IN 1951, the Israeli Knesset proclaimed the 27th day of the Jewish month, Nissan, as Yom Hashoah, the Day of Remembrance for the Martyrs and Heroes of the Holocaust. This year, Yom Hashoah falls on April 20, the same day as Adolf Hitler's birth, in 1889.

I was born in a displaced persons camp in Landsberg, Germany. My parents met after the war in my mother's hometown, Czestochowa. It was dangerous for Jews to live in Poland. They escaped under mattresses loaded on a flatbed truck for the safety of Germany.

After the war, camps were set up to shelter thousands of "displaced persons," often in military barracks and former concentration camps. These were refugees, their families murdered, without country or connection. Zionists hoped to go to Palestine. Many prayed for papers to America. They had little in common except memories that haunted them and gnawing desperation, speaking a Babel of tongues, and more kept arriving. Some were very sick. But they were young and recuperated quickly.

Children who had found each other during the war continued to run together like a pack of mongrels. Couples, still mourning dead spouses and lost children from their previous lives, married again in borrowed clothes and improvised ceremonies. Pregnant women waddled with huge bellies. Landsberg had one of the biggest baby booms in history.

I grew up myopic like most children and assumed my life was the norm. Didn't all Jews go to yearly Holocaust commemorations where they were surrounded by weeping men and women?

The American Jewish Joint Committee, committed to "rebuilding Jewish lives and Jewish life," aided Landsberg with its own hospital, orphanage and nursery. There was a library, a synagogue with a Torah, printed on German soil and inscribed in Hebrew, "From Slavery to Redemption." 'The Survivors Haggadah,' published in 1946, read: "We were slaves in Egypt. We were slaves of Hitler in Germany."

There were cooking and tailoring classes, trade schools, even a kibbutz with an agricultural training center for Zionists who would emigrate to Palestine. Youth and sports groups competed, theater and orchestras performed in the social hall, where American movies were shown weekly.

My parents spent four years in Landsberg, before receiving their papers to emigrate to America. Their best friends Bronka and Bolek, now living in the Bronx, had finally been able to sponsor their passage. America. The magic word of passage. In 1950, we left Bremenhaven and arrived in New York City harbor on the MS General Hersey.

I grew up myopic like most children and assumed my life was the norm. Didn't all Jews go to yearly Holocaust commemorations where they were surrounded by weeping men and women, and cries of "Never again!"

Every spring, my family traveled from uptown Washington Heights, then from Kew Garden Hills, to Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue. An American flag flew at full mast at the entrance. I stood before the white stone synagogue, startled by its immensity and grandeur. The most un-Jewish structure one could imagine, except for its modest star of David within an immense circle of latticework.

A man handed us a program as I entered. "Let us remember those who perished in the Nazi Holocaust," it proclaimed. "Join us in paying tribute to the six million Jewish martyrs. We wil not forget, we will not forgive. We remember."

My mother dressed in black. She was one of the women who lit the candles for the dead from her city. The rabbi led prayers. The cantor wailed. Politicians spoke. El Maleh Rahamim was sung by all with fervor. Then Yeshiva Day School children, dressed in white shirts, navy blue skirts, and pants, marched to the center. They began to sing. "Shtiler, shtiler -- softer, softer, let's be silent, graves are growing here . . ."

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The Hebrew expression for Holocaust survivor is she'erith hapletah, the saved remnant. In Israel, a siren goes off at 8 a.m. on Yom Hashoah. It is an eerie sound, reminiscent of deportation wagons in war movies. All traffic stops except for the Arab buses and cars. For a full minute, there is silence.

On the street, people freeze as in a game of statue. The soldiers in fatigue uniforms, holding their guns and plastic bags of yogurt, hard-boiled eggs, andoranges. A gnarled old man bent over like an ancient tree. The peasant woman who sells buttons and thread closes her eyes and weeps. Post offices, banks,schools, movie theaters are closed. At the end of the day, one of my Israeli friends mutters, "God, I'm shoahed out."

At Congregation Ahavath Sholom in Great Barrington, we commemorate Yom Hashoah by asking our congregants to bring poems and remembrances theywould like to read. We say Kaddish together. I remember names: Sonia, my mother's mother, Hanna, my father's mother. I am named after both of them. Zalmen, my father's father, Alexander Zyskind, my mother's father, Mieco, my mother's baby brother, Ruzha and Sabcha, my father's sisters, Josef, his baby brother . . .

Remembrance continues, but so does life. If my parents' good health continues, they will dance at their grandson's bar mitzvah later this year.