Special to WJW

Henry Kahn was 16 years old the last time he saw his parents alive.

That was 68 years ago.

"I saw them for the last time before I came to England," Kahn, a German-born Kindertransport Holocaust survivor whose English cousin sponsored his move to Britain in 1939, told Jewish high schoolers and middle schoolers Sunday evening at B'nai Israel Congregation in Rockville.

"But compared to most, I didn't have a horrible experience. Š I worked in a factory so I would learn something, and in July [of 1940] I was taken with other foreign internees by train to Liverpool. We lived in a tent camp. There we were asked, 'Who wants to volunteer to be interned at an overseas dominion?' " recalled the Bethesda resident. "But we didn't know where overseas. I volunteered anyway, and they took us to Australia. Ten days after we arrived, they took us by boat to Bombay, India. It took 2 1/2 months, and I stayed in India, where I met my wife, till 1946, when we moved to the U.S."

Kahn's story was not the only one told at B'nai Israel last weekend. Sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council in honor of the 64th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Sunday's communitywide event, "Yom Hashoah V'Hagvurah: Holocaust Heroes and Martyrs Day" included a Dor L'Dor (Generation to Generation) portion, featuring storytelling by more than 10 child Holocaust survivors at a pizza dinner.

The main program followed, including a vigil reading of some of the names of some of the Shoah's known victims and talks by Union College history professor Stephen Berk and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.). About 600 attended.

Interviewed Tuesday, Berk said his talk included discussion of the factors leading to Adolf Hilter's rise to power and the Nazi war against the Jews, the heroes ‹ soldiers, righteous gentiles, resistance fighters and the survivors themselves ‹ and lessons of the Holocaust.

Among those lessons, he said, is to draw inspiration from those heroes "and that will give you the courage to deal with the difficult days ahead."

Cardin discussed the Holocaust in terms of monitoring human rights.

On Sunday, Jason Albersheim, an eighth-grader at Julius West Middle School in Rockville and a B'nai Israel youth group member, listened raptly to the story of Vienna-born survivor Edith Cord, whose brother and father were deported from France after being labeled "enemy aliens."

Cord's family had managed to escape to France from Austria.

"We're here to understand the stories of the survivors so that when they're gone, we can pass those stories on," Albersheim said, adding that he couldn't believe that Cord, who lives in Columbia, had survived "on a sugar cube and a glass of wine a day" when she was living in France and laboring 10 hours at a stretch in a vineyard.

Sheila Bernard, now a Bethesda resident, recalled her horrific wartime story to another group of kids.

"I was 3 when the war started," said the retired nurse, who now volunteers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. "I was born in Poland, and though we lived in a small town, my family was very well off."

When the Germans arrived in 1939, she and her family were taken to the ghetto.

"My father and uncle tried running away to Russia, but they were caught and shot down by the Nazis. The Nazis then came to my house and also shot my aunt ‹ I saw her fall down the stairs," Bernard remembered. "The Nazis were going to kill me, too, but they thought it was funny that I was crying, and they laughed and decided they had killed enough Jews for one day. That was how I survived."

An elderly local police officer, riddled with cancer, took in Bernard, then 6, and her mother and stowed them in one corner of his backyard chicken coop, where they remained for two years.

"For two years, I didn't have any toys, nothing to play with," Bernard remembered. "My entertainment was looking out the cracks in the shed wall at the people walking by."

In 1945, when Bernard was 8 years old, her mother died from thrombosis and she was taken to an orphanage. There, she wrote to an uncle, who brought her to live with him in Israel.