JERUSALEM - A museum painting of a barefoot girl holding up a pair of shoes led Bracha Ghilai to break a half-century of silence about what happened to her in the concentration camp barrack.

She saw herself in that girl, taking her dead sister Shari's shoes for protection against the cold.

"Forgive me, my dear sister, forgive me Shari, but I wanted so much to live, and the shoes symbolized life for me," Ghilai later wrote in a short story titled "The Shoes."

As the world marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz today, there will still be survivors of that camp and others who wake up screaming in the middle of the night and still can't speak about their trauma.

Some, however, are determined to keep telling their stories - concerned that memories will fade with time, aware that the number of living survivors is dwindling, and fearful that history might repeat itself.

Ghilai couldn't bring herself to talk about her experiences in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps until several years ago, when she visited Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust museum. There she was moved by the picture of the shoeless girl standing beside a naked woman. "And then I started to speak. This is what opened me."

And this is what happened to Ruth Brand: Arriving in Auschwitz from Hungary on May 18, 1944, she was immediately separated from her family, and the German guards promised the 16-year-old girl she would soon be reunited with them.

Her fellow inmates laughed at her.

"Don't you see the chimneys? Don't you see that's where they're burning your people now?" she remembers them telling her.

Her parents, brother, sister and grandmother were gassed that same night.

She recalls a Jewish doctor named Gisela Pearl who performed abortions to save pregnant women from extermination or experimentation, including one in which mothers were tied to beds so that they couldn't care for their newborns.

The experiments were "to see how long it takes for the woman to go crazy ... and to see how long it takes for the infant to die without food," Brand said.

In Auschwitz, death was always close and survival could depend on a fluke.

Ghilai said she survived one "selection" - when the Nazis weeded out the weak and sick for extermination - by pleading with a fellow inmate to open a barracks window when she was running a temperature. She crawled through the window to safety.

Martha Weiss was 10 when she arrived at Auschwitz in 1944, and like all children too young to work, she was selected for death. But the Soviet army was approaching and the SS diverted her group from the gas chamber after Soviet planes flew over. She said she and her older sister, Eva, spent their last month in camp doctor Josef Mengele's notorious experimental ward.

"He would tell little children to sit on his lap and tell them to call him 'uncle,' 'uncle Mengele' and sometimes give them a sweet and in the same tone of voice that he said 'I'm uncle Mengele' he would tell the officials to give them a lethal injection," Weiss said.

Martha and Eva Weiss were among an estimated 5,000 mostly sick inmates still in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death complex when it was liberated.

The Nazis began evacuating Auschwitz 10 days before the Soviets arrived, forcing some 60,000 prisoners into the Polish forests on "death marches" during which many thousands were murdered or died of cold, hunger and exhaustion.

Jack Handeli, a Greek Jew sent to Auschwitz when he was 15, was on such a march.

"They cannot walk anymore ... So you can hear the shooting," Handeli recalls of the marchers. "They are all shot and in this beautiful white snow you see the red blood of those poor people ... "I walked like some kind of robot that does not think anything," Handeli said.

Living with the memories and the nightmares is a daily struggle for the estimated one million Holocaust survivors still alive today.

Ruth Brand says her four sons, 11 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren are "the revenge I have on all our enemies who wanted to destroy me, destroyed my entire family, destroyed a third of my people."