Holocaust survivors help mark anniversary of U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Clara McCarthy has found a certain sense of community here among the only people who can truly understand her past. In what is expected to be the last full-scale reunion of an aging generation, 2,000 Holocaust survivors have come this weekend to take part in the 10th anniversary of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The entire experience is new for McCarthy. She has been reticent to share her story with most who know her, barely even talking about her ordeal with her children and telling only a few close friends.

And it might have remained that way had she not recently seen "The Pianist," a film depicting the capture of an accomplished Polish musician during the Holocaust. The images of his family being pulled from their home and corralled into a concentration camp were frighteningly real to McCarthy, who was taken from her home at age 6.

"It just hit me so hard, I couldn't believe it," McCarthy said of seeing the movie. "It just opened up all of the closed doors that I had pushed down inside of me."

It was one of the reasons she decided to journey to Washington from Florida, where the 66-year-old has spent almost five decades of her life since fleeing the Germans. She needed a way to resolve her emotions and make sure the world never forgets the 6 million Jews who died, including her father, grandparents, sister and brother.

"It was time for me to participate and see what can be done in the future and get some closure in my own life," she said.

McCarthy has struggled with her own identity and believes that only by coming to terms with her past can she feel more comfortable with her roots. She has yet to join a synagogue or affiliate with any Jewish organizations near her Vero Beach home "because that's how they caught my mom and dad."

'I grew up in a hurry'

Born Claire Blik in Amsterdam, she was just 5 when the war broke out and 6 when her father was arrested in 1942. Her family had to don the yellow Jewish star on their arms, weren't allowed outside after 5 p.m. and her father -- a salesman for an automobile parts company -- was not allowed to work anymore.

After the family spent its final six months together in Westerbork, a concentration camp on the German-Dutch border, McCarthy's father was shipped to Auschwitz, where he was killed -- a fact she learned some 10 years after the war by matching up the number tattooed on her father's arm with records of those exterminated in the death camps.

The rest of the family went to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp originally established to hold political prisoners. This was where Anne Frank died from typhus after she was evacuated from Auschwitz.

Disease and starvation pervaded the camp. McCarthy's infant sister, who was born in Bergen-Belsen, could not survive the conditions and succumbed to double pneumonia.

The days blended together, but McCarthy still vividly recalls certain sounds and events.

She remembers hearing the sound of the dead bodies being pulled out of the barracks, the heads banging on the wood. She remembers stealing food from those who had died to make sure her mother -- who also suffered from typhoid -- could maintain her strength.

And she remembers her grandmother being beaten to death after she spit in a German officer's face when he made her eat pork, an affront to the kosher diet she kept under Jewish custom. Her grandfather died a short while later "of heartbreak and disease," McCarthy said.

McCarthy doesn't exactly know what got her through her 21/2 years in Bergen-Belsen; she was too busy trying to do what she could to survive.

"I grew up in a hurry. My brother was a little bit younger than me, so I had to make sure he was taken care of," she said. "When you're that young, you get this feeling that it was perhaps an adventure -- until things got too realistic."

Nothing is more realistic than riding a train carrying you to the gas chambers. But that is the fate that befell McCarthy's family in the ending stages of the war as they were loaded into a German troop train that was bombed every day of its 12-day journey for Auschwitz.

As the tide of the war turned, the train was intercepted by Russian troops, and her family was eventually moved to a displaced persons camp in Paris, where a relative found their names on a Red Cross list and took them in.

Moving on from the past

McCarthy, her mother and brother emigrated to America in 1956, finding a sponsor in Miami Beach.

Her brother, Maurice Blik, moved back overseas to London and has since channeled the emotion and passion from his experiences into his art, becoming a renowned sculptor.

She's a bit uneasy about her telling her story, partially because of her learned experience from her grandmother's death as well as anti-Semitism she felt after her liberation.

"I was afraid to ever speak out," McCarthy said. "That's what saved us in the war."

But after a weekend of meeting fellow survivors, McCarthy is committed not to be ashamed of her history and "be as brave as they are" in telling how she survived. Although once contacted by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation -- Steven Spielberg's effort to tape and preserve testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses -- she never participated. Now she says she would like to tell her story.

This is the type of epiphany the weekend helped her reach. While she did have moments of tears -- her family discovered photos of both of her parents in the camps in books in the museum -- both McCarthy and her visiting brother from London found more reason to be uplifted by seeing the survivors of the Holocaust.

"Jewish history is defined by tragedy and victimization. But it's not all about doom and gloom," Maurice Blik said. "People picked themselves up and have come out of the Holocaust and made lives for themselves."