But Daniller couldn't keep it to himself much longer. Twenty-thousand people filled a Maryland sports arena in 1983 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; Yale interviewed Holocaust survivors; and Steven Spielberg filmed 50,000 survivors for a documentary.

Gradually, Daniller would tell bits of his survival story to his family, friends and finally the world.

Daniller is among 50,000 survivors who are being heard in eight museums throughout the world. He's among just a handful of Latvia's Jews to survive the Holocaust. There were 95,000 Jews in Latvia before the war. There are only about 10,000 or so today.

"If you forget it'll go away," Daniller hoped. But it wouldn't. So the 72-year-old survivor has visited Maryland schools for the past six years telling students his story "because it won't be long until there won't be [Holocaust] survivors living anymore. And then it [the Holocaust] will be forgotten."

Daniller admits it is still hard for him to talk about the war. But it is necessary. "Maybe these children will grow and tell their children so the memory would still exist."

A new beginning

Harry Daniller opens the door to his Pikesville house and apologizes for the boxes staggered around his living room. He points to the corner sofa and sits comfortably with his fingers crossed over his portly waist.

He explains in an accented English that he and his wife don't need such a big place anymore. After 35 years in Pikesville they're moving to a smaller apartment in Reisterstown.

His family had to move during the war too, but under less pleasant circumstances.

Daniller grew up in Riga, the cosmopolitan capital of Latvia off the Baltic Sea.

But Riga wasn't always open to foreigners. His Lithuanian grand-father had to bribe a Latvian officer to get a special permission to stay in Riga.

Once settled, the Daniller family lived a happy life in Riga. Their 52 Gertrude Street apartment was situated in one of the most affluent neighborhoods of the capital.

Daniller, sitting today on his comfortable sofa, says he still "could draw a picture" of the apartment.

He closes his eyes, tilting his balding head backward, and remembers the place. His parents and his widowed grand-mother had their own bedrooms. The living room was large and housed his father's upright piano where he would practice for concerts. Harry liked listening to his father play. But like every kid in the neighborhood he preferred to play soccer outside.

On another corner of the living room Faust was visiting Marguerite in a dungeon. The six-foot painting dominated the living room. Daniller opens his eyes and remembers the Persian rug, too. There was a smaller room. Daniller's room. It could hold a bed, a desk and a chair where he would do his homework. "And that's as much as that room could hold. But it was big enough for me," says Daniller.

The invaders

Life was peaceful in Riga. An 800-year-old city, Riga had been founded by the Germanic tribes. The German kids went to the German schools. The Jewish kids went to the Hebrew schools. There was even a French Lyceum. But everybody got along, Daniller remembers.

But in the late 1930's people began to get nervous. France and Great Britain allowed Hitler to invade Austria. Then Czechoslovakia. Then Poland. "For a Peace in Our Time," British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain boasted at the time.

But it wasn't the Germans they should have worried about. Hitler and Stalin's 1939 secret Non-Aggression Pact allowed the Soviet Union to reclaim the Baltic states, including Latvia.

Ethnic groups began to suspect one another. Life was not normal anymore. But people survived. When the Germans broke the 1939 Pact things got from bad to worse.

Daniller's father, Eugene, lost his lumber business. He couldn't give concerts anymore. Playing Felix Mendelson concertos was forbidden, as was owning any book or playing any music by Jewish artists.

The Danillers eventually lost their piano and most of their belongings. In October 1941 Jews were told they had to move to a new neighborhood. The Nazis warned them with signs posted everywhere: "All Jews living within the boundaries of Riga City as yet have not moved to the ghetto must do so before Oct. 25, 6:00 p.m. Those who do not observe this directive will be most severely punished."

The Danillers and 29,602 other Jews moved to a 16-block poor neighborhood that used to house 13,000 souls. The ghetto, in the suburb called Moscow Vorstadt, was inhabited by Jews the previous century, before most of them prospered and moved to more affluent neighborhoods.

The Daniller's new home was small. It didn't have plumbing. The Danillers had to trade their beautiful furniture for the old furniture of their new home's predecessors. There were more people in this small, wooden house. Eugene and Anna Daniller and their son. Both grandparents and Eugene's sister who just had a baby.

But they wouldn't stay there for long. On Nov. 30, three weeks after Daniller's 13th birthday, men were to be placed in a special section of the ghetto where they would be used for labor. Women, boys under 16 and the elderly were going to a camp somewhere in the East.

Bitter luck

Recently, Daniller addressed a crowd of students at Paint Branch High School in Montgomery County. As he peered at the students, standing barely taller than the podium in front of him, Daniller's voice cracked as he remembered his last moments with his mother. The best mother a man could ever have.

As the Germans rounded able men for work, Anna Daniller told her husband to take their 13-year-old son with him. Germans were only taking men 16 and older.

She said she would have cut her hair short. She said she would have dressed as a man and smuggled herself into the men's camp with them. But she couldn't abandon her mother. She couldn't leave her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law who just had a baby. She was 39 years old, healthy, and strong, she said, but she had to take care of them.

The Daniller men went to the work camp. The women, the children and the elderly didn't go to a camp in the East. Instead, the Germans took them to the Rumbula forest. A beautiful forest on the outskirts of the city. So peaceful, you would never believe over 25,000 people were machine-gunned and buried in it.

So all forests aren't like this,
I stand and shriek in Rumbula-
A green crater in a midst of grain fields.
Every man who has entered me
Becomes my tongue
My flame.
You come in

The poet Ojars Vacietis, "the conscience of the Latvian people," wrote this ode to the victims of the liquidation of the Riga ghetto. An ode to a forest Daniller didn't want to see again.

Months after his presentation to the Paint Branch students, Daniller sat in his Pikesville home, remembering Nov. 30 again. He says he was lucky that day, shrugging his shoulders and raising his eyebrows. It's hard to call it luck. But that's what got him where he is now: Alive and the grandfather of seven children, the product of his three children.

Buchenwald

His mother's sacrifice was the first step towards survival. Pretending he was 16 saved him. But he was vulnerable. The Germans made him work in a hospital where he was beaten to the point where he was incapacitated for two weeks.

Two years later the Germans would get the beating of their lives in the battle of Stalingrad, where 835,000 German soldiers died of battle and bitter-cold weather.

In 1944, as the Russian marched west, Eugene and Harry Daniller were moved out of Riga. They were shipped like sardines in a 600-capacity boat with about 4,000 other people to Danzig in German-occupied Poland.

Later, they would be crammed into a World War I wagon that used to carry 40 soldiers and a few horses. One-hundred and twenty people traveled for three days without food, water or toilets.

The smell of feces and corpses were unbearable. A similar freight car is exhibited at the Washington, D.C., Holocaust Museum.

"I get very annoyed every time I see that freight car. That freight car that you see in the museum is authentic. However, it's been cleaned up and painted to look clean. Just another freight car. The freight car we were in had never been cleaned. People were dying in them. It took three days for us to get to Buchenwald," Daniller said.

Buchenwald was one of the largest camps of the war, housing 110,000 prisoners by 1945. It stood in a wooded area on the northern slopes of the Ettersberg, about five miles northwest of Weimar in east-central Germany. Weimar had been the birthplace of Johann Wolfgang van Goethe, father of 18th century German Enlightenment. It was also the birthplace of the German Constitutional democracy in 1919 until the "Weimar" Republic was toppled by the Nazis.

Once in Buchenwald Daniller was sent to work in a finery where the Germans were trying to create synthetic gasoline. But the fake gasoline was never produced.

Instead, the prisoners spent most of the time rebuilding the factory after several Allied bombings. It took the prisoners 30 days to rebuild the factory. On the 32nd day, Daniller remembers smiling, the Allies flew over Buchenwald again. The factory had to be rebuilt again.

Eugene Daniller didn't survive Buchenwald. He was overworked and under fed. He died of exhaustion and starvation. French laborers that had been coerced to work in Germany would tell the prisoners: "Si vous n'avez pas à manger, ne travaillez pas." If you don't eat, don't work. But if they didn't work, they died.

Daniller was "lucky" again. People were dying, dying and dying in barrack 62. He had developed boils all over his body and couldn't work anymore.

Karl Koch, the camp's first commandant, had declared: "There are no sick people in my camp. There are only those who are dead or alive!"

But an older prisoner persuaded the guards to let Daniller go to a clinic.

A "clandestine" clinic, Daniller calls it today. He doesn't remember seeing any SS men there. Or any German soldier for that matter. But members of the Jewish resistance had convinced some SS that children could be trained to work. In the end, 904 children and adolescents survived Buchenwald. By the end of the war 56,000 people had died.

America

As the Americans pushed from the West and the Soviets charged from the East, the Germans evacuated Buchenwald. But they had forgotten the clandestine clinic.

Harry Daniller laid in his clinic bed when tanks roared down Ettersberg Hill.

"Oh my God! They're coming back," shouted one kid as he stood on his bed watching the steel machines barreling down the mountain. The tanks stopped in front of the clinic. Nobody moved. One of the tanks' trap doors popped open, a soldier appeared and his orders followed:

"My name is Captain Major and we are the Third U.S. Army. I'm your new commandant and you are free," the soldier said in a language most of the children didn't understand. Someone repeated the order in German. They were free.

It was April 11, 1945, and the war had claimed Daniller's entire family. The 16-year-old boy was invited to a Jewish community in Switzerland where he recuperated from his illness. Soon, the Soviets were ready to accept him back to Riga, Latvia, his country of birth.

But Daniller knew better. He had no family and he wanted to live in a free world; something the Soviets couldn't promise. From 1945 to 1949 100,000 people in Latvian were deported to Siberia, somewhere or nowhere in the middle of cold Russia.

One day Daniller received a call from America. An uncle who moved there before the war found his name in a list of survivors and invited him to live with him in Baltimore.

Daniller lived free. He found odd jobs and even moved to Winston-Salem, N.C., where he worked as a furrier.

He would go to Baltimore occasionally and on one of his trips there in 1954 he married his wife Raella.

For 35 years the Danillers lived in Pikesville. But they had to move. They were retired and their children were gone. Their new Reisterstown apartment is big enough for the two of them, even though they had to get rid of almost half of their furniture.

Rumbula

It took Daniller over 50 years to go back to Riga. Steven Springfield, a friend from Jewish Survivors of Latvia, told him he had to go back. He had to go to Rumbula and say Kaddish.

The Jewish prayer is based on a folk belief that it helps to release the souls of the dead from purgatory.

Daniller could not refuse. He finally went to the forest in 1998.

"To stand in that forest ... Beautiful forest ... Many flowers, many bushes. And to know you belong there too. And to know that your mother was machine-gunned there. It was one of the most heart breaking moments in my life," Daniller told a class of students once.

Daniller has talked at many schools lately. Sometimes, Raella will drive him to the school so her husband can catch some sleep before getting there. Once at the school, he puts on his glasses, stands in front of the class, and talks for an hour, "for the sake of our children," he says.