Time has blurred the A-4890 tattoo on Margot Dzialoszynski arm. At 85, she hesitates before offering details about how she survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Birkenau, Gross-Rosen and Bergen Belsen. 

But she’ll sing Hebrew songs learned as a first-grader in Berlin's Rykestrasse School, and she’ll rattle off the names of the 13 children she and husband Avraham brought into the world after the Holocaust. (“Because the Germans killed so many of us, we have to make up for the loss,” she told a washerwoman who questioned her family's size.)

But even when Margot is prompted by daughter Rivka Marules to retell the stories she once shared, she cannot. Rivka asks, “Remember when the Nazi shot in the air and did not shoot at you?” 

“Thank G-d, I forgot.”  

The call to the second, third, now fourth post-Holocaust generation to 'Never Forget' grows more urgent with each passing year. Margot is one of Israel's 208,000 Holocaust survivors. The time when men and women of Margot's generation could be counted upon to bear witness to the Holocaust at school assemblies and speak at community memorials is quickly fading away. 

Over the last year in Israel 13,000 Holocaust survivors passed away. It's estimated that by 2015, only 145,000 Holocaust survivors will remain alive in Israel. How many of them will possess the ability to share their experiences is far fewer than that. Soon the books, the Spielberg interviews, the artifacts in Yad Vashem, the purposefully preserved memories will be all we have from this generation that is both our sorrow and our rebirth. Margot published her own memoir in 2002 (The Living Miracle, Targum Press), where she recounted the horrors she endured and the faith that carried her through.

Sitting alongside a floor-to-ceiling window of her daughter's gracious Bnei Brak home, her clear eyes catching Israel's sunlight, Margot smiles at her daughter and her granddaughter Kreindy, who is back in Israel after teaching at Chabad centers in San Francisco and Cincinnati. 

That this woman has survived Hitler's death camps, the murder of her parents and two brothers, near death from typhus and tuberculosis, who then went on to raise a large family in Switzerland and enjoy golden years in Israel qualifies as a textbook definition of the “living miracle.”

In her daughter's household, there is no danger of forgetting the circumstances of this miracle even if Margot can no longer tell the story of Chanukah, 1944. When Margot worked in the munitions factory at the Gross-Rosen labor camp outside of Christitanstadt, she scavenged wax from the camp dump and baked potato peels into latkes.

To this day, “I cannot throw away food,” said Rivka, now a grandmother and mother of 10 children, ages 29 to 3.

There are other lessons that endure and serve to strengthen the next generation. After the war, Margot was delirious with a 105 degree fever, dehydrated, and was treated in a makeshift hospital, once Bergen's officers' club. Margot had but one answer for friends who asked her what her last wishes were. A peaceful passing? Some rest? Food? 

“My dream is I want a big family to sit and sing around the Shabbos table.” 

In her memoirs, Margot later wrote “The vision of Shabbos is what kept me going in the worst moments.”

Margot's dream has long been realized. Despite a doctor's dire predictions about the effects of illnesses that left Margot desperately weak for years after the war, she married Avraham Dzialoszynski, a doctor-to-be who followed the Lubavitcher Rebbe's advice to stay in Basel, teach Jewish children there and in Zurich. The Dzialoszynskis raised the one of the biggest families in Basel. 

“As a child, I didn't realize how hard it was, how my mother managed. My mother had nobody,” said Rivka. “Despite all the hardship, my mother never dreamed of giving up.” 

Of all the messages from the Holocaust, this is the one Rivka is most adamant about passing on to her children. “Life can be tough,” but instead of welcoming a peaceful death, her mother wished for a family singing at a Shabbos table. 

“That’s how she made it.”