“'A’ stands for Auschwitz,” said Dolly “Shaundy” Rabinovich, reluctantly baring her forearm to show the little blurred blue tattoo put there 77 years ago by the tattooist of Auschwitz.

Along with a group of holocaust survivors, Rabinovich, looking impeccable, fit, and a lot younger than her years, was enjoying a visit to the Hudson Valley Resort (formerly “the Granite”) on the Shawangunk Ridge when the Shawangunk Journal caught up with them. The trip is a regular one organized by Nachas Health Group every summer.

These now elderly people are a fragment of a lost world. They were born in Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. They were Jewish and after 1939 their world descended into one of the darkest hells humanity has ever created.

Most of them were sent to Auschwitz, which was both an extermination center, killing 1.2 million Jews and another half million other victims of German Nazism, and the center of a galaxy of slave labor camps and mines in southern Poland.

But the Holocaust was a continent-wide genocide. Lillian Spierer, who spoke to the Shawangunk Journal right after breakfast in the resort’s enormous dining room, began the war in Antwerp, Belgium. Invaded in 1940 during the Wehrmacht’s campaign to defeat France and drive the British off the continent via Dunkirk, Belgium fell under the dark shadow of the Gestapo soon after.

“I was very young,” she recalled, “A child of four or five, but I remember we were helped by a gentile family. We were hidden in their house. We were told, if we were outside and came back and saw the door was left open, to stay away, because that meant the Gestapo were there.”

Later she was smuggled across the border into France and was hidden again by “gentiles” during the war years. Always they existed just a moment away from exposure, arrest, and a train to the near certain death awaiting them in southern Poland.

For the reporters, talking to these lively, elderly people, there was a sense of unreality to the scene. The Hudson Valley Resort is in the midst of a refit. Yossi Zablocki, a veteran hotel operator, who is now in charge, said, “We are breathing life back into the Catskills. The model is to update the old classic resort with modern touches.”

A row of Segways lines the front desk. Outside there are bright red “bouncy houses” for the kids, and the famous — and enormous — swimming pool. “It’s a cruise ship on land,” said Zablocki. “Activities for every age group.”

But while cheerful people are moving through the vast lobby, and kids are running to and fro, we are talking to people, who when they were kids, were caught up in Operation Reinhard, named for the SS General Reinhard Heydrich who drafted the plan for the “Final Solution,” which was to be the mass murder of all the Jews in Europe, along with tens of millions of others who were not white Aryans from northern Europe.

By the time the Jews of Hungary and Romania were seized by the SS and shipped to Auschwitz, several million people, most of them Jewish, had already been gassed or shot to death in pursuit of the racial purity goals of the Third Reich.

We spoke to one incredibly lucky survivor in the resort’s grand dining hall. David Einhorn was older than the others back then. At 18 he was torn from his family, all of whom were gassed at Auschwitz Birkenau. Einhorn was judged good for heavy labor and was sent to a coal mine about 15 miles west of the main camp. He recounted a tale of fantastic horror, leavened with strokes of what could have been divine intervention.

Coal mining is hard work, but removing a quota of several cubic meters of rock and coal every day on a diet of a pint or two of vegetable soup and a piece of bread the size of your hand, turns it into a brutal exercise in pushing a human being to the limits of existence.

“We worked 10 hours a day,” he told us, “but if you didn’t reach your quota you stayed there working until you did.”

Failure meant a bullet to the head.

One day, just before Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of Atonement, he saw a cabbage fall off a truck and roll to his feet. He ate half of it then and half the next day. He could only wonder about that act of providence. But then a second story seemed to confirm his suspicion that a deity had marked him out. “The dynamite went off like usual, and it brought down rock from the ceiling, and a big piece fell on my head. I was buried under rocks.”

They pulled him out and the SS overseer was amazed that Einhorn was still alive. Fate, the war, and perhaps a deity, wasn’t finished with David Einhorn. As the winter of 1945 came to a conclusion, so the Germans, now in full retreat from the Red Army, began the infamous “death marches,” driving their slave laborers west, into Germany itself.

“The day they were sending everyone out, I fell sick. I had a temperature. I was in a bed at the infirmary. An SS officer came and looked me over. They were going to send me away, but he saw that I was shaking and trembling and he decided to leave me there.”

He was still there a few days later — January 27, 1945 — when the Russians arrived and discovered the horrifying remains of the main camp, including hundreds of emaciated people left behind by the SS. Einhorn survived and traveled back to Transylvania to seek out family members. Eventually he came to the United States to make a new life.

Meanwhile, other survivors were on that death march. Dolly Rabinovich, who described herself as “from an upper-class orthodox Jewish family named Spitz,” with a successful flour merchant father, who had a sideline in wine making, was staggering through the snow of Silesia in wooden clogs with a thin cotton shirt as her only clothing.

A year before, in March 1944, the Germans had finally occupied already fascist Hungary to stave off an attempt at a separate peace by the Hungarians. The war appeared lost, but the Final Solution carried on relentlessly. Thus, 550,000 Hungarian Jews were rounded up and shipped to Auschwitz and the waiting gas chambers.

The Rabinovich family was among them. Dolly Rabinovich was a young pre-teen. “The gestapo shoved us in, 80 to a 100 at a time into the cattle wagons like animals. They bolted the doors with metal bars that locked us in. There was only room for standing or sitting tight packed on the floor. We took turns sleeping in sitting positions. An elderly man died in our wagon; they covered his body so the children would not be frightened.”

At Auschwitz she witnessed her father try to save his tefillin (religious items) and prayer shawl. The SS guard tore it loose and tossed them on the floor. Rabinovich heard the guard snarl to her father, “Where you are going you will not need it.”

Then came the “Selektion” in which Doctor Mengele scrutinized the Jews as they were driven towards him on the platform. Mengele sent most of them to the left, to the gas chambers.

Rabinovich and her mother were sent to the left, but she recounts that her mother turned to her, in the chaos with people crowded around, guards yelling, children crying, and asked where her sisters were. Dolly said they “went to the other side, the right side.”

Her mother, possibly understanding the grim truth, “let go of my hand” she remembers, and said “go run after them.”

Rabinovich puts it down to divine intervention by “Ha Shem” the Jewish word for God, that she was not seen by Mengele or the SS guards as she obeyed and ran after her sisters.

“Nobody was allowed to cross from left to right. Ha Shem and my mother saved my life.”

That was the last time she saw her mother.

Soon her head was shaved, she was wearing a striped uniform and was tattooed. “I was now called A6889.”

The hair from prisoners in these camps was then used to line the boots of U-Boat crews.

While Einhorn dug coal, Rabinovich and others slaved at a peculiarly grim task. “We were assigned to work at the Brezanka railroad area where piles of Jewish luggage had been built up.”

She recalled the sheer scale of the work involved.

“Mountains and mountains of valises, boxes, bundles, packages filled with personal belongings.”

They separated the items — clothing, shoes, fur coats, pocket books and all the silver items, gold and other valuables too — into separate bins.

They received the same watery soup, the hard black bread, and lived cold, starving, one mistake away from going to the gas chamber themselves, until January 18, 1945, when they were pulled out and sent in a long line marching north and west, deeper into Hitler’s Reich. The Russian Red Army was approaching from the east and the Germans were hiding their crimes. The other extermination centers (Vernichtunlager) — Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno, Maidanek — were all erased as much as possible from the landscape. Great death pits were dug up and decomposing bodies burned on pyres built over steel rails.

Rabinovich and her sisters marched. “The road and ditches were full of young dead bodies. I was frozen and tired and wanted to lie down. My sisters, knowing what the guards would do if I lay down, held me up and literally dragged me for the rest of the march.”

They covered 250 miles that way and reached the Ravensbruck Labor Camp in Prussia, the largest women-only Nazi camp, which operated from 1939 to the end of the war.

The horror continued. Ravensbruck acted like Auschwitz as the center of a galaxy of slave camps, with disturbing accents of banal normality attached. For instance, Siemens Halske (today part of Siemens Engineering) had 20 workshops there, producing electrical components for warplanes, submarines and tanks.

More than 120,000 women and children passed through the camp and tens of thousands were killed there, some in gruesome medical experiments.

Rabinovich recalled only that when she woke up that first day. “There were dead bodies all around me.”

She survived that, and beatings from SS guards, and was eventually liberated on May 2, 1945, as the Russian Army swept through in the final defeat of the Nazi military.

Rabinovich and her sisters were set free, skeletal, emaciated, but alive.

Others, like Toby Goldberg were also staggering away from concentration camps, or in some cases from a workshop operated by Oskar Schindler who saved 1,200 Jews from death by selecting them to work for him. Rabinovich and Goldberg, as well as other women we spoke to, spent years after the war in “Displaced Persons” camps in Europe. Some went to Israel and Palestine, but many came to the United States.

Rabinovich completed her education in Pittsburgh and then worked for 25 years as a book keeper in an office on 34th Street near the Empire State building.

Toby Goldberg worked as a teacher in a Jewish school in Brooklyn, and then with her husband Moishe ran “Shirt Plus Men’s Boutique” on Coney Island Avenue, Brooklyn.

Such normalcy seems utterly strange after these tales of horror, but these people survived the worst that humans can do and we have recorded part of their story. And so it is time for us to leave them. We say goodbye, and walk out into the sunshine atop the Shawangunk Ridge, shaking our heads over the savage incongruity of it all.

Dolly Rabinovich made a plea that the holocaust never be forgotten. “I will never forget, or forgive the barbarian slaughter of six million decent, innocent humans by the Nazis. My dear parents, two young married sisters, their children, their young husbands, my three young brothers, were all killed. With Ha Shem’s help some of us survived.”