Lydia Lebovic holds the tinted photograph taken when she was turning 16. Within weeks of her birthday, Nazis had separated Lebovic from all of her immediate family members. Photo by John Locher.

At the arrival ramp to the Auschwitz death camp, Lydia Lebovic waved goodbye to her mother and younger sister, though she didn't know yet it was goodbye forever.

Lebovic was 16, the year was 1944. Camp prisoners who helped with arrivals had told the crowd that families would reunite. It was a lie that helped newcomers move along peacefully.

A resident of Sun City Summerlin since 1997, Czechoslovakian-born Lebovic is now 78 and an ardent lecturer for Holocaust education.

Her mother and sister went to the gas chamber, but she -- along with a brother and second sister -- managed to be selected for forced labor for the Nazis. The three went to different camps, but somehow all happened to be sent to the same one, Bergen-Belsen, before liberation in spring 1945.

Lebovic's activism today is a 180-degree turnaround from her stance immediately after the war. She and her husband, William -- both Jews with light hair and fair coloring -- vowed when they migrated from Europe to Chile, to never again publicize their Jewish identities. If their firstborn was a boy, they would not circumcise him. "I was proud of my Jewishness. However, I was afraid," Lebovic admits.

She grew up near the city of Uzhhorod, in a turbulent corner of Czechoslovakia that became part of Hungary in 1938, went under Russian control after World War II and is today part of Ukraine. "We had about 30 percent of Jewish people in that 40,000 population town. The neighbors were very much integrated. There were no ghettoes. We were all friends," she recalls.

Lebovic's father died when she was a toddler; her mother was raising four children alone when the Nazis occupied Hungary in 1944. "Your friend of yesterday became your enemy of today" is how Lebovic describes the sudden change in policies and attitudes toward Jews.

Jews in her section of town went to a temporary ghetto created overnight at a local lumberyard. From there she and her family were among the Jews packed into cattle cars, ostensibly bound south, to work on Hungarian farms.

The family knew something was amiss as soon as her mother peered through the train slats and spotted signs written in Polish, indicating the train had taken them north to Poland instead.

After a German officer separated her family members at Auschwitz, Lebovic kept searching for them. A hardened prisoner pointed to the chimney of the camp's crematorium and said her mother had gone up in smoke. Another prisoner, however, gave her a word of hope: The way to get out alive was to qualify for a labor camp. Within three weeks she and a girl cousin were on their way, selected for labor in the port city of Hamburg, Germany.

Her female labor crew lived in a warehouse near the piers. Their job was to clean rubble in the bombed-out city. "They needed the material to rebuild. So we recycled bricks. They didn't have any metal so we were cleaning the rust off the metals that were the support columns of the building(s)."

When the Germans moved Lebovic to Bergen-Belsen in early 1945, it was only a month before Allied liberation. Her older sister, it turned out, had arrived several months earlier and was barely alive due to reduced rations. Lebovic describes their surprise reunion in a barrack: "She was on the floor. She was taller than me, but she was down to 75 pounds. She could not get up to greet me."

After her liberation from the camp. Lebovic made a brief trip to her family home, to verify her mother and other sister were not returning. Then she joined her surviving siblings in Prague. By November 1945, she and William -- her brother's boyhood friend, also living in Prague -- had married and were anxious to leave Europe forever. They went from consulate to consulate, eager to find a country whose immigration quota wasn't full. The first country willing to take them was Chile, so they emigrated there in 1947. William made a career in photography and camera supplies. In 1963, they left Chile for southern California because they foresaw the coming socialist regime of Salvador Allende.

Lydia and William have one daughter, Sonia. Raising a child was emotionally difficult, Lydia Lebovic admits. "It was three years after (the) concentration camp, with a (stressful) new life. I had no teenage years, it was robbed away from me."

The young parents sent Sonia to organized Jewish activities in Chile but didn't participate themselves. They revealed little of their own wartime lives to their daughter. "It wasn't so much protecting her. It was I who was protecting myself," Lydia says, a refrain that is common among first-generation Holocaust survivors.

When the family moved to the United States in 1963, Lebovic's older sister, already living in Los Angeles, confronted her about retreating from Judaism. "Don't you think your mother's turning in her grave?" Lebovic recalls her sister accusing. "You are against your own heritage, what happened to you?" In the years since, both Lebovics have returned to celebrating their religious roots.

But it took more than 50 years for the couple to come to grips with the notion of Holocaust reparations. Since World War II, various European governments, industries and individual corporations have taken steps at different times to make amends for wartime wrongdoing or acquisition of Jewish assets. Multiple funds exist today that offer limited sums of money to specific classes of individuals who can prove they were harmed.

For decades, Lebovic believed taking money would trivialize the loss of her relatives. In 1996, she reversed her position and applied for restitution. It could at least compensate her for her forced labor, if not the deaths of her loved ones, she decided.

In 1997, she received approximately $7,500 for all the prior years she was eligible. Since then she receives about $300 a month. U.S. courts, she notes, sometimes solve struggles over principle by a symbolic award of $1. "The United States makes us think differently. We (as a society) are geared toward money. We respect money a lot."