KEEPING A PROMISE The victims especially children are the focus of a Southfield couple's annual Holocaust memoria ALAN HITSKY News Editor The Broders have graphic memories of the Holocaust. hey escaped from the Sarny Ghetto, and lived like animals in the woods for five years, hiding a child and living with the partisans. They feared -the Nazis, they feared anti-Semitic partisans in Poland and the Ukraine and they were afraid of starvation. They feared for their next breath. But Mayer and Mary Broder of Southfield made a promise to their fellow fugitives from the Holocaust, and on Saturday they will keep that promise again. For more than 20 years the Broders have been sponsoring a Holocaust memorial program at De- troit area synagogues. On Saturday, 36 Friday, August 22, 1986 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS at B'nai Moshe, the .Broders will again urge the Jewish community to remember the martyrs. State Senator Jack Faxon and Rabbi Stanley Rosenbaum will speak as the Broders keep their unbroken promise to the hundreds of thousands of -Jewish men, women and children who perished at the hands of the Nazis and the Ukrai- nian police." Both Mayer and Mary were nearly counted among the victims on several occasions. Both were wounded during their long ordeal. He was shot twice in the leg while crawling from a mass grave and she was once shot in the shoulder. The family was separated for months at a time as they tried to escape the Nazis and marauding bands in the woods. Mayer would travel with one band of partisans while Mary and infant daughter Clara hid with other groups. We were just trying to stay alive," Mary said, recalling the five-year ordeal. Her husband "did not expect to more than a half- hour," he said, "so we lived from day to day." The Broders were among the lucky few. An older child was killed by the Nazis, and they lost their parents and 75 other relatives in the olocaust. They picked up the shattered pieces of their lives after the war, coming to the United States in 1949 . with the help of an uncle, Paul- Broder, who still lives in the 'Detroit area. Mayer Broder opened a restau- rant and later was in the real estate business. Their daughter Clara, now Mrs. Harold Stern in Huntington Woods, and her husband have provided the Broders with two grandchildren, as has their son and daughter-in-law in Washington, D.C. Their son, Dr. Samuel Broder, heads the clinical oncology program of the National Cancer Institute. But the Broder's experiences in the Holocaust and their promises to fellow Jews in the woods will always haunt them. We told each other in the woods," Mrs. Broder said, we prom- ised each other that if we escaped, if we survived, we would always re- member." For the past 20-30 years, their promise has taken the form of an annual memorial meeting, first held at Young Israel and Shaarey Shomayim, and now at B'nai Moshe. The passing years have not eased the pain or the bitterness. Mayer Broder is especially vocal about the Nazi campaign against Jewish children, recalling the signs and radio broadcasts offering a Ger- man bounty to citizens who turned in Jews to the Nazis. They gave a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of salt for turning in a Jewish child," Broder said. The Ukrainians and Latvians