los Angeles on Friday and headed straight for a Westside hotel in hopes of gaining a clue about the family he lost 50 years ago.

“No way was I not going to be here,” said the 65-year-old retired jeweler from Brooklyn, N.Y., who spent three days on the bus to attend a gathering of Jewish Holocaust survivors at the Century Plaza Hotel.

As others mingled quietly in anticipation of a weekend of seminars, dinners and emotional reunions expected to attract 2,000 survivors and their relatives, Shatz stood in the middle of a crowded meeting hall, attracting the most attention without uttering a word.

On placards draped around his neck, the faded pictures of a teen-age brother and 9-year-old sister accompanied a simple plea in less than perfect English: “Maybe Some One Can Tell Me Were Their Graves Are.”

People stopped and stared. Some offered condolences. Like other survivors hoping to use the event to make a link with their past, Shatz was full of questions for which there are few answers.

The event, sponsored by the United States Holocaust Museum Council, is meant to focus attention on the planned 1993 opening of a Holocaust memorial in Washington, D.C. “For some attenders, it is one of the few good chances they will have to make a connection to a part of their past,” said Bonnie Glass, spokeswoman for the event.

A highlight will be a gala dinner tonight to honor Benjamin and Vladka Meed, who helped hundreds of fellow Jews escape persecution in Warsaw during World War II, Glass said.

For Shatz, who left his mother and sister at a train station in the Soviet Ukraine in 1941 to look for his brother and never saw any of them again, the pomp and ceremony do not mean much.

“I came here on a chance. Maybe somebody who sees me has some piece of information, a clue, anything,” he said. “Anytime there is a gathering of Holocaust survivors, there is always hope.”

Despite a search that has spanned half a century, Shatz has no idea whether his mother and siblings are dead or alive.

He was 13 when the family became separated as they traveled across the Ukraine in the fall of 1941, fleeing the Nazi advance.

They had traveled for two days, and during a stop in a small town, his 19-year-old brother, Abraham, left the train to bring water to the others. The train left before he could return.

At the next town, Shatz said, he persuaded his mother that he should leave to find Abraham.

“She begged me not to do it,” he said. “The memory of her features is fuzzy in my mind, but the expression on her face still haunts me. She said: ‘I lost one son already. You stay.’ But I went anyway.”

Shatz said he was detained by Soviet soldiers and sent to Siberia to work in a coal mine for the next four years.

When the war ended, he returned to the small towns along the Ukrainian train route where his family disappeared and discovered that his mother and the others had been there looking for him several months after their separation.

Despite decades of searching for information about them in Europe, Israel and the United States, he has yet to turn up a trace.

Shatz, in ill health since suffering a heart attack several years ago, said he is under doctor’s orders not to fly and undertook the 72-hour bus trip over the objections of his wife and two grown children.

“They worry about me,” he said. “But they know that I plan to keep searching until the day that I die.”