Joined by Bonds of Anguish : Genocide: Survivors of Nazi horrors share memories at a ceremony marking Holocaust and 50th anniversary of death camps’ liberation.

They had never met before Sunday morning, when they gathered side by side outside the fog-draped Simon Wiesenthal Center, clutching flimsy yellow signs marked “Auschwitz.”

They were strangers. Yet they were bound so tightly, they could finish one another’s sentences.

I ate raw potatoes so full of worms I could feel the maggots writhing in my gullet, one man said. I, too, remember the potatoes, a woman broke in. I managed to cook them--in the toilet.

I borrowed a blanket from a horse one night, another woman mused. If I had been caught, I would have been killed. The horse was worth more than I was.

“Yes, yes,” a third woman said simply.

In painful fragments, the stories spilled forth all morning Sunday, as dozens of Nazi death camp survivors joined war veterans, schoolchildren and hundreds of others to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day in Los Angeles.

As though their words could beat back injustice and intolerance, the survivors recounted their sufferings--not in bitterness, not in anger, but in hope.

“Our lives are full of purpose,” said Sara Wasser, 72. “To never forget, to speak for the 6 million Jews who died. To speak for the children, the fathers, the mothers, the brothers who perished. We are still here, thank God, to tell the story.”

During a two-block March of Remembrance down Pico Boulevard and a 90-minute ceremony in the Museum of Tolerance, participants urged anyone who would listen to fight hatred, evil and prejudice and make sure the Holocaust never happens again.

Watching silently from the curb, dentist Bernard Gaston said he took comfort in the marchers’ resolve. “There’s so much hate out there now,” he said. “This really is a good idea.”

Among the participants was Rabbi Leslie Hardman, who as a chaplain in the British armed forces helped liberate Germany’s Bergen-Belsen concentration camp half a century ago. When the troops he was with stormed in, they found 10,000 skeletons on the ground--and thousands more tottering around, starving and diseased but still gripping life.

The grisly tales survivors told then, Hardman said, must be repeated today, tomorrow and for decades to come. He called for “a renewal of remembrance” that goes beyond merely reciting the staggering numbers of dead and missing to telling children the individual stories of victims.

“Billions of words have been written from historical, sociological and economic points of view about why Hitler came into power. People read those and gradually, they forget them,” Hardman said. “We need to talk about the details of the suffering. How (the Nazis) murdered children--how they would throw a baby up and try to cut it in half as it fell back down. . . . How there’s no death worse than starvation--a ghastly, ghastly death.. . . We’ve got to talk about the details.”

Those details haunted the two-block March of Remembrance. When an Army band struck up a spirited tune to kick off the procession, one woman in a smart blue-and-white suit suddenly crinkled her eyebrows and began to cry.

“It’s because the Nazis played music while we marched to the gas chambers,” 64-year-old Harry Magid explained.

Nearby, concentration camp survivor Esther Spielman shuddered in disapproval as the shimmering brass band filled the gloomy sky with music. “It reminds me,” she said, “of sad things.”

Yet laughter and joy mingled with the sorrows as the Holocaust survivors celebrated the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and other concentration camps.

Polish immigrant Ann Gilbert recounted her personal Holocaust in staccato sentences: “I was in the gas chamber. It malfunctioned. They took me out. They put in another group.”

But then she recalled meeting her husband, Fred, 50 years ago Saturday during the liberation of the Dachau camp. “I felt like I was reborn,” she said. This weekend, she added, “I felt like it was my birthday.”

To recall the liberation, officials played a poignant tape of Rabbi Hardman’s first service at Bergen-Belsen.

On Sunday, Jews he had nursed back to health--and sometimes, back to faith--crowded around him once again. One elderly couple in the audience thought Hardman was, perhaps, the young British chaplain who had married them in the concentration camp just after liberation. And Sara Wasser rapturously described how he had managed to procure candles and white challah bread for Friday night services.

“We couldn’t believe it when he arrived and said, ‘Children, you are safe,’ ” Wasser said. “We had thought we were forgotten the whole world over.”