Wednesday, April 8, 1998 | 10:05 a.m.
Dozens of round tables in the banquet room at Nellis Air Force Base's enlisted men's club were occupied by a sharp contrast of diners.
Space at each table was shared by relatively youthful airmen and airwomen and older civilians.
The military people had their identification numbers etched into the dog tags hanging around their necks.
Many of the older people had their ID numbers carved into their arms and into their memories.
Sharing a noon meal and stories of life experiences at the military installation Tuesday were 55 survivors of the Holocaust, an attempt to exterminate the Jewish people and anyone else who did not conform to Adolph Hitler's vision of the master race.
Entire families were wiped out during the Holocaust between 1933 and 1945. Along with 6 million Jews, millions of homosexuals, Gypsies, Slavs, political dissidents, mentally ill and war prisoners were murdered.
More than 160 of those who survived the slaughter live in Las Vegas and have joined a two-year-old organization called the Holocaust Survivors Group, which is a program of the Jewish Community Center.
Henry Schuster, 72, a retired building contractor, is chairman and organizer of the organization.
Fifty-five of its members attended Tuesday's luncheon as part of a Day of Remembrance -- a day dedicated to keeping alive the memory of the tragedy that is still fresh in the mind of those who experienced it.
During the meal the survivors visited with the young people, most of whom had not been born when the Holocaust took place and probably only knew about it from history books and the media.
However, Tuesday they had the opportunity to hear from those who lived through the experience and want to lay to rest a growing belief in some corners of the world that the Holocaust is a Jewish hoax that never took place.
"Anti-Semitism began in Germany in 1933," recalled Schuster, who was only 7 when the terror began. "We were abused by children, classmates, teachers, people of culture."
In 1935 his father died of a heart attack and later his mother and sister died in a concentration camp.
"Father might have lived, but doctors weren't permitted to treat Jews," Schuster said.
One of his sisters, now a California resident, survived four forced labor camps and four concentration camps.
"I was fortunate," he said. "I was admitted into a Jewish orphanage in Frankfurt, Germany."
In 1939 residents in his orphanage were sent to France.
"We were in Paris the day Germany marched in one end of town. About 100 of us escaped out the southern end," he said.
The orphans hid in southern France till 1941 and then American Quakers brought them to the United States.
After graduating from high school in America, Schuster joined the Army Air Corps in 1944 and in 1945 went to Germany with the occupation forces and then to Paris, where he found his sister.
After returning to the United States he attended college in New York; had a building career in Illinois; went to Southern California where he had a second career in contracting; and then retired in 1993 and moved to Las Vegas.
He said most of the members of the survivors organization are from Los Angeles. After lunch, three of the Holocaust survivors spoke briefly to the audience about their experiences.
Harold Blitzer, Ernest Ostreicher and Meta Dorn talked about events common among most of the survivors.
Blitzer, 71, was sent to a farm in Denmark at the age of 13 in 1940, but he was there only two months before German troops entered the country.
He stayed on the farm for two years, then one morning before dawn he and 150 other Jews were rounded up and placed in cattle cars and shipped to Camp Terezin, a ghetto built specifically for them.
"One street was like a movie set for when inspectors came by to see how we lived," Blitzer said.
Then he was sent to a work camp where he became ill but was saved by a doctor at the camp who had been awarded the Noble Prize and happened to be a pediatrician.
Ostreicher, 72, was a Hungarian Jew whose entire family -- mother, father, three sisters, grandmother, aunts and uncles -- died in camps.
He was crowded into a cattle car and taken to Auschwitz, where he saw the tall chimneys that marked the crematoriums where those who had been gassed were then cremated.
Ostreicher survived several death marches during the closing months of the war, when German troops were taking them as far from approaching American and Russian forces as possible.
"I want to take this opportunity to thank American War veterans and the United States for bringing me to this country and making me a citizen," he told the audience. "I am very happy to be here. Thank you again. Thank you USA America."
Meta Dorn, an only child, was the daughter of a successful business couple who owned a recycling plant in Hamburg, Germany.
In 1938 the German government took over Jewish businesses and jailed many of their owners, who bought their way to freedom.
Dorn's father wanted to take his family to America, but before he could get his visa he was deported to a ghetto in Poland, where he died of tuberculosis.
Schuster said the Holocaust Survivors Group was formed for many reasons, including to provide a speakers bureau to make speakers available at schools and civic organization; to work with German attorneys to get reparation; to work with the Nevada Insurance Commission to get delayed insurance payments due survivors; and to help "Schindler's List" director Steven Spielberg keep the reality of the Holocaust alive by recording the experiences of the survivors.
But perhaps one of the most important reasons for its existence is to provide a support group, which has become a family that in some small way replaces the families lost by the survivors, Schuster said.
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