Every Tuesday at 2 p.m., Bella Friedman steps onto the dais at the Museum of Tolerance, sits down on the straight-backed chair, folds her hands in her lap and looks out at the audience that has gathered to hear about life, death and the Holocaust.
She is 82, neatly coiffed, with tailored pantsuits that hide the tattoo on her left forearm. She is the only member of her immediate family to survive. She brings pictures of the people she lost. Her mission: to make sure the world does not forget.
But Friedman also has dementia. She has trouble now speaking English and communicates best in Yiddish, the language of her childhood. She sits in front of the theater -- silent, compelled -- while museum staffers project an interview she gave in 1995 on the wall above her frail silhouette.
The digital woman tells the story the flesh-and-blood survivor from Radom, Poland, no longer can: "The whole ghetto was liquidated. They pushed us into cattle cars. . . . We couldn't breathe."
There are few better places than the museum's intimate theater to witness history's slow fade. Six days a week, a small cadre of survivors -- average age, early 80s -- gives testimony here to the Holocaust's horrors. Each year the group dwindles as one or two aging volunteers dies.
The Los Angeles museum's ranks were never all that big to begin with, because most Holocaust survivors remain mute about their painful pasts. More than 60 years later, only a minority has found that remembrance can bring healing.
These days, many of the 30 or so survivors who volunteer at the museum feel increasing pressure to speak up in their own way, reaching out to as many listeners as possible before being silenced by disease or death. In less than a generation, they all will be gone.
Few people have been more aware of that fact than Bella Friedman (Tuesdays at 2 p.m.), Lion Cohen (every other Thursday at 3 p.m.), and Eva Brown (usually Tuesdays at 3 p.m.).
"I was so silent for 50 years and kept everything bottled in, and now I don't know how to shut up," said the diminutive Brown, 81, who just learned that her leukemia is back after a too brief remission. "It's so critical to tell our story. Because you're here today and gone tomorrow."
Cohen, 82, had a fondness for bright plaid shirts and a history of heart disease. To rapt groups of students and tourists, the former chef described years as a Dutch teenager hiding from the Nazis in a rural attic, long stretches flat on his back or stomach. By the time he was liberated by the Canadian army, his legs no longer worked. Most of his family was dead.
