80 Join in Remembrance of Nazi Terror : Holocaust: Survivors, descendants celebrate their lives while paying tribute to 6 million victims of the horror.

No matter how hard she tried, Frances Gelbart could not suppress the memories that haunt Holocaust survivors.

When she was only 8 years old, Gelbart watched helplessly as her three younger sisters were sent to their deaths at the Auschwitz concentration camp. For decades, she refused to talk about the horrors--even with her three sons--because “I didn’t want anyone to share the pain I felt.”

On Sunday, Gelbart, who now heads the Orange County chapter of about 100 Holocaust survivors, joined 800 people at Temple Beth Sholom in Santa Ana to pay tribute to the 6 million Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis--and to celebrate the lives of those who survived. The day of remembrance, known as Yom Hashoah, has become an annual gathering for Jewish groups in Orange County.

Gelbart, a real estate agent of Fullerton, said she is no longer silent about her childhood. She told the congregation Sunday about her experiences in the Krakow Ghetto and in concentration camps at Plaszow, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where she and other Jews were eventually liberated by American soldiers at the end of World War II.

“This once hungry and frightened young girl feels very lucky and proud to be here among you,” she told the congregation. “She relearned how to trust and love people. She relearned how to appreciate music . . . for music is poetry and hope.”

Sunday’s solemn service was filled with heartbreaking songs that described the nightmare of the Holocaust.

Some members of the audience brushed away tears as Cantor Don Croll of Temple Beth David in Westminster delivered an emotional rendition of “The Boy With the Fiddle.”

“We sang as our people went to die,” he sang.

Rena Wolfson, an Anaheim Hills resident and daughter of Holocaust survivors, said children of Jews who survived the Nazis “have grown up and watched you, our parents, and felt helpless. We have wanted to wrench the pain out of your hearts--to make bearing witness not yours, but our responsibility only.”

Wolfson is a Cal State Fullerton instructor in education and is president of a local group of people whose parents survived the Holocaust.

She told the congregation that “just like our parents had no choice, we have no choices. If we choose to not remember and not teach our children, we will have violated our parents’ purpose of survival.”

Gelbart said she was encouraged that the public was becoming more aware of “the story of my childhood.”

Gelbart said she recently wrote to director Steven Spielberg to tell him that his highly acclaimed movie, “Schindler’s List,” was the “closest” portrayal to her experiences. Spielberg sent his thanks in reply, she said.

Still, she said, she wants people to know that the suffering of her people is unimaginable.

“How can a camera ever capture the horror in a mother’s eye when her child is ripped from her arms?” Gelbart asked. “How can one book truly describe what really happened?”