She’ll Forever Live in the Holocaust’s ‘Shadows’ : Poetry: ‘My mind is sentenced for life,’ writes camp survivor Aranka Klein, whose work will be part of a program in Newport Beach marking what would have been Anne Frank’s 66th birthday.

Aranka Klein of Laguna Hills began writing poetry three years ago, poetry about her experiences 50 years ago at Germany’s Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Bergen-Belsen was where Anne Frank died, at the age of 15.

Klein did not know Anne Frank. In fact, Klein only began to read about Frank last year, when her granddaughter portrayed her in a play.

If she had met Frank, she would have remembered.

“It could be 100 years ago--it seems to me yesterday,” said Klein, 67, who will read two of her poems Sunday at “Shadows of the Holocaust,” an afternoon of music, poetry, drama and art in Newport Beach commemorating what would have been Anne Frank’s 66th birthday (actually June 12).

“The memories every time I turn around . . . [I lost] everybody except two of my brothers,” she said. “I lost two brothers, my sister, my aunt, quite a few uncles, all my cousins, my mother, my father . . . any time I [feel like I] just lost them yesterday.”

The program, organized by 26-year-old oboist and pianist Beth Clements, is presented in conjunction with the “Anne Frank in the World” exhibition, which continues through June 18 at the Library Annex of the Newport Harbor Art Museum.

Among dozens of participants are cantor Jonathan Grant, violinist Mari Haig, and the Irvine Conservatory of Music String Quartet,a which will play John Williams’ theme from “Schindler’s List.” The exhibition’s local coordinator, Bruce Giuliano, will read a birthday poem by Anne’s father, Otto Frank, entered into Anne’s diary June 13, 1943; students from Irvine and Santa Ana will read other diary excerpts.

Clements will accompany several singers and play oboe in an instrumental version of “Ani Ma’Amin” with violinist Haig and pianist Phyllis Gilmore.

“The words are, ‘I believe in complete faith in the coming of the Messiah,’ ” Clements said. “It’s a song that was sung by the people in the camps. They all knew it from the synagogues. They sang it on their way to the gas chambers.”

Clements first saw the “Anne Frank in the World” exhibition in Des Moines five years ago, while enrolled in a Holocaust class at Drake University. She was helping coordinate docent training sessions at Newport Harbor when Giuliano found out she was a musician and suggested she do a concert.

Clements contacted the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, and they sent her a packet of music “written in, and sung in, the camps and ghettos.” She contacted cantor Grant. Word spread. People contacted her.

“Some music, people already had and knew, but most of us have been learning new things,” Clements said.

Among the works on Sunday’s program is one movement from a sonata written by Gideon Klein (no relation to Aranka) while the young composer was interned at Terezin, the death camp near Prague. There, according to pianist Phyllis Gilmore, Klein and other artists “provided inmates beauty and meaning” in the midst of unspeakable suffering. Gilmore will play Klein’s piece, to which she was introduced by a pianist in Israel.

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“The minute I saw the look of the music, I knew I would love it,” Gilmore said. “It looks very rich, with lots of chromatic indications, and a flow and gestures and phrases that just caught me. It’s very chromatic, but not atonal. I’d played a piece by Alban Berg similar in style. Like the Berg, it’s very intense, expressionistic.

“I haven’t played the Klein Sonata as much as I’d like,” she said, “usually at a commemorative time rather than just part of the standard repertory. But then, even a standard work like the Berg Sonata is not played that much, it’s not that popular.”

A portion of the program is dedicated to contemporary music about freedom and peace; all of the program is devoted to ensuring that memories of the Holocaust don’t die--memories that, for some, can’t die.

In a poem called “Flowers for My Mother,” Aranka Klein writes, “I feel your hand holding mine so tight / When the Nazis tore us apart . . . “ In “Free at Last,” about her liberation from Bergen-Belsen by British troops, during which Nazi guards continued to shoot prisoners even as they rushed to greet their liberators, she writes, “My mind is sentenced for life.”

Said Klein: “I talk to my grandchildren about my mother, the memories are so vivid, so fresh. The subject always comes up. . . . I automatically keep it alive, I can’t help it, I can’t erase it.”

* “Shadows of the Holocaust” takes place Sunday at the Library Annex , Newport Harbor Art Museum, 856 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. 3 p.m. Program is included with admission to “Anne Frank in the World” exhibition: $4 for adults, $3 for senior citizens, free for 18 and under, and students of any age with I.D. Exhibition hours on Sunday are 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. (714) 645-3793.