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Everyone was there together, the dead and the living. Aging Holocaust survivors with their children and grandchildren. A monument listing the names of those who exist only in memory and the stones of those who died in freedom.

And on the stone, crying out in raging anger, Hebrew words from the Haggadah, slightly modified: "Pour out Your wrath upon the wicked Nazi and German nations for they have devoured Yaakov and destroyed his habitation. Pour out Your anger upon them and annihilate them from beneath the heavens of the Lord, and may our eyes see revenge over the blood that was shed."

This was the setting for the annual Yizkor commemoration of the Fraternal Order of the Bendin-Sosnowicer Sick and Benevolent Society Sept. 13 at the Beth Israel Cemetery in Woodbridge. The 250 gathered on the hot Sunday afternoon are an extended "family" of survivors and their descendants from a region in southwest Poland near Krakow, drawn together by the losses that have defined their lives.

Set up originally as a burial society, the Bendiner Society owns plots at cemeteries around the world, including in Modiin, Israel. But its purpose has been somewhat transformed today since the second and third generations so outnumber the original survivors. Much of the focus now is keeping alive the memories of those who have died. Members in New York and New Jersey also meet twice a year in Forest Hills for educational and cultural programs.

The event intertwined stories and messages, both those spoken from the dais and those shared in a side conversation. Sitting down next to a stranger could prompt the sharing of a family story, as it did with Emily Goodman Schuman, who was also the second generation speaker in the formal program. She told The Jewish State that her parents met in the Sosnowice ghetto after her father's first wife and his three daughters, ages 9, 5, and 4, were taken to Auschwitz.

Her mother, knowing that her father was in charge of smuggling Jews out of the ghetto, approached him and offered all the family jewels if he would save her and her parents. He walked away, and the next day when she approached him, he said to her, "You insulted me. Do you think I would save my own people for personal gain? All you had to do was ask."

He smuggled them out of Sosnowice, but then Schuman's mother and grandparents were recaptured and put in a different ghetto. Her father then managed to extend to her mother and grandmother a chance for life in the form of two nurse's uniforms smuggled into the ghetto -- these would enable them to join a group of 25 women who were to clean out another empty ghetto.

Her grandmother refused to leave her husband, but urged Schuman's mother to leave, telling her, "It will make it easier for us if we know you are safe." Then she added -- prophetically, it turned out -- in reference to Schuman's father, "This man is going to save your life." Because her mother made the group 26 instead of 25, however, one woman had to stay behind, and Schuman said her mother never got over that.

Eventually her father and mother ended up together in the basement of the Wawak family's barn with three other Jews until the end of the war. When they returned to Sosnowice, they realized that the Russian occupiers might be as dangerous to them as the Nazis. Although her mother was pregnant with Schuman and people were being shot on the borders, they made their way successfully through Czechoslovakia and into West Germany to safety.

The Yizkor ceremony, led by Cantor Murray Simon of the Jewish Center of Princeton and Yizkor chairwoman Annie Zaks, included a candle-lighting ceremony, a recitation of the cities and towns in the Bendin-Sosnowice region, second and third generation speakers, and a keynote, followed by El Moleh Rachamim, Mourner's Kaddish led by a survivor, the Partisan's Song, and Hatikvah.

Hanna Feffer, president of the society, spoke of past, present, and future. She turned first to the survivors, emphasizing that no film or book could describe what they had lived through.

"You were robbed of your parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, and also your youth, your education, and your homes -- all that was precious," she said. "You were abandoned because no one cared about a Jew."

She also honored the courage of her parents' generation, noting that the Yizkor ceremony was not just a commemoration of families murdered in the Nazi death camps, but also "a tribute to the heroic decision our parents made to rebuild their lives and give us lives."

And of course any commemoration of the past is linked to hopes for the future. In the face of Holocaust denial, she said, we must fight intolerance, ignorance, hatred, and anti-Semitism, and must be committed to human decency.

After the candle lighting ceremony, Lorraine R. Kaufman recited the cities and towns of the region, but first said, "The cities and towns are just names for us, but they were the homes of our parents in their kinderjahren (childhoods). Now they exist only in dreams, and sometimes in nightmares. We are saying Yizkor for those who would have loved us if they had survived."

Lara Shegoski, a senior at Montgomery High School and a member of the Jewish Center in Princeton, spoke next, representing the third generation.

"I was not there, I did not experience it, I did not live it," she said. But through the stories of her grandparents she felt that she had in some sense lived through the Holocaust, even to the point of knowing the horrible smells at the camps, and she felt it is her role to keep those stories alive.

Schulman, the second generation speaker, emphasized how a single individual can and should take steps toward saving humanity. She told the story of a man who was throwing beached starfish back into the ocean. Another man came along and said, "This is ridiculous, why are you doing it? You can't save them all." The first man's response was to pick up another one and hurl it into the sea. Then he said, "To this one, I'm making a difference." Which, she said, was just like the difference the Wawaks made for her parents.

Schulman also expressed her admiration for the survivors themselves.

"People have the capacity to endure great pain and tragedy, but can muster up the strength to love and care again," she said.

Schulman ended with a challenge to the next generations to be a testament to those who have died, saying, "We are their voice to speak out against bigotry, intolerance, and hate."

The keynote speaker, Dr. Robert Moses Shapiro, an associate professor of Judaic studies at Brooklyn College, spoke about his father's wartime experience, but also set the historical context for what happened in Sosnowiec during the war.

His father's neighbor, Moshe Moniek Merin, served as the self-appointed representative of the Jewish community with the Nazis. Because many of the region's Jews were skilled in the production of textiles, fabrics, and clothing, Merin convinced the Germans that the them could contribute to the German war effort. He also established a network of social services.

When deportations begin, Merin followed a policy of saving some of the Jews by sacrificing others, and prepared lists for the Germans. Despite some accusations of his being a collaborator, many Jews actually supported his policies. Eventually the Jewish underground clashed with Merin, and he betrayed 10 members to the Gestapo, who were executed; not long after, he and his top aides to Auschwitz were also deported, and by the first of August 1943, the last of the Jews were gone.

Shapiro ended his talk by reading his translation of a letter in Yad Vashem that a Jewish mother from Bedzin had written to her 6-year-old daughter, who had just been adopted by Polish parents.

She described to her daughter in the letter what she was taking with her along with her daughter's picture: "your beloved chatter, the scent of your delicate body, the rhythm of your innocent breathing, your smile and crying.... I am taking with me the fear in your eyes, your great, maddening fear that my maternal heart was not in a position to console." And she begged her daughter not to blame her, presumably for leaving her with strangers, and near the end of the letter cries out in heart-wracking anguish, "Forgive me, my dear Child, for having given birth to you."

That letter encapsulated the raw emotion of a horrific time, but Shapiro was not going to leave the assembled crowd in such depths, and ended by telling everyone that father, mother, and daughter survived and immigrated to Israel.

This move from despair to hope was the arc of the Yiskor ceremony, about survivors who lived the unthinkable but moved on to productive lives and new generations who remember the past but carry forth the legacy of those who died into the present and the future.