Frances Irwin, the only survivor [listen] of eight sisters and brothers,lives alone in a fourth-floor apartment in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. In a glass case, she keeps a collection of tchotchkes, and on a wall of the study, piled with letters and bills, is an improvised mural of nametags from a lifetime of speaking engagements and volunteerism. She watches Shalom Television on channel 138 and wears a Tikvah bracelet, for which she pays $15 a month, to alert someone in case of emergency. A painted portrait of her son hangs over her bed. “He pays my bills so I can live OK,” she says. “But others don’t have all this, and they don’t behave like survivors.”

Hymie Steinmetz tells the harrowing story of Nazi soldiers moving into his family’s home in Hungary, pushing him and his six brothers and sisters into one room, and later sealing the doors to the family business—all in an uninflected voice tempered by years of telling. “But forget about it,” he adds, sitting in a sofa chair across from the television in his Kensington apartment. On the wall are framed mementos and clippings from his liberation from Auschwitz, his refuge in Sweden, and his arrival to America: photos of steamer ships, bunkmates, news clippings, portraits of family members lost and since gained. On the boat to America from Sweden, he wrote a book about his experiences in the war, but in the confusion and physical pain lost it [listen]. Now his children and grandchildren are asking him to write it again. “The pain that I would go through to really start thinking back,” he says. “But it is a duty of every person, every survivor, to go and tell people what transpired in Germany.”

Miriam Wenger is as boisterous and energetic an octogenarian as you are likely to find—almost defiantly joyful, determined to, as she says, “put music … dance … cheer up.” When confronted at the local bank recently with a woman walking with a cane after a stroke, Wenger’s answer was to exclaim, “Oh, you came out very good! You have speech. And you walk. You’re going to be fine!” Still, Wenger calls this new friend every day, takes her to the theater, telling her, “You are going to be a happy girl.” This can seem surprising from someone who once picked grapes barefoot in a refugee camp in Palestine, after being chased from Poland and Romania and walking across the Alps, and whose dreams were haunted for years by echoes of Nazis shouting, “Catch the Jewish people! Kill the Jewish people!” But other things about her tiny Upper West Side apartment also show the mark of an ambitiously engaged, if limited, person: piles of letters, a seated-exercise machine, a desk with a working PC, and notepads by the phone for when someone in need calls.

Ruth Wertheimer has lived and worked in Washington Heightssince 1948. She goes to the senior center two blocks away every day for an affordable lunch—“Glatt Kosher,” she says, “it’s delicious”—whose packed-up leftovers provide the meal for the night. To get her talking about the past is to hear an absorbing, confusing mix of nostalgia for the lost beauty of her Oma, sugar cubes, and a “stunning synagogue,” paired with tales of standing in mud up to her knees, hiding in a convent, riding kindertransport as an orphan [ listen], and the rats, mice, lice, and other things she can’t forget. Does she get help now? “Nobody except myself,” she says.

Simon Goldsmith’s modest second-floor apartment is in a residential part of Brooklyn’s Flatlands neighborhood. During our visit, his phone rang four times, and each time he answered in an unfailingly cheerful manner. (“I hope you don’t mind, I have people here and I can’t talk to you right now … call me back later … thank you, thank you, thank you.”) He has piles of bills and philanthropic queries on his kitchen table, and on top of the stacks sits a framed photo of his beautiful late wife, who died two years ago—“the nicest dancer at the parties,” he says. His fridge is full of deliveries from the local JCC, of which he is a member. After a small party of Yeshiva University High School girls finishing a project on the Holocaust drop off a charitable food delivery, Goldsmith tells them, “Come a little more often. I’ll do everything you want me to do. I’ll give a nice interview, too.”

Boris Shkolnik has calloused strong paws that envelop your own in a warm grip. Though he has lived in the United States since 1984, most recently in a rent-controlled apartment off Grand Concourse in the Bronx, he never became more than conversant in English; he never needed more for his work making deliveries. When we met him, in the company of his daughter Anya (who translated) and son-in-law Isaac, Shkolnik showed us his Deutsche Rentenversicherung papers—the oddly anodyne “Claim for old-age pension for former ghetto workers residing outside Germany”—from which he pays sundry bills for TV, phone, utilities, and rent. “I want to show him how young I was when they took us away,” he said in Russian to Anya, reaching for the copy of the form. A town name on the page reminded him of something he’d seen: “a thousand, four thousand, 50 thousand Jews, walking.” And in the box labeled “Other names used in the past,” Shkolnik had written in big block letters: AVROM BARUCH. “Here it is,” he said. “I was 9 years old.”

Irene Hizme’s oral history is enshrined at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She and her twin brother, René Slotkin, have also been the subjects of a documentary film, a book by Lucette Lagnado, and news reports from People to The Jewish Week, because she is, as she told the New York Times in 1991, a member of “the most exclusive club in the world”: the Mengele Twins [listen], so named for the Nazi physician at Auschwitz-Birkenau whose monstrous experiments on Jewish siblings was part of the plan to engineer a master race. In America, she became a biochemist and computer programmer. “Is it possible that on a subconscious level my experience led me to this?” she says. “I don’t know.” From her comfortable home inOceanside, Long Island—where despite advanced MS she produces Hebrew calligraphy and counts herself a marathoner—she reminds us that the needs of Holocaust survivors are more than material.

Jack Ratz’s home in Mill Basin is a private museum to his life and family: Every available flat surface and wall space is set with framed portraits of his kin and with certificates of appreciation, awards, news clippings—all in recognition of his role and efforts as a survivor. (A citation from the State Supreme Court of New York causes special pride.) In the United States, he eventually became what he calls “a television man,” until the arrival of the microchip, which made his repair skills obsolete. He joined the MTA as an electrician, on light duty because of a bad heart. He wrote and self-published his autobiography,Endless Miracles. Now when he speaks to high-school students, he has them consider that at the age they entered as freshmen, he entered the ghetto. You become a junior? He graduated to a concentration camp. Senior, traveling to see which college might tempt you? “I traveled on a death march.” Ratz, who is small in stature but thick-chested, says he doesn’t need the financial support various Jewish organizations have offered him. But he takes some anyway because it makes the memory more real, somehow. “No matter how much you’re going to pay,” he says, “it won’t pay me back for my brothers who were shot and killed back in ’41.”

Katherine Noire, who is legally blind, isn’t a struggling Holocaust survivor of the kind you might encounter in the New York Times’ “neediest cases” holiday campaign. She lives in a spacious, clean apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, under the alert and protective care of her daughter and son. In her living room, on a polished-wood credenza, sits a beautiful ceramic bust of her late husband, and on the walls hang tastefully framed oil paintings. But her historical lot—“a matter of luck,” she says: to have survived forced labor at a factory where German hand-grenades were manufactured [listen]—remains a burden, and doubly so now that her memory is going. “It’s very difficult to cope,” she says. “I cannot do what I want to do.”