The Unraveling of a Human Being : Slaying: Some think the killer on an RTD bus was gripped by the psychic aftershocks of the Nazi slaughter.

She was going away for a while, she said, and wanted to know if he would collect her mail.

“Hold it and I will come and get it,” she told Warwick Sims. Esther Rogers’ request was nothing out of the ordinary, just a neighborly favor. But her manner screamed danger.

“She said to me, ‘I’m being harassed. I have to either rent the house or sell it,’ ” said Sims, an actor. “She said she had torn her mailbox off the front of her West Hollywood house. She was very shaken up and raving.”

The wild speech was not the first thing that struck Sims. It was Rogers’ hair. Usually salt and pepper and shoulder length, it was now orange and nearly as short as that of a concentration camp survivor--which her father was. Sims said he could not take his eyes off it.

“It will fade down,” she said, self-consciously stroking the stubble.

Hours later the frantic woman, known around West Hollywood for public tirades against foreigners and strangers--would board a Rapid Transit District bus in the heavily Latino upper Broadway district. By the time the bus reached Beverly Hills an hour later, she had produced a six-inch, blue-steel Smith and Wesson .357 magnum revolver from her bag and mortally wounded a fellow passenger.

It was May 15, the 25th anniversary of her mother’s death from cancer.

Three hours later, after midnight, Rogers was fatally shot by Sheriff’s Department special tactics deputies. Some say her violent death was a chilling an echo of the Holocaust, an extreme example of the psychic aftershocks suffered not only by Jews who escaped the Nazi slaughter of a half-century ago, but many of their children.

Intimate with the horrors of genocide--Rogers was known among her family as Stania, in memory of a family friend lost in a death camp--some members of this second generation grow up anxious, angry and distrustful of strangers, psychologists have found.

Those close to Rogers say that for the last years of her life, she felt comfortable only with her family. After witnessing the death of her mother in 1966, Rogers, a bright and bubbly Fairfax High School student, came to doubt and fear those she did not know, especially foreigners and minorities.

After a failed marriage and the death of her aged father, she quit her bank teller job and retreated into the seclusion of her crumbling Martel Avenue bungalow, less than a block from the fashionable social whirl of Melrose Avenue.

Her contact with others shrank to talking to her sister, huddling with homeless people at a nearby park and riding buses for hours on end.

The further she withdrew from the world, the stranger and more threatening it seemed. In the end, apparently, it was too much to bear.

“You know the phrase about getting hit with an ugly stick?” said Esther’s sister, Cita. “Well, it was like she was hit with a crazy stick. Just, wham! One day, she went crazy.

“The woman that was killed on that bus was not the same person I knew,” Cita said. “The woman on that bus was a crazy lady.”

Esther Rachel Rogers was born June 21, 1948, in Germany, in a relocation camp for refugees displaced by the communist takeover of Poland, the second child of Joseph Radziejewski, who was then 42, and his wife, Margaret Wentland Radziejewski, then 26.

Before World War II, Joseph Radziejewski prospered by selling bicycles, milk separators and sewing machines to Polish farmers. But he survived the Auschwitz death camp only to be driven from his home by communists, Cita said. Margaret had lived through the bloody 1943 Warsaw Uprising in which poorly equipped Jewish insurgents unsuccessfully rose up against Nazi occupiers.

Following the lead of family members who had settled in Los Angeles and wrote glowing tales of California, Cita said, the Radziejewskis emigrated to the United States in 1950--landing, because of a paperwork error, in Galveston, Tex. After five months of humid Gulf of Mexico heat, Margaret Radziejewski, petite but iron-willed, insisted that the family board a train for Los Angeles.

Joseph Radziejewski bought an old furniture store on 1st Street in Boyle Heights, then the city’s Jewish Quarter, after a few months here, Cita said. He parlayed that business into a modest real-estate portfolio, including several properties in Boyle Heights and the then-emerging Jewish Quarter in the Fairfax District.

Friendly and pleasant, Joseph Radziejewski “very much controlled the family.” He and his wife were strict and focused on their children, urging them to flourish in ways denied them by European anti-Semitism. The intense desire for children to excel is common among survivors’ families, as documented in such books as “In the Shadow of the Holocaust” by UCLA psychiatrist Aaron Hass.

Joseph regaled his children with tales of his experiences before, during and after the Holocaust: how he escaped from a concentration camp with his brother and how the two rescued their sister from another camp; how he re-established himself in Poland after the war, only to lose it all when communists came to power.

The family, including a son born in Los Angeles, moved to Martel Avenue near Fairfax in 1961, five years after Joseph Radziejewski became an American citizen named Joseph Rogers. Esther attended Fairfax High.

“I remember her as a bright and smart girl . . . someone serious who I would have expected would have done something good with her life,” said former classmate Leah Schneider Bergman, now a deputy district attorney.

“She was wonderful, very sweet and bright and a very loving and lively person,” said Maxine Deitz Talenfeld, another former classmate who now works as a psychiatric social worker in Mesa, Ariz.

In high school, Esther held a variety of jobs: as a counter girl at a McDonald’s restaurant, a kitchen aide at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, a clerk at her father’s store--and saleswoman at Frederick’s of Hollywood.

In May, 1966, one month before 17-year-old Esther was to graduate, her mother died of cancer, as Esther looked on.

“After my mother died, she seemed to lose some direction,” said Cita, a small woman with attractive, angular features but the same salt-and-pepper hair of her younger sister. “If you’re looking for a turning point, that might be it.”

Esther married two months after her 21st birthday in 1969. She and her husband, Ted H. Spiegel, separated five years later, but their divorce was not final until 1979, after two bitter court battles over the house at 617 N. Martel Ave. where she spent her final years.

Esther sided with her father when he accused Spiegel in a civil lawsuit of defrauding him of the house. Spiegel, who lives in San Pedro with his parents, declined to be interviewed. But in court records from the 1970s he asserted that the house was a gift to him and his former wife. Cita said her father eventually bought out Spiegel’s interest in the house, allowing Esther to live there.

Cita said the marriage fed her sister’s “general suspicion of men.” She added, “The only man she really trusted was my father.”

Not long after the divorce became final, Joseph Rogers left on a visit to Israel. Esther, emotionally spent, checked herself into the St. Johns Mental Health Center in Santa Monica.

“Imagine, the only man you ever trusted goes off halfway around the world,” said Cita. “She began to worry that something would happen to him and he wouldn’t be able to return.”

In fact, Joseph Rogers, then 73, suffered a stroke on that trip, the start of his long, slow physical decline, Cita said.

Talenfeld, the former classmate, friend and psychiatric social worker, said Esther checked out of St. Johns because “she didn’t like the doctor.”

“At that time, the process that led to this tragedy was in motion,” she said. “She was very paranoid and (the attending psychiatrist) thought she was paranoid schizophrenic at that time.” The psychiatrist declined to discuss his patient.

Cita said her sister never again sought counseling and did not take any medication once she began working in the early 1980s as a bank teller.

When Joseph Rogers died of heart disease late in 1987, with Esther there, she quit working and began to leave the world behind.

“She had withdrawn even from the family,” said Cita. “There were family functions she declined to attend, claiming she was too sick or too tired to even get out of the house.”

Esther often told her sister that she had barely enough energy to get out of bed to feed herself, her cat and her German shepherd.

Her neighbor Sims recalled, “I wouldn’t see her for days . . . (then) she would come out at midnight with a hand tool and cut down half the lawn--but only half.”

Neighbor Sims said he rarely saw his neighbor after buying his house in 1987, and at first she was skittish around him. Eventually, he said, he gained her confidence.

“She was a nice person, very friendly, very caring, very gentle,” he recalled. “Not at any time did she give to me a skittle of a fraction of a hint that she was in any way violent.” He said he often saw her at nearby Plummer Park, talking with the homeless people.

Others had a far different experience with her.

Tamara Tucker, an actress and massage therapist, recalled seeing her in the Centennial Post Office on Beverly Boulevard about 3 p.m. two days before the incident.

“That woman was there and she started to have an emotional breakdown in the post office,” Tucker said. She “started screaming that this was the worst post office in the city.”

Bus drivers and riders tell similar tales.

“Anyone who rides the bus (regularly in Hollywood) knows her,” said Mike Devine, an actor and parking attendant. She would rant, “then she’d be quiet and start up again.”

Cita has difficulty reconciling such stories with the eccentric but nonviolent sister she recalls.

“When you’re close to it, you don’t see it,” she said, tears of anguish pooling in her eyes. “It’s like someone growing old. You just don’t notice it until one day you say, ‘My, this beautiful young girl is now an old woman.’ ”