Group Offers Help to Aging Survivors of Nazi Terror : New York: Selfhelp Community Services tries to help those who have lived through the Holocaust and find feelings of loss intensifying as they grow older.

Nearly five decades after the end of World War II, even the youngest survivors of Nazi persecution are approaching retirement age.

For these people, who lived through one of the most horrific periods in history, aging can be especially difficult.

“What is important to remember is that as people get older and experience loss, it sort of reawakens the losses they’ve had. For the Nazi victims, it brings back all the loss they’ve had: of a country, a family, a home,” said Harriette Friedlander, an executive director at Selfhelp Community Services.

At Selfhelp, where victims of the Nazis have been going for aid since it was founded in the mid-1930s to help Jewish refugees, the aging of survivors has meant that issues affecting the elderly have become some of the leading concerns.

Though Selfhelp is now a large not-for-profit social service agency with a $51-million annual budget and programs ranging from senior centers to AIDS services, providing help to survivors is still a prime focus. Nearly 40 staff members are assigned to the agency’s Nazi Victim Program.

The program serves people, the vast majority of them Jewish, who suffered under Nazism, whether they fled, survived death camps or hid in Nazi-controlled territory.

Selfhelp remains one of only a handful of agencies around the country with a wide range of programs for elderly survivors, despite the difficulties these people can face.

While many survivors don’t continue to suffer as a result of their wartime experiences, some elderly survivors find themselves alone in the wake of a cataclysm that wiped out entire families and villages. Others struggle with depression, anxiety or other emotional troubles because of the atrocities they endured.

For about 2,000 of the metropolitan area’s survivors, the agency provides such services as counseling, home care, financial assistance, housekeeping, outreach services and help with the mundane troubles of daily life.

Some of their clients are the people who couldn’t be helped by other social service groups, “the people who were living without a phone in an unheated room above a garage who thought the Nazis were after them,” Friedlander said.

Through counseling, the agency’s social workers try to help survivors come to terms with their experiences under Nazism--and other issues that concern the elderly.

To ease this process, most of Selfhelp’s Nazi Victim Program social workers can speak at least one of the many languages the survivors brought with them to America.

This can be especially important as some survivors will slip into their native languages when discussing the horrors they lived through.

“It’s more comforting,” said Eva Knoller, a social worker and the director of the Selfhelp office in the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights.

On a recent afternoon, Knoller sat with one survivor in the woman’s Washington Heights apartment. The survivor allowed a reporter to sit in on the discussion on the condition that her name not be used.

The woman, who fled Vienna and the emerging horrors of the Holocaust in the late 1930s, helped support her family for years after she came to America by caring for elderly people too frail to care for themselves.

But that afternoon, 76 years old and a widow, she sat at a table in the small apartment where she and her husband reared two children, her many prescription bottles arrayed in front of her, and talked with Knoller about her own need for help.

“I used to do this for other people,” she said sadly in her soft German accent, vaguely gesturing around the apartment. “Now, someone has to do this for me.”

Knoller, who was especially worried because one of the woman’s friends was moving out of their apartment building, gently prodded her to volunteer at a senior citizen’s center.

“I think it would be good for you,” said Knoller. “I think you’d find you have something to contribute.”

While the two women came to no conclusion about volunteering, Knoller did get her to say she’d come on the agency’s next outing for elderly survivors.

Beyond mental health issues, the isolation that some elderly Nazi victims face is one of Selfhelp’s biggest concerns.

“Most of these people don’t socialize anywhere and they keep coming, month after month. Some have Alzheimer’s, some are profoundly, profoundly depressed,” said Tova Klein, who heads the agency’s newly opened Brooklyn office.

She attributes the success of the get-togethers to the fact that they are “dignified and not condescending . . . everyone is a survivor and they don’t have to explain themselves.”

But no matter what help is offered, from coffee houses to counseling, it’s not always enough.

Some survivors are never found. Some reject help. Some are never to come to terms with their experiences.

“I see death as a coping mechanism,” said Klein. “If they need to die because it’s too much, then they need to die. That’s what makes it hard to look on. It’s not about what I think is the right thing; it’s about helping.”