Unforgettable

On a rainy October morning in 1938, Hanna Bloch stands on the sidewalk, crying softly as a bus departs Prague. She is just 19. As she watches her sweetheart Walter Kohner, 24, disappear in the distance, she cherishes their last embrace.

Swastikas had been appearing in nearby towns, including Teplitz-Schoenau, where Hanna and Walter had fallen in love.

But now he is leaving. He has an American visa--and plans to go to Hollywood, become an actor and arrange for Hanna to join him.

But they lose track of each other. She is taken prisoner by the Nazis, hauled around in cattle trains between concentration camps until she ends up in Auschwitz.

But she did survive.

They survived.

Today, Julie Kohner--Walter and Hanna’s only child--tells her parents’ story at synagogues, churches and schools in Southern California and around the country.

She teaches about the Holocaust with “Voices of the Generations,” personalizing World War II with the painful and happy events of her parents’ lives.

From Tennessee to Long Beach, audiences have seen a timeline of Hanna’s and Walter’s whereabouts during the war. During the hourlong presentation, they see intimate mementos from the Kohners’ past, like the small, rusted box containing jewelry that Walter’s mother had buried in the backyard as Hitler’s troops marched into Teplitz.

“I was very fortunate my parents shared with me the story of my heritage,” said Kohner, 43.

To some who hear the presentations, the message transcends religious and cultural barriers.

“Your family kin who emerged had done more than survive,” Dr. Cecil Murray, senior minister at L.A.’s First African Methodist Episcopal Church, wrote Kohner after her recent presentation there. “They had overcome. And so shall we, aided by the story you tell.”

Teaching Came Naturally

Kohner lives with her husband, Stephen Greenberg--an aerospace engineer for TRW--and her 7-year-old son, Danny, in the same Bel-Air home where her parents raised her.

Until Danny was born, she was the Hollywood Reporter’s marketing director. She stayed home to raise her son and to develop “Voices of the Generations.”

Teaching about the Holocaust came naturally for her because she had taught religious education for 20 years. Her master’s degree is in educational psychology.

A book her parents wrote, “Hanna and Walter: A Love Story” (Random House, 1984), is recommended literature on the Holocaust in the Los Angeles Unified School District--along with “Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl.” King World Productions, together with Barbra Streisand’s production company, Barwood, have bought a one-year option Kohner hopes will lead to a television movie.

“It’s almost too good to be true, that somebody would survive the concentration camps and be reunited with their love,” said Merrill Karpf, King World’s senior vice president of network programming. “These kinds of stories don’t get ignored.”

This would not be the first time Hanna would have appeared on television.

Her story first emerged in 1953 when she was featured in an episode of Ralph Edwards’ “This Is Your Life.”

At El Capitan theater in Hollywood, a surprised Hanna--then 32--composed herself enough to gracefully be reunited with friends who shared her past, and her brother, Friedl, whom she hadn’t seen since the beginning of the war.

Many of her loved ones had been killed in Auschwitz--including her parents, Max and Hertha Bloch, and friends such as Lilo, a carefree girl who joined the underground but was eventually captured.

It was the first time Edwards strayed from the show’s customary practice of featuring the lives of celebrities.

The black-and-white video is the centerpiece of Julie Kohner’s presentation. Her mother speaks candidly about the horrors just eight years before--horrors that are also detailed in her book.

How They Met

On a crisp morning in January 1935, the official opening of the skating season, a group of young men and women did the snake on the ice in Teplitz. Hanna held on to the hand of an older boy next to her.

When they all fell, Hanna did not let go of Walter, a 20-year-old aspiring actor. His glasses had fallen, so she put them back on, and he saw her for the first time: dark hair and eyes. Maybe 14.

Later, Walter attended a prestigious acting school in Vienna. Hanna, not a particularly good student, went to hotel management school in Karlsbad.

They visited each other frequently, walking in the wooded parks and talking at cafes, sometimes about Europe’s political atmosphere.

After his graduation Walter could not get work in the German-speaking theaters because they had been purged of Jewish actors. Hanna found work at a hotel in Karlsbad, a lively city where she had dreamed of living. But as Hitler’s army advanced, the town had become desolate.

Hanna and Walter returned to Teplitz, a Czechoslovakian town in a region known as the Sudetenland. Hitler wanted to unify the region with Germany. In September 1938, the Sudetenland was annexed to Germany by Allied politicians, believing the new Czechoslovakian border would not be invaded.

Hanna’s family fled to Prague, Walter to California.

Walter rented a room in Hollywood for $3.50 a week.

There was no shortage of refugee Jewish actors seeking work. With help from his two older brothers, who had immigrated earlier, Walter found work as an errand boy at Columbia Pictures on Gower Street.

Hanna escaped Czechoslovakia by getting a job as a maid in Holland. After the Germans fully occupied Czechoslovakia in March 1939, she lost hope of helping her family.

She was awakened in the Amsterdam room she rented one morning in 1940 by the sound of plane engines and explosions. Holland was defeated in just five days.

It wasn’t long before the anti-Jewish laws began. Jews’ identification cards were marked with a “J.” They were required to wear a yellow star.

Walter and Hanna had written frequently during the first two years, but eventually the letters became fewer.

One letter from Hanna came in the summer of 1941. It was a tender explanation that her years with Walter could never be replaced. She had fallen in love with a young refugee, Carl Benjamin.

Walter wrote once more, but all that was needed had been said, Hanna decided, even as she felt the bittersweet pain of their memories.

Taken by the Nazis

Walter was drafted into the American Army by the time the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941.

First, he was off to Ft. MacArthur in San Pedro. Then, Ft. Knox in Kentucky, Ft. Francis E. Warren in Wyoming, the Stringtown Internment Camp in Oklahoma and, finally, Maryland’s Camp Ritchie.

Back in Holland, the first round-ups in Hanna’s neighborhood started in May 1942. She had listened to the footsteps outside her window, always hoping the heavy ones would pass. The Nazis systematically arrived, blocking off streets, ordering Jews to come out.

It happened that way one beautiful morning--June 16, 1943. Hanna, her new husband, Carl, his parents and sister left their apartment together, holding hands. Hanna carried a picture of her parents and a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.”

They were taken in cattle cars first to Westerbork. The prisoners there constantly talked about transports to other camps: Theresienstadt, Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz, which was rumored to house gas chambers.

Soon Hanna received a letter from her parents and brother, who had been deported from Prague to Theresienstadt.

At Westerbork, trainloads of prisoners came and went.

In the fall of 1944, Hanna and Carl, along with hundreds of prisoners, were put in cattle cars for a transport to Theresienstadt. They were given a slice of bread as the metal doors were shut. Four days later when they were unlocked, it was Sept. 7--Hanna’s 25th birthday.

Carl and other men were soon deported to Auschwitz. On their last night at Theresienstadt, Hanna sneaked into the men’s barracks to be with Carl. In the morning she said goodbye forever.

Ten days later Hanna and other women were also deported to Auschwitz.

One night, her head shaved, her body starving, Hanna was sure she would die in the camp. She thought of all those she had loved and wondered what had become of Walter in California.

Inexplicably, one night a few hundred prisoners were shoved into another cattle train and taken to Vocklabruck, Austria. There, Hanna worked in a parachute factory.

By then prisoners knew the Allies had invaded Europe.

Indeed, the German guards seemed nervous on May 5, 1945. The prisoners were taken out into the courtyard, as the sound of machine-gun fire approached.

The guards announced the camp would shortly be invaded. Then they were gone.

Hanna was free. Alone and homeless, too.

Searching for Hanna

Walter had never forgotten her.

As his unit made its way to France, the soldiers stopped in London. Out on a stroll, Walter heard “Good Night Sweetheart” playing in the distance. Suddenly he was back in Teplitz, Hanna in his arms, welcoming 1938.

By September 1945, his unit made its way from the beaches of Normandy to Luxembourg, where he broadcast the news in German at a radio station Americans had taken back.

There Walter learned about the gas chambers--and thought of Hanna.

Then he received a letter from his brother in Los Angeles. Inside the first envelope there was another envelope, sent to: Walter Kohner, Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California.

The letter was from a soldier who had run into Hanna. The soldier promised her he would try to find Walter and tell him she was alive.

Walter got permission to travel throughout Europe in search of her. He rushed in a military Jeep to Teplitz. He found no one he knew, but he retrieved the small box his mother had buried in the backyard before she fled to America.

In Karlsbad he found Hanna’s brother Friedl, who had survived Auschwitz but did not know Hanna was alive.

Walter went to Amsterdam. At the repatriation office he was given an address for a Hanna Benjamin. She was staying with the family of a doctor.

At the two-story villa a maid answered the door. There were voices upstairs. Hanna stopped halfway down the stairs. Then she ran to Walter.

Hanna died in 1990 and was buried in Hollywood. Walter, who became a Hollywood agent after the war, died in 1997 and was buried next to her.

Hanna had numerous miscarriages, which she traced to a secret abortion she had in Auschwitz (pregnant women made prime targets for extermination) before she finally conceived Julie.

She never knew her grandson, Danny. Nor Julie’s work keeping her memory alive.

“This is a survivor’s story,” Julie Kohner says. “The fact that I’m here is because my mother survived.”

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Times staff writer Jose Cardenas can be reached by e-mail at Jose.Cardenas@latimes.com.