COMPANIONS SENT TO SEPARATE CONCENTRATION CAMPS TO REUNITE 55 YEARS LATER : FRIENDSHIP SURVIVES THE HORRORS OF HITLER.

Byline: Dennis McCarthy 

She tries to get some work done in the deli Thursday, but her mind is back in Poland more than 55 years ago - back with Hena when they were young teen-age girls growing up in the shadow of a madman who would soon destroy countless families and scar millions of lives forever.

Rena Drexler's life. Hena Leitner's life. So many more lives.

``I'm nervous and anxious,'' Rena says, looking up at the wall clock in her North Hollywood restaurant, looking at it as if she's willing it to move faster, to move to Friday morning when Hena's plane arrives in Los Angeles from Florida.

It's been more than half a century since these friends last saw each other after being pushed off a crowded cattle car and ordered by Nazi guards to break up into lines.

Rena's line marched off to Auschwitz with her family. Hena's line was transported to another concentration camp with her family.

Two girlfriends waving goodbye to each other with fear in their eyes.

They would survive the gas chambers but not the nightmares and scars. No one who was ever where they were has been able to do that.

Rena was 19, and a bag of bones, she says, when the Allies came to Auschwitz more than four years later to liberate the concentration camp. By then, every member of her family was dead.

Hena's horror story Rena will hear today when they meet - when they talk late into the night and early into the morning because more than a half-century cannot be compressed into a few hours.

When, after they are tired and out of words, they hold each other tight and have their first chance to cry together about the family and youth they lost to a madman named Hitler.

``I have always said that I've paid a high price for my life, but that God has been good to me,'' Rena says Thursday, preparing for another milestone in her life this weekend - her 50th wedding anniversary with husband, Harry.

It is being celebrated this Sunday at Temple Adat Ari El in North Hollywood, and the guest of honor will be an old friend of Rena's from the old country - Hena Leitner.

She reads the letter aloud before slipping it back in the envelope and putting it with hundreds of others.

If Rena Drexler could write her own obituary, the words and feelings she would use are found in letters like this, letters from schoolchildren throughout the San Fernando Valley thanking her.

This one is from a young student at Campbell Hall private school, thanking Rena for coming to her school to talk recently, and saying how Rena's words had such an impact on her.

She and her mother never seem to be able to get along, the girl says. But after hearing Rena talk about her childhood in the camp and losing her entire family there, she went home and apologized to her mother.

They talked out their differences, and then they hugged, the girl says. She was taking Rena's advice to respect her parents and show them her love, because as Rena had told the entire school that day, ``It is too late to cry on their graves.''

It is this way wherever this remarkable woman goes in the Valley to talk to kids about her life in a concentration camp - tries to make them appreciate their parents, country, school, teachers and everything around them, down to the birds and colorful flowers.

Her generation was forced to grow up too fast, she tells them, forced to fight for their lives with no chance to defend them.

She tells these kids how she was always so ashamed to be forced to stand naked in line and how, everywhere she looked for four long years, she saw only death, including her father's, mother's, brothers' and sisters'.

And when she is done talking to these kids, they come to her up on stage with tears in their eyes - hugging her, kissing her, thanking her.

Then they go home, and they are better children, Rena Drexler says simply.

``They see their own parents or grandparents in me, see themselves in a place like Auschwitz. It is incomprehensible to them. It should be incomprehensible to the world.

``Yet, it happened,'' she says, looking up again at the wall clock and willing it to move faster into today.

An old friend was coming into town, an old friend she hadn't seen since more than 55 years ago, when the horror of Hitler happened, incomprehensibly, to them.

When two girlfriends stood in separate lines in front of a cattle car and waved goodbye to each other with fear in their eyes.