DEJA VU; KOSOVO HORRORS REVIVE HOLOCAUST MEMORIES.

Byline: Sharline Chiang Daily News Staff Writer

Sixty years after Joseph Neustadt's family died in the Holocaust, the suffering of the past has come back, as he sees the haunting images of ``ethnic cleansing'' in Yugoslavia, of Kosovar refugees driven from their homes by Serbian soldiers.

``I cry every time I see it,'' Neustadt, 71, of West Hills, said last week. ``It's terrible. It reminds me of what happened to us in the Holocaust.''

Sylvia Martin, who fled on foot from Nazi terror but ended up in Auschwitz at the age of 22, also has revisited the horror of the past in the past two weeks.

``It's us all over again. When I see a young girl I think, I was there too,'' said Martin, 80, a native of Austria who now lives in Hollywood.

Among Holocaust survivors, such reactions to the scenes of the Kosovo crisis are common, say psychologists who treat survivors of genocide. A European campaign of ethnic cleansing starkly evokes the Nazi era and is taking its toll on many elderly survivors.

Charles Portney, a psychiatrist in Santa Monica, has been treating Holocaust survivors and relatives for about 25 years. He says patients began to report distress about the genocide in the former Yugoslavia from the early 1990s when violence broke out in Bosnia.

But what's happening in Kosovo is even more disturbing to them, he said.

``It's starting to have more resemblance to the Nazi Holocaust as people are being transported and dying on trains that are packed with people, reports of mass murders,'' said Portney, a psychiatry professor at UCLA.

`Traumatic reminders'

Televised images of the refugees serve as ``traumatic reminders'' of the past, Portney said. An estimated 80 percent of Holocaust survivors are believed to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, he said.

The campaign of ethnic cleansing by the Serbs creates a particularly sad and ironic context this year for Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The day was established after the war as a memorial to those who died in the Holocaust. It commemorates the day according to the Jewish calendar on which Allied troops liberated the first Nazi camp and falls on April 13 this year. Yom HaShoah often is observed with events promoting tolerance and marked by vows against allowing history to repeat itself.

What troubles many survivors is the realization that dictators like Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and campaigns of ethnic cleansing did not end with the defeat of Hitler.

``They might have thought that Hitler was an anomaly in history,'' said Elliot Dorff, a rector and professor of philosophy at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles.

``After it's all said and done, he was defeated. And what might comfort them is that the postwar Germans have denounced what the Nazis did. But any comfort like that is undermined as soon as one sees that sort of cleansing is being used with a vengeance in the Balkans,'' he said.

Coming with memories

Sylvia Martin volunteers at the Shoah Foundation in hopes of preventing future generations from having to endure what she and others did. The Los Angeles-based educational foundation was established by filmmaker Steven Spielberg in 1994 after he made ``Schindler's List.''

``It's hard to keep your morale. We try so hard to teach to the young people so it won't repeat itself,'' Martin said.

``But there it is in the living room. What is it that makes it hard for people to learn? What is it that people do not have respect for humanity?'' she asked, her voice shaking.

Sigi Hart, 73, has been asking himself some of those same questions. A survivor from Germany now living in Calabasas, he was 14 when the Holocaust started. For almost two years he survived at Auschwitz.

Images of Albanians packed onto crowded trains take him back to one of his own train rides that allowed him and 2,000 others to escape from Belgium to France.

``It's so terrible to see the people of Kosovo, to see them walk the mountains,'' Hart said. ``It all comes back to me like a nightmare.''

Despite similarities, several Holocaust survivors also pointed out tremendous differences between the crisis in Kosovo and their own experience.

During the Holocaust, the mass murder of European Jews by the Nazis during World War II, Adolf Hitler planned to wipe out the entire Jewish population as part of a plan to take over the world. By the end of the war in 1945, about 6 million Jewish men, women and children - more than two-thirds of the Jews in Europe - were killed. Also killed were many members of other ethnic groups, especially Gypsies, Poles and Slavs.

The mass killing was organized with industrial efficiency, with millions dying in gas chambers.

Holocaust survivors are extremely sympathetic to the plight of Albanians, Hart said. But the fact that NATO has stepped in to stop Milosevic, that refugees are receiving aid and are being welcomed by so many nations likely has triggered a tinge of bitterness among some Holocaust survivors, he said.

Hart noted how boats filled with Holocaust refugees fleeing Germany and attempting to seek asylum in the United States were turned away.

``When it happened to us, there was nobody there for us. We had nobody. You cannot compare it to our plight. No way,'' Hart said. The Serbs ``want them out of the country, but they're not killing everybody. In our case, it was systematic killing.''

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PHOTO (Color) Joseph Neustadt's Holocaust memories have been intensified by news reports from Kosovo.

John McCoy/Daily News