Clary was born into a strict Orthodox family in Paris, but the childhood he recalls was full of joy. From a young age, he was a determined entertainer. He’d go on to find success after the war — as a singer and an actor on Broadway, TV and film (he’s best known for his role as the French patriot Cpl. LeBeau on Hogan’s Heroes, which is set in a German POW camp).

Clary’s passion to entertain helped sustain him during his darkest moments. At Buchenwald, he sang with an accordionist every other Sunday to an audience of SS soldiers. Clary feels certain that his singing gave him a purpose and an escape and thus helped save his life: “Singing, entertaining and being in kind of good health at my age, that’s why I survived,” he says. “I was very immature and young and not really fully realizing what situation I was involved with. … I don’t know if I would have survived if I really knew that.”

Survival wasn’t easy. He was forced into labor at a prison shoe factory in Germany that the Allies bombed regularly. And with the war’s end looming, the Nazis ordered Clary and other prisoners on an arduous death march from Poland to Germany. Clary says that only 1,500 of the 4,000 prisoners who started were alive at its completion. “All the others died on the road.”

For decades, as he settled into a new life in America and his career took off, Clary chose not to discuss what he had been through. But in the 1980s, after he saw a documentary about a woman who had survived Auschwitz, he signed on with the Wiesenthal Center and began sharing his story. Says Clary, “I stopped hav­ing nightmares the moment I opened my mouth.” — P.F.

During her three years on the run, she continued to inhabit the role: pretending to suffer from tuberculosis as an alibi for seeking shelter in a peasant’s countryside cottage and kneeling bedside at night while reciting the Lord’s Prayer verbatim like a good Catholic girl. “It was how we survived.”

Once she settled in England, attending the London College of Dance and Drama, she kept quiet about her Holocaust experience for years. “I didn’t want to be a victim, and I didn’t want to tell anyone because I was afraid they wouldn’t believe me,” says Posner, who didn’t even discuss it with her British husband, Michael, whom she married in 1950. “It was too dramatic.”

Her thinking evolved in the early 1990s, around the time she starred in the German touring run of British playwright Julia Pascal’s acclaimed Theresa, based on a true story about a Jewish woman betrayed by Nazi collaborators during the war. In Frankfurt, a newspaper story noted that the father of the actor who played her son had been a Nazi. “After the performance, people were throwing flowers,” remembers Posner. “They were just so moved by the fact that there were the two of us, holding hands. I have never in my life and never will again have such a reception.”

That moment indeed might have been a high-water mark. The pronounced rise in recent years of European anti-Semitism has, she explains, given her yet “a renewed impetus not only to talk about [her experience] but to scream about it. My whole life was changed. I lost everyone.” — Gary Baum

Gabbai grew up in Thessaloniki, Greece, where he attended an Italian school and began work at a newspaper where his father was a typographer. But then the Nazis came. In March 1944, Gabbai’s family was crammed into a cattle car bound for Auschwitz. There, they faced a selection by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele — Gabbai, 21, and his brothers were pointed one way; his mother and father the other. But his younger brother, who was 12 or 13 at the time and terrified, rushed to his parents’ side. Gabbai never saw the three of them again.

By all accounts, Gabbai, now 93, is the last living Sonderkommando. His older brother and two cousins were among a few dozen Greek Jews who were commanded to do unimaginable things — coaxing prison­ers into the gas chambers, moving bodies to the crematoria, dumping ashes in the nearby Vistula River. He recalls seeing two friends from Thessaloniki, and all he could do was tell them where to stand in the gas chamber to minimize their suffering. Afterward, he buried their ashes in a garden.

In January 1945, when the Nazis evacuated Auschwitz, Gabbai and other prisoners were subjected to a death march (“We were freezing. I don’t know how I didn’t pass away there”) and then another cattle­ car ride to a camp in Austria. Liberated in May 1945, he moved to the U.S. under the sponsorship of the Jewish community in Cleveland, then relocated to Los Angeles in 1951. Gabbai, who loved to exercise outside for decades, has never left. Though the bulk of his work was outside the entertainment business, he did have a small role in the 1953 war flick The Glory Brigade — his photo album contains snapshots of him on set with Victor Mature and a young Lee Marvin. He also has pictures of himself with Steven Spielberg; Gabbai was prominently featured in Spielberg’s 1998 documentary The Last Days as well as a 2005 BBC film series on the Holocaust.

Despite how many times he has told his story, Gabbai still struggles to explain how he survived nine months in hell. He says that he tried “not to think” and often talked to himself, seeking strength in verbal affirmation. “I said to myself from the beginning, ‘This war will be ending one day,’ ” he recalls. “And the world will be much better by telling them exactly what was happening.” — P.F.

Born in Krakow, Poland, the only child of a pair of accountants, Biniaz and her parents were forced into a labor camp called Plaszow and worked in factories belonging to an associate of Schindler’s — her parents as bookkeepers, she as part of a child’s cooperative making envelopes and brushes. When that associate decided to shut down his factory, Schindler put hundreds of its employees on his now-­famous list. But soon after that, his female employees would be erroneously sent to Auschwitz, where Biniaz lived one of the film’s most indelible scenes, in which the women, seeing “the fiery plumes in the sky,” assumed the worst when herded together into a group shower cham­ber, but “fortunately water comes out and we figure we have another lease on life.” At another moment, during one of the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele’s selec­tions, she was chosen to die. “I guess my survival kicked in,” she says. “The will to live. I just looked at him and I said three words — ‘lass mich gehen’ — which in German is, ‘Let me go.’ He pushed his pencil the other way, and I ran out naked into the snow.”

In time, she would immigrate to Iowa (an uncle lived there), graduate from college (after missing out on formal education between second and 12th grades), spend her adulthood in Long Island and retire to Camarillo, Calif. This year, to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi camps, she returned to the site where she’d escaped slaughter. “The first time I went to Auschwitz was in a box car,” she says. “This time I went to Auschwitz in business class.” — G.B.

The epic journey was punctuated by fraught moments internalized as only the child of a chocolatier could. Prochnik — who went on to a Hollywood career as a screenwriter (Child’s Play, directed by Sidney Lumet) as well as a trailer editor on films like All That Jazz and Tommy — had loved to visit the giant tub in which the factory melted industrial-sized chunks of cocoa, sticking his arm in to his elbow, “then I’d lick it all off.” He privately named it Milka, coming to believe during his time on the run that it had magical powers and repeatedly returning to his happy place when breakthroughs emerged: the moment his father finally connected with the Lithuania-based, transit visa-bestowing diplomat Chiune Sugihara (the “Japanese Schindler”), the point when a bayonet-wielding German officer with a scar on his face that looked like a snake (“You remember these things”) missed his mother’s Hebrew prayer book on an otherwise thorough search of their belongings.

Yet Prochnik, now 82 and living in Los Angeles, also was haunted as a child by his imaginary savior. “I had a dream about Milka one night where she was as big as a lake,” he says of the tub, which these days still is in use — as a storytelling device he deploys in regular speaking gigs to engage schoolkids to begin to digest the enormity of the Holocaust’s horror. (A book, Milka & Me, will be released in the spring.) “She invited me to swim, and there was my friend, Oleg, a Lithuanian Jewish boy who had stayed because his family would not think of leaving Poland. What Milka was telling me was that this boy would not survive the war.” — G.B.

Gottlieb did not return to his village until 2008, when he visited a nearby site where the relatives who stayed behind — his grandparents, seven aunts and uncles, dozens of cousins — had perished. After a stay in a temporary ghetto, they were “marched [by Nazis] through the center of town, into the woods, forced to dig open graves and were all shot and killed,” says Gottlieb. “We were able to find the three mass graves where there were women, children and men separated.” Tears swell as he recalls performing a yizkor (mourning prayer) service for the dead at that grave, six decades after 90 percent of his family was eliminated. “It’s very difficult to understand and explain,” he says. “The truth of the matter is that the weapons of massive destruction are not bombs — they’re hatred, intolerance and bigotry.”

Following four years in Ukrainian camps, Gottlieb and his mother were expelled with thousands of refugees to a displaced ­person camp in the U.S. sector in Germany; Stalin didn’t want the Jews, either. After another stretch behind barbed wire, the family was about to immigrate to Israel when a great aunt in Los Angeles spotted their name on a Red Cross list and sponsored their journey to America. “I feel like I have two lives,” says Gottlieb. “I was born in Poland initially, and I was born again in America.”

He went on to a successful Hollywood career, pro­ducing such films as Master and Commander and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013). A pivotal moment came in 2003 as he helped promote Rosenstrasse, a film about Christian women who protested in Berlin to save their Jewish husbands in 1943. As he encountered people claiming disinterest in the topic because of “Holocaust overload,” Gottlieb realized he had to tell his story and began to do appearances on behalf of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“As a survivor, you have to prove that there is a reason for your existence,” says Gottlieb. “You are driven to justify the fact that you survived what others did not. And part of that justification is to do something that will help repair the world.” — P.F.

Now 83, Lustig has never for­gotten. After his camp was liberated — Lustig was 12 and recalls the sound of the bagpipes as the British Army marched in, thinking, “I had died finally, and that was the angels’ music in heaven” — he was miraculously reunited with his mother, one of the few members of his family to survive the Holocaust. It was “a miracle, a fortune,” says Lustig. “You see in all my life there has always been something of fortune, dedi­cation, destiny.”

It was destiny, he believes, that took him back to his homeland of Croatia, where he was born and where, after decades of living in Los Angeles, he has returned with his wife of 45 years and their adult daughter to the capital, Zagreb; destiny that brought Lustig to the film business in Europe, where he helped make such movies about the rise of fascism and the Holocaust as The Tin Drum and Sophie’s Choice.

“I remembered the words: ‘Tell to the world how we lived and how we died,’ ” he says. “I took this as a task in my life.” This task brought him to America in 1988 to help produce War and Remembrance, an Emmy-­winning miniseries starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Seymour. In Los Angeles, he met Steven Spielberg, who was devel­oping Schindler’s List. “I told him my life, details about the camps,” says Lustig. “He kissed my number [from the concentration camp, tattooed on Lustig’s arm] and said, ‘You will be my producer.’ He is the man who gave me the possibility to fulfill my obligation.”

Lustig donated the Oscar he won for Schindler’s List to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memo­rial in Jerusalem. And together with Spielberg, he set up the Shoah Foundation to record the testimony of more than 50,000 Holocaust survivors. Lustig’s film career has been impressive — he produced six films with Ridley Scott alone, including Gladiator, which won Lustig his second best picture Oscar — but he sees the Shoah Foundation as his greatest achievement. “People say today around the world that [the Holocaust] doesn’t exist. And it’s important that we not forget, never forget. If you forget it, they will have really beat you.” — Scott Roxborough

“I remember distinctly the reading of the [deportation] lists on Monday night, the crying and many times screaming and separation of family of who was on the cattle car on Tuesday morning at 1 a.m.,” says Lowens, now 90. Fortunately, his family had paperwork indicating that they were not to be deported yet, which brought them a release. Soon the son took on a new identity as a small-town teacher named Ben Joosten, joining a three-person cell of the Dutch resistance that would, in time, be credited with saving 123 lives by delivering Jewish children (and a few adults) to families who hid them.

By V-E Day, he had rescued and found safe shelter for two downed American airmen who had landed in a nearby field — he received a commendation from Gen. Eisenhower — and, as an interpreter for the advancing British Army, helped place Karl Donitz (Hitler’s designated successor as president) and key minister Albert Speer under house arrest. “My sanity turned around,” observes Lowens, recalling “the Gestapo knocking on doors,” whereas by liberation, “I now knocked on doors.”

In time, he turned to Hollywood, bringing his wartime experience with him, whether when telling Oscar-winning director Robert Wise (The Sound of Music, West Side Story) during his successful audition for The Hindenburg that he’d witnessed the airship over Berlin — “He says, ‘You did? Sit down, tell me about it!’ ” — or in performing Nazi roles. “As a survivor, they now serve the memory of what some of them did or didn’t do, the horror of eliminating the millions,” he says. “I am lucky to be here and tell you some of the story.” — G.B.

An only child, Westheimer, now 87 and known worldwide as sex therapist Dr. Ruth, exchanged letters with her parents and grandmother until September 1941, when their letters stopped. Her family likely perished at Auschwitz. “It was very difficult in the home,” she says. “But we created a community, a family.”

At age 17, Ruth left Switzerland for then-British-controlled Palestine to join the Haganah, the precursor to the Israel Defense Force. She was only 4-foot-7, but she trained as a sniper. “I never killed anyone,” she reassures. In 1950, she moved to Paris, where she studied psychology at the Sorbonne and taught kindergarten. She received a restitution check in 1956 from the West German government and left for New York, where she earned a scholarship from the New School of Social Research and met Manfred Westheimer (they raised two children and were married until his death in 1997).

A pioneering media personality, Westheimer busted the taboo of talking about sex in explicit detail — in an unforgettable accent — first on her radio show (beginning in 1980 on NBC-owned WYNY) and then on her many TV shows (on Lifetime and in national and international syndication).

“People like me need to stand up and be counted to repair the world,” she says. Westheimer’s story contains lots of loss, but she insists it’s also full of hope: “Looking at my four grandchildren: Hitler lost and I won.” — Marisa Guthrie