TIME FOR REMEMBRANCE '30S LOVE STORY LIVES BEYOND HOLOCAUST, PAIR'S DEATHS.

Byline: Amy Raisin Staff Writer

Years before the unflinching documentaries and Academy Award-winning films - even before the term ``Holocaust'' entered the American lexicon - a petite woman with an involuntary smile unwittingly forced a nation of TV viewers to see beyond the grainy newsreels depicting mounds of starved corpses.

Like many survivors of the Nazi campaign to wipe out the Jewish people in World War II, Hanna Bloch Kohner is gone, as is her husband, Walter. But their story lives on through the words of the couple's only child, Julie Kohner, and in a 1953 episode of ``This is Your Life'' - in which Hanna Kohner became the first Holocaust survivor to tell her story on national television.

As congregants fill synagogues and light candles Tuesday for Yom HaShoah - Holocaust Remembrance Day - to honor the 6 million Jews who perished, Julie Kohner will be in Georgia recounting her parents' love story so younger generations never forget.

For the last 13 years, schools, temples and churches across the country have welcomed Kohner and her 80-minute program, which focuses on the Holocaust and her parents' ordeal. The vintage TV episode and an autobiography her parents published in 1984 are the centerpieces of her program.

``I was about 12 when I started asking why I didn't have grandparents like my friends,'' the 47-year-old wife and mother said recently. ``My mother was very age-appropriate with me, telling me about what happened to our family - and to her.''

Her mother, born Hanna Bloch in the German border town of Teplitz- Schonau in Czechoslovakia, survived four concentration camps before being liberated by American troops in May 1945.

With precious artifacts, a copy of the ``This Is Your Life'' episode and her parents' autobiography, ``Hanna and Walter: A Love Story,'' Kohner has put a human face on the Holocaust for thousands since 1990.

``I know it sounds strange, putting the words ``Holocaust'' and ``love story'' together. But that's really what my parents' story is about,'' she said.

In 1935 at age 15, Hanna Bloch met Walter Kohner, five years her senior, at the local ice skating rink. Within three years the Nazis had begun their ``final solution to the Jewish question,'' uprooting entire families.

Walter was able to secure a visa to join his brothers in Los Angeles and promised to send for Hanna once he was settled.

The young sweethearts kissed goodbye on a train station platform in the fall of 1938.

They were reunited seven years later. An emaciated Hanna had managed to survive.

When Ralph Edwards, the host of the popular TV show ``This Is Your Life,'' devoted an episode to Hanna, it was the first time the program strayed from its celebrity format.

In keeping with the era, the show is framed with carefully scripted music, sponsor placements and the stiff decor popular in television's early years. Once Hanna is seated in the ``chair of honor,'' she is greeted by people from her past.

Marilyn Rosenthal attended Kohner's program at Temple Adat Elohim in Thousand Oaks recently and was struck by Hanna's unscripted emotions.

``When her friend from the (concentration) camp came out, there was a smiling face over a mask of horror,'' the 69-year-old grandmother said. ``You can read between the lines. You knew there was a lot more pain than they allowed or wanted to show.''

The most powerful moment comes when Edwards tells the audience that Hanna's brother was the only other member of her family who survived the death camps. A doctor in Israel by 1953, Friedl Bloch had not seen his sister since before the war.

Their embrace stays with viewers long after the credits roll.

After U.S. troops liberated Austria's Mauthausen camp in May 1945, Hanna wrote her Walter saying she had survived. She could provide the soldier helping her with only this address for Walter Kohner: ``Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles.''

His brothers in Los Angeles somehow got the letter and forwarded it to Walter, a U.S. soldier stationed in Luxembourg. His search for Hanna Bloch ended in Amsterdam.

They were married in Luxembourg on Oct. 24, 1945, and moved to Los Angeles the next summer. Hanna gave birth to their daughter, Julie, in 1955.

Julie Kohner and her husband, Stephen Greenberg, live in her parents' home in Bel-Air with their 11-year-old son, Danny.

Walter died in 1996 and is buried in a Hollywood cemetery next to his wife, who died in 1990 at the age of 70.

When Kohner speaks to religious congregations and school audiences, she talks about growing up as the only child of Holocaust survivors.

``My mother was very, very overprotective of me,'' Kohner said. ``But as I got older, I understood why. There were no goodbyes (for European Jews). There were no last embraces. Someone would go off to work, and you never saw them again. That's something that we should never forget.''

``Hanna and Walter: A Love Story'' can be purchased through Voices of the Generations, at jkohner(at)earthlink.net.

IF YOU GO: These are dates and locations of upcoming Voices of the Generations presentations in Southern California:

--May 8 Temple Ner Ami, Camarillo

--May 14 Temple Ner Maarav, Encino

--July 19 Los Angeles Public Library, downtown Los Angeles 

--Nov. 2 Hillel Santa Barbara

For information about the program, go to http://home.earthlink.net/[ordinal indicator, feminine]jkohner/index.htLine is overdrawn m1

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Photo:

(1 -- color) Julie Kohner of Los Angeles shows a photo of her parents, Walter and Hanna Kohner, whose love story has put human faces on the Holocaust for thousands since it was told on prime-time U.S. television in 1953.

Andy Holzman/Staff Photographer

(2) ``This Is Your Life'' TV host Ralph Edwards, left, watches in 1953 as Nazi death-camps survivor Hanna Kohner sobs in her brother's arms at their reunion. Her husband, Walter, also watches.

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