HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR LOST IDENTITY; L.A. CEREMONY EVOKES BITTERSWEET MEMORIES.

Byline: Eric Moses Daily News Staff Writer

For 1-1/2 years of her life, Erica Korda repeated to herself over and over: ``I am not Jewish.''

Korda, who attended Sunday's Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony in Pan Pacific Park, was one of the Holocaust's many victims - a hidden child. She wasn't sent to a work camp. She didn't lose her life. Instead, she traded in her identity to stay alive.

When Korda was 5 years old, she fled with her mother to Budapest, Hungary, from her native Czechoslovakia, where the Germans were moving in, uprooting Jews from their homes and loading them onto cattle trains bound for work and death camps. She packed everything she knew about herself into a little corner of her brain.

``They explained to me that we are going to a different city and not tell anyone who you are,'' Korda said. ``I knew I was Jewish, and I wasn't allowed to tell anybody.''

Korda was given a new name, a new family and a set of Catholic prayers to memorize. She was placed with a couple on a farm outside Budapest, and people imagined she was the couple's illegitimate grandchild.

Her mother went to live with another family in Budapest. They saw each just twice during 18 months in 1943-45.

Korda, now 59, looked at her granddaughters, Sarah, 5, and Shayna, 6 months old. ``They are not going to go through it,'' she said, and her voice cracked with happy emotion that life is different now.

Honoring the children of the Holocaust, Sunday's event in the Fairfax district drew hundreds of people to the city's Holocaust Monument. It was one of many ceremonies held around the world in celebration of the upcoming 50th anniversary of the state of Israel, which was created May 14, 1948.

Many at the event were children during the Holocaust. Six million Jews were killed in the genocide, including about 1.5 million children. As many as 10 million others - homosexuals, Gypsies, Poles, Ukrainians and Belarussians - were put to death, too.

Irwin Goldstein of Beverly Hills was 15 when his family was torn apart by the Nazis. He spent three years in concentration camps in Poland before he was liberated from Bergen-Belsen in April 1945. He weighed 75 pounds and by his account was ``more dead than alive.''

He spent two years in a Swedish hospital recuperating and dealing with the deaths of six of seven siblings and 19 nieces and nephews.

``It just never goes away, as much as you try to live a normal life,'' said Goldstein, 71. ``It haunts you. The worst is not having a family - brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews.''

Wendy Marsh of West Los Angeles brought her daughter, Leah, 11, to the event. ``I think it's an important piece of history that our kids should know about and not forget, and we as adults should not forget,'' Marsh said.

At other events in Los Angeles, Clifton Truman Daniel was thanked by hundreds of Southland Jews for a single act of courage by his grandfather, President Truman, in 1948: recognizing Israel as an independent state.

``It makes me feel like crying,'' Daniel said at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. ``It's my grandfather who did this, but they still reach out for me.''

The Associated Press contributed to this story.