For nearly a decade, Pacific Palisades resident Anna Sorotzkin had thought about writing a book about her experiences during the Holocaust, but it was a trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., in 2005 that convinced her.   ’I realized how important it is,’ Sorotzkin told the Palisadian-Post. ‘I wanted my offspring and their offspring to know what had happened. This can happen to any people, not just the Jewish people.’   She also wanted to memorialize her grandfather and 13 aunts, uncles and cousins whom she lost in the Holocaust.   Originally, she wrote the book only for her family, but after completing it, she realized that her story could teach others about the Holocaust. She will now speak about her self-published book, ‘Panni’s Quest for Freedom,’ on Thursday, August 19 at 7:30 p.m. at Village Books on Swarthmore.   Sorotzkin spent about a year writing her autobiography (edited by Palisadian Reeva Mandelbaum Cohen). She not only had to recapitulate the details of her early life, but also had to re-educate herself on Hungarian history.   ’When I left, I was angry,’ said Sorotzkin, who escaped from Hungary to the United States after the 1956 revolution. ‘I almost mentally erased everything about Hungary.’   Born in Budapest in 1932, Sorotzkin recalls living comfortably in an apartment overlooking the Danube with her parents, Paul and Ilona Weisz Fulop, and older brother, Egon, until 1941. At that point, the government required Jews to turn in luxury items such as radios and bicycles, and a year later, prohibited them from attending public schools.   ’It hit very hard when I had to give up my dog, my little fox terrier, Suzy,’ Sorotzkin wrote in her book.   After the Nazis invaded Hungary in March 1944, Jews were forced to wear yellow stars, abide by a curfew and live in ‘yellow-star houses.’ Sorotzkin’s apartment complex was declared as such, so the family could remain.   In October 1944, her father and brother were taken to Mauthausen, a concentration camp in Austria, to work in the stone quarries. Sorotzkin’s mother was also taken by soldiers, but was able to escape and return to the apartment, where Sorotzkin was being taken care of by relatives.   When the yellow-star houses were ordered closed, Sorotzkin and her mother moved into a Swiss-protected house and later to a ghetto in early December 1944.   In the ghetto, Jews ages 16 to 45 were collected for work, and those older and younger were sent to Auschwitz. Since Sorotzkin was 12, she and her mother lied about her age.   ’We were fortunate to get away with it,’ Sorotzkin said. ‘I strongly feel that it was our way of resisting them. Some people ask why the Jews went quietly to their death, but the Jewish people resisted in any way we could. There were many small acts, whether it be hiding behind a door or sneaking from one group to the other to stay together.’   One morning, she and her mother were ordered to march toward a waiting train to be transported to a concentration camp, when Raoul Gustav Wallenberg, the first secretary to the Swedish Legation in Budapest, pulled them out of line and took them to a Swedish apartment, where they were reunited with her mother’s parents and uncle. Sorotzkin now wonders if Wallenberg selected them randomly or if her uncle arranged it.   Wallenberg rescued about 100,000 Jews in Budapest by issuing them Swedish identification papers.   ’Another main purpose of publishing my book was to publicize the story of Wallenberg,’ Sorotzkin said. ‘He was my savior.’ Shortly thereafter, the Russian Army arrived to fight the Germans, and she and her mother decided it would be safe to return to their apartment.   ’They saved our lives,’ Sorotzkin said of the Russian soldiers. ‘But they also acted cruelly to the population.’   One night, a Russian soldier grabbed her mother, intending to rape her. Throughout the war, Sorotzkin had carried a leather case containing a gold Mont Blanc fountain pen, a watch and a few gold charms under her clothing. Hoping to save her mother, she gave her treasures to the soldier.   ’When he looked inside, he gave out a happy yell and ran out,’ Sorotzkin wrote. ‘Fortunately, he totally forgot about my mother.’   Sorotzkin explained that she had risked being shot by the Nazis for carrying that case, but she never once considered discarding it.   ’It was like some voice up there was telling me to keep it for that moment,’ Sorotzkin told the Post.   By March 1945, the Russian Army had defeated the Germans. Four months later, Sorotzkin’s father and brother returned; both were about 6′ tall, but each weighed less than 80 pounds.   Her father recovered and resumed work as a lawyer, while Sorotzkin went back to school. They never discussed the tragic events.   ’We were just numb afterwards,’ Sorotzkin said. ‘It’s not like today, with psychiatrists and psychologists helping you process your thoughts. After the war, the adults were busy rebuilding and the children were left to deal with their own thoughts and feelings.’   The relative normalcy did not last long as a Communist government soon took root.   ’It was really hard to have to live through the Holocaust and then be confronted with Communism,’ Sorotzkin said, so she and the family escaped across the border to Austria and immigrated to the United States in winter 1956.   Sorotzkin studied at Penn State University and moved to Santa Paula in 1958 to work for the Burpee Seed Company. She met her husband Joshua, who worked for Shell Oil as a chemical engineer, and they married in 1959. That same year, Sorotzkin became a teacher, working at Oak View Elementary in Ventura.   They raised three children, Ruth Mandelbaum and Aliza Sorotzkin, both of whom live today in Pacific Palisades, and Dalia Attia of Studio City. In 1986, Sorotzkin commuted from Ventura to Pacific Palisades to teach at Village School.   In 1989, Sorotzkin returned to Budapest with her mother, whom she described as nostalgic. Sorotzkin, however, said she didn’t experience the same sentiment because she hardly has any memories of the good times before the war. She has since returned twice with two of her five grandchildren to show them their ancestral home.   Sorotzkin, who has lived with her husband in the Palisades Highlands for 14 years, says she mostly feels fortunate for the life she has built for herself in the United States.    ‘I have always emphasized to my students to be grateful for all the freedoms we have here,’ said Sorotzkin, who retired from teaching in 1991.r

In its effort to preserve the stories of Holocaust survivors for the next generation, Chabad of Pacific Palisades recently invited several of them to speak as part of a class called ‘Beyond Never Again.’   ’We have a moral obligation to hear the stories,’ Rabbi Shlomo Zacks said, noting that the survivors provide a personal and spiritual perspective of the mass genocide that occurred.   Beba Leventhal, a Pacific Palisades resident who has lived on Enchanted Way for 45 years, was among those to share her story.   In June 1941, the Nazis captured Beba’s hometown of Vilna in Poland (now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania). Beba recalls that many Jewish people fled across the border to Russia. Her family of six, however, decided to stay because her father, Simeon Epstein, had a secure position as a bank manager.   ’We did not think it was going to be so bad; we did not expect the extent of the tragedy,’ said Beba, who was 18 at the time.   At first, the Nazis required Beba and the other Jews to wear an armband with the Jewish star and abide by a curfew. Jews could not be seen outside between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. Beba explained that the Nazis took the curfew seriously and would kill Jews out past curfew and leave their dead bodies in the street with a note that listed the time of death as a warning to others.   After a few months, the Nazis forced Beba and her family to move into a ghetto, comprising seven narrow streets enclosed by a fence.   ’They took the poorest part of the city and assigned it to us,’ Beba said. ‘The most we could carry with us was a suitcase. When we arrived at the apartments, it looked as if they had been recently abandoned. There were unfinished meals on the tables.’   Beba’s family lived in a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment with 20 other people. ‘We had to sleep on the floor, and there was one toilet,’ she said, pausing. ‘You can imagine.’   She lived in the ghetto for two years, working many jobs: distributing ration cards, working in gardens around the city, and cleaning and stocking shelves at a supply house.   ’We never had a lot to eat,’ Beba said, noting that when she worked in the gardens, she would hide food under her clothing. ‘It was extremely dangerous. If they caught you, they beat you.’   Beba recalls that every day, the Nazis would take away the elderly and the children, and they would never be heard from again. She lost her entire family: her father, mother, Malka; younger sister, Esia; and two younger brothers, Motia and Chaim. During those two years in the ghetto, Beba escaped for about a month to live with family friends on their farm. The family hid her on the second floor of their house, but with the harvest workers coming daily, Beba became concerned for the family.   ’I decided that it was too dangerous for them, so I returned to the ghetto,’ she said.   When the ghetto was disbanded, Beba was forced onto a crowded freight train and taken to a concentration camp. ‘We didn’t know what was going to happen to us,’ Beba said. ‘We thought it was the end.’   Beba spent the next two years of her life in three concentration camps: Kaiserwald, Stutthof and Torun, a subcamp of Stutthof.   ’Most of the time I dug ditches,’ Beba said. ‘We used to joke that we were digging graves for ourselves.’   She also had to carry rocks in wheelbarrows from point A to point B. ‘It was busy work to keep us very tired,’ she said, noting that she received a bowl of soup and a piece of bread for dinner and bread and coffee for breakfast. ‘We were skinny like a pencil.’   In spring 1945, the British liberated Beba, and she was hospitalized in a German military hospital for several months. She then traveled by ship with other survivors to Swedish hospitals in Helsingborg and Stockholm. She was diagnosed with typhus and suffered from the consequences of malnutrition.   She reconnected with her father’s older brother, who lived in Brooklyn, and he was instrumental in bringing her to the United States. When she arrived in Brooklyn, she took classes to learn English and worked for YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.   Beba met her husband, Lee, through her uncle, and they married on August 5, 1948 in San Antonio, Texas. They then moved to Los Angeles, so that Lee could earn his master’s degree in chemical engineering at USC. Lee, who was born in Poland and immigrated with his family to Mexico City as a child, worked for North American Aviation and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.   The Leventhals moved to Pacific Palisades in 1965 and raised their two children, Mary Ellen, a psychiatrist who lives in Santa Monica, and Michael, now an attorney who lives in West Los Angeles. They have two grandchildren, Noah, 16, and Ariel, 14.   Beba earned her degree in social work from Antioch University, and she worked for the Jewish Family Service for 17 years as a translator and social worker.   Since the war, Beba has returned to Vilnius, but she discovered that her hometown was a completely different place. The thriving Jewish culture that once existed had disappeared.   ’Every day, I think of that particular time period,’ Beba said. ‘When you are incarcerated for four years, all the memories are bad.’

Appearing at a fundraising event to benefit the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute’s Women’s Heart Center on August 4, singer and actress Barbra Steisand helped highlight the fact that heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in the United States. Dr. C. Noel Bairey Merz, a Pacific Palisades resident and director of the Women’s Heart Health center, told an audience gathered at the new Bloomingdale’s in Santa Monica Place that 500,000 women die each year from heart disease, and that surprisingly, 20 percent of them are typically in their 40s or younger. ‘Even though heart disease is less prevalent in young women than their older counterparts, it is still the leading cause of death in young women,’ said Merz, who received the McCue Woman Cardiologist of the Year award in 2009. ‘Yet less than 10 percent of women think that heart disease will impact them.’ In the United States in 2006, all cardiovascular diseases combined claimed the lives of 432,709 females while all forms of cancer combined to kill 269,819 females (including 40,821 from breast cancer).   Only in the last 10 years has it become common knowledge that there is a difference between men’s and women’s bodies and diseases, like those of the heart. Women experience different symptoms then men and need different diagnostic tests.   ’During the Bush years [2001-2008], there were cuts for women’s health research,’ said Merz, who had to actively search for benefactors to help fund this research and an education campaign. She met Streisand, who is committed to women’s health causes, and Streisand agreed to provide support by setting up a $5 million Barbara Streisand Heart Research and Education Program endowment at Cedars-Sinai.   As Streisand reiterated last Wednesday night at Bloomingdale’s, ‘We’re behind in research for women. Heart disease presents itself differently in men than women. It’s not just a man’s disease anymore, and once I learned these facts, I met with a brilliant woman, Dr. Merz, so we could make a difference.’   Merz would like to find an additional $20 million endowment in order to insure her Women’s Heart Center ‘will not have periods of feast or famine,’ and research won’t have to depend on the financial whims of the federal government.   Basically, in terms of heart disease, both sexes suffer large-artery blockage, which means the artery lining becomes hardened and swollen with plaque (calcium and fatty deposits and abnormal inflammatory cells), minimizing or stopping blood flow. An angiography is used to diagnosis this condition.   Unlike men, the plaque lining in women is smooth and even, which means the condition isn’t diagnosed through an angiogram and, quite often, is misdiagnosed.   ’Symptoms in women can include persistent chest pain or pressure,’ Merz said. ‘Patients describe it as a constricting band or ‘elephant on my chest.’ They have fatigue and shortness of breath. Often the women have already had an angiogram and were told that nothing is wrong.’   Additionally, more women are likely to suffer microvessel disease in which the small arteries fail to respond when demands for blood to the heart are higher. This can lead to a starving to the heart tissue of oxygen and the results are the same as plugged up arteries, resulting in a heart attack.   Why do more women have small-artery disease? Women have smaller arteries than men and although size might be part of it, more probably it is sex related. Data is lacking because tests that have been developed over the years have been geared towards the male and large-artery blockage.   Merz is also excited about the latest stem-cell research and the impact this may have on women’s heart disease. Stem cells are considered a person’s master cells because they have the ability to develop into any type of cell and they can self-renew.   Eduardo Marb’n, director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, is conducting an ongoing clinical trial in which patients who suffered recent heart attacks undergo a minimally invasive biopsy to retrieve a peppercorn-sized piece of heart muscle.’Scientists then use it to grow stem cells in a lab.’A month later, millions of the patient’s own stem cells are re-inserted into the patient’s heart via a catheter in an effort to repair muscle damage to the heart.’   ’This is an exciting area; it has so much potential,’ Merz said.   ’Research is time consuming and one has to think outside the box,’ she continued. ‘Maybe one in 10 ideas will work, which means you have to be merciless in your persistence.’ That also means that research is expensive, which is another reason she’s thankful for Streisand’s endowment.   Currently, Merz is treating a woman in her 30s who has three children and has had numerous heart attacks. ‘They (attacks) are in the process of ‘knocking’ her heart out,’ Merz said. ‘She will likely need a heart transplant.’   With the latest stem-cell research, there’s hope that eventually a heart transplant may be an option that is no longer used. Instead, the stem cells will be taken from the patient, ‘souped up and corrected in a Petri dish,’ and put back in the person, Merz said. ‘There are reasons to be optimistic.’   The $1,000-a-plate dinner benefiting the Women’s Heart Center at Cedars-Sinai was underwritten by Bloomingdale’s and hosted by chairman and CEO Michael Gould at the company’s new store at Santa Monica Place. Bloomingdale’s will donate 100 percent of the proceeds from ticket sales to the Center.

Martin Sugarman’s photographs and paintings, contrasting his quiet views of Santa Monica Bay and his careful documentation of social conflicts around the world, will go on display this weekend through September at g169, the new gallery at 169 W. Channel Rd. in Santa Monica Canyon.   A reception for the artist will be held on Saturday, August 14 from 5 to 8 p.m. The public is invited.   For the past two decades, Sugarman has been painting his beloved Pacific Ocean from the vantage point of a man who has lived most of his life close to the beach, including Santa Monica Canyon and on a sailboat in Marina del Rey.   Sugarman is a professional photographer with a Ph.D. in sociology.’ His publications include ‘God Be With You: War in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina’; ‘Kashmir: Paradise Lost’; ‘Storm over Cuba’; ‘War Above the Clouds: Siachen Glacier’; and ‘Speak Palestine, Speak Again.’

‘Elektra,’ the fifth-annual outdoor theatrical production at the Getty Villa, opens September 9 in the Villa’s outdoor amphitheater.   One of Sophocles’ most elegantly structured and emotionally wrenching works, ‘Elektra’ will feature Annie Purcell in the title role, Olympia Dukakis in the role of the Chorus, Pamela Reed as Clytemnestra and Manoel Felciano as Orestes.   Directed by Carey Perloff, artistic director of the American Conservatory Theater (ACT) in San Francisco, the Getty Villa production debuts a new translation by British playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker.   The story of ‘Elektra’ carries forward the tragic history of the House of Atreus. Years after the bloody murder of King Agamemnon, his widow, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, rule the city with an iron hand, while their daughter Elektra prays to the gods that her exiled brother, Orestes, might return to avenge their father’s death.   Believed to have been written near the end of Sophocles’ life, ‘Elektra’ embodies the playwright’s most profound portrait of the endurance of the human spirit, brilliantly ablaze with the warring, inner flames of hope and despair.   ’Elektra is a play about willful memory and the damage that happens to someone who refuses to forget,’ says Perloff, who grew up in Pacific Palisades and received a B.A. in classics and comparative literature from Stanford University. She is celebrating her 18th season as artistic director of Tony Award-winning ACT in San Francisco, where she is known for directing innovative productions of classics, championing new writing for the theater and creating international collaborations with such artists as Robert Wilson and Tom Stoppard.   This year’s Getty performance offers a particularly rich experience for theatergoers, as it simultaneously complements The Art of Ancient Greek Theater (August 26 through January 3), the first exhibition in the United States in over 50 years to focus on the artistic representation of theatrical performance in ancient Greece. The exhibition will be open at the Villa before each evening’s performance of ‘Elektra.’   Performances will be held Thursdays through Saturdays, at 8 p.m., through October 2. For tickets ($42; $38 for students and seniors), call (310) 440-7300 or go online to www.getty.edu.   A two-day symposium on the historical context of theatrical performance and its relation to the creation of some of the most vivid art from the ancient world is set for September 24-25 in the Getty Villa Auditorium. On Saturday afternoon, director Carey Perloff and Professor Helene Foley of Columbia University join curator Mary Louise Hart of the J. Paul Getty Museum for a conversation about the process of adapting and directing ‘Elektra’ for the contemporary stage.   Advance registration required.