It's been so many years, the voices are fewer and they are getting more frail.

So a group of 80 people, young and old, sat in a sun-splashed hall in Simi Valley on Sunday to listen to those voices, to hear firsthand of the horror of man on man, and to picture the faces of 11 million people who disappeared into the darkness in Europe in the Shoah, the Holocaust.

Six million of those were Jews, murdered by Nazis and their collaborators.

A handful of Holocaust survivors went to Mount Sinai Memorial Park to recount their stories, hoping the oral tradition could be grafted onto the young, those capable of understanding the horror of 60 or 75 years ago.

For the second year, the cemetery and Simi Valley Jewish community leaders hosted a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at the Memorial Park.

This year, they asked families with memories to contribute a square for a Holocaust memorial quilt that will be displayed at the site and used at funerals.

Schoolchildren lit 11 candles to commemorate the 11 million deaths.

"On this date, the brave young Jews walled off in the Warsaw Ghetto fought back," said Martha M. White, the service organizer. "Although those people were slain, on this day we remember that."

The storytellers Sunday included Bernie Simon, who told of being shipped to the Dachau concentration camp in 1933, only to be somehow rescued by his mother.

Together, they escaped to Cuba and then to the United States, and Simon returned to Dachau in 1945 as an American soldier.

"I married a survivor of the Auschwitz camp," Simon related. The two moved to Ventura in 1948.

Bent Lerno, a Simi Valley resident today, was a teenage boy living near Copenhagen when Danish authorities were tipped off that the Nazis were coming for the Jews in 1943. Lerno was on a bicycle trying to flee when he saw a bus, on which his mother was a passenger, stopped by the Germans.

"We saw the taillight on the bus blinking, and we thought it was some sort of an SOS signal," he recalled.

Lerno hid, but his mother was taken to a Czech concentration camp. Swedish Red Cross workers found her there in 1945 and took her home.

Sydney Wilner, a Simi Valley man, stood from the audience to tell his mother's story. She escaped from occupied Poland with half her family, but those who stayed behind were forced to dig their own mass grave and were machine-gunned.

Wilner said that out of 60 members of his extended family in a village called Ozorow, one lived.

Daisy Miller of Los Angeles said she was a Jew born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (now Croatia), as her Austrian family was fleeing the Nazis.

"I am one of those children who survived, who made it, because they were hidden or taken in, most often by complete strangers. We were hiding in a room in a farmhouse hidden in the hills," Miller said.

Even as a 5-year-old, she said, "I knew that all of the people crowded into that room were terrorized. I knew that if I wasn't good it would mean the separation of me and my parents, which is what all children fear the worst."

Her family was liberated by a South African soldier "who happened to be a Jew, of all things."

In the postwar shortage of food and medicine, Miller's father died of tuberculosis. Only she and her mother made it to America.

"I want to thank you for letting me a little girl from Zagreb who never thought she would be standing here, with silver hair, in the last third of her life, telling you my story stand here in front of you and say thank you," she said.

White, the Mount Sinai official who organized the service, spoke of the importance of the survivors.

"Your presence here today reminds us of so much ethnic cleansing, an immoral term that should be called what it is: genocide," White said.

She said that baby boomer Jews "always knew of the Holocaust, because we were always surrounded by those who were directly touched by the events. There were always old people around, crying at Jewish events, even happy events," she said.

"But now, as the 'me generation' matures, it is in the telling and retelling that we all have strength, in the forgetting we are all lost," she said.

"As we transmit this to our children, they will go on and tell the world."