The three speakers had different stories to tell; together they imparted a first-person immediacy to events that are fast fading into history.

"Long Ago and Far Away: Memories of a Dark Era," a public forum sponsored by the Jewish Historical Society and the Holocaust Council of MetroWest, was held Oct. 15 at the Alex Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus in Whippany. The 100 people in attendance hung on every memory invoked by Ellis Jacob, Gina Lanceter, and Marsha Kreuzman. Below are their stories.

Marsha Kreuzman of Livingston recounted a gripping tale of incarceration in five different Nazi camps.

"Many times they wanted to shoot me. They took my mother to Auschwitz. They shot my father on Yom Kippur Day. I had to dig a grave for him, and after I had to bury him," she said. "You know the philosophy for this? They put the blame on us. I couldn't believe that God would do this to us, his chosen people."

Kreuzman worked in Nazi-run hospitals so she could procure the insulin necessary to keep her diabetic brother alive.

"I was not afraid of blood, so I always worked in hospitals in the camps so I could sneak insulin for my brother until he was taken in 1944 with other children. He was sick. I never saw him again. I stayed alone."

In Flossenberg concentration camp in Germany, she worked in an ammunitions plant hand-filling gunpowder into bullets. When her captors weren't watching, she said, "I kicked the powder onto the floor. So I saved some people. Maybe American people. Who knows?"

Kreuzman said she didn't care if she was caught. "I tried to commit suicide twice. I begged them to shoot me."

After periods of internment at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Kreuzman was taken to Mauthausen in Austria. "They put us on the hill near the crematorium. There were thousands of people still alive in Mauthausen and they were pushing us as quick as they could into the ovens. Then they said, ‘You're liberated.'"

As Kreuzman turned around, she realized she was first in line to enter the ovens. "My face was right next to the crematorium. I would have been the next one to go. I fainted."

Gina Lanceter told the forum of her near-death experience.

After surviving in the disease-ridden ghetto of Brody, Poland, Nazis found her family hiding in a cellar and herded them into a crowded cattle car in a train that was to take them to the extermination camp of Majdanek.

"When the train started to move, my parents urged me to save myself. My father suggested I jump through the window," she said.

Holding aloft a replica of the small window she crawled through, Lanceter said, "Can you imagine? Through the opening I went out. I did not want to leave them. But I wanted to live. And my father's last words to me were: ‘You must live. You must jump. You must tell them what happened to us so we didn't die in vain.'"

Fourteen-year-old Lanceter was shot in the head and the side by a German soldier riding on the roof of the train. But she persevered, relying on the kindness of a Catholic priest and several caring families for shelter and protection during months of dangerous hiding.

She lives in Montclair and is co-chair of the Holocaust council, along with Lois Lautenberg of Montclair.

"I want to tell you that Hitler did not win," she said. "Unfortunately, many people were silenced, but the ones who are here should speak about it. If people had spoken up before, the Holocaust wouldn't have happened."

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Ellis Jacob spent the war years many thousands of miles from the killing fields of Nazi-occupied Europe.

He was born and raised in Shanghai in an Orthodox Sephardi family. His grandfather had emigrated from Baghdad in the 1800s to the Chinese city with a vibrant Jewish culture.

"There were four synagogues, three cemeteries, and one Jewish school," he said. "The synagogue I grew up in was packed, and not just during Jewish holidays. It was a very active community, and the Chinese left us alone."

All that would change during World War II, when a wave of Jews fled to Shanghai from Europe and after being denied entrance to England and the United States. The influx was massive, with some 20,000 refugees descending on a community of several thousand.

"Wealthy Sephardic Jews, most of whom had made their fortunes selling opium to China, formed a relief committee to help the newcomers with food, housing, and jobs," Jacob said. "Then, just three hours after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, their troops occupied Shanghai and established martial law.

"The Japanese had a very interesting attitude toward Jews," Jacob said. "They had a warm feeling toward Jews because many people in Japan believed the Japanese were descendants of a lost tribe of Israel."

In addition, a Jewish financier in New York named Jacob Schiff, appalled at the pogroms in Russia, loaned the Japanese $300 million to finance their successful war against Russia. "The Japanese never forgot that," Jacob said.

They even denied requests from their German allies in World War II to kill the Jews then living in Japan.

After constant pressure, Jacob said, "the military commander in Shanghai forced stateless refugees from Europe to move into a ghetto. Life was tough. Food and water were very poor. Disease was rampant. People had dysentery and cholera. But people from Europe were very resourceful, and pretty soon little coffee shops and pastry shops popped up. Newspapers in German and Yiddish popped up in the ghetto."

But the Japanese "left our family alone. We were not refugees. We continued with our Jewish life. They did not bother us at all."

Toward the end of World War II, Jacob, then 12 years old, watched from a rooftop as American warplanes bombed military installations and fuel reserves in Shanghai, "leaving pillars of fire and smoke that lasted for days. It was kind of tough and kind of dangerous, too, but it was a very exciting time for me."

Jacob, a Montclair resident, has just published a memoir, The Shanghai I Knew: A Foreign Native in Pre-Revolutionary China.

After the war, he moved to Canada, then the United States, where he served in the army and attended college on the GI Bill. "I'm very grateful," he said. "I try to think of ways to give back."