An American flag flew at full mast at the entrance to the Temple Emanu-El. I stood before it, startled by the immensity and grandeur. The most un-Jewish structure one could imagine, except for its modest star of David within an immense circle of latticework.

I thought we were supposed to be people who shunned ostentation, I protested silently. Not the yekkers, yukking it up with their red carpets and cushioned seats where men sat with women. Few wore yarmulkes, a shtetl peccadillo. This was wealthy, privileged Jewry, mostly pre-war arrivals, whose refugee past had long been eclipsed by business and professional status.

For the Day of Remembrance, they opened their doors to the noisy, pushy DPs and greenhorns from uptown and the boroughs like my parents. If they bought tickets, of course. These were successful Jews who lived on the East Side, attended Metropolitan Museum openings and Sotheby's, demanded private day schools for their children, who had complete sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Each week's mail brought the brown sleeve of The New Yorker.

I walked into the temple, half-fearing the spectacle of skeletal figures in torn blue and white shifts. Instead, I saw the well-fed, survivors wrapped in fur coats and Florida tans, seemingly well-heeled Jews who had their society and ceremonies, chattering excitedly in the aisles. "Oh, there's Lola Rosenberg with her new husband.... Look at how handsome!"

In my worst moments, I hated the victims. They deserved it. If they'd been cleverer, stronger, less greedy, they wouldn't have been stuck in Europe in the first place. Look at all the émigrés — Einstein, Mann, Brecht — who made it out. I hated their weakness and stupidity. "I'm not the first generation," a voice behind me boasted. "I'm the very first generation!" The highly rouged woman wore a navy silk suit with a black and white sticker on her lapel: REMEMBER 6,000,000.

Remember what? Parents with no parents? Uncles, aunts, cousins who are only names, and they are forgotten too? Remember to hate? Whom? Germans? Poles? Arabs?

The voice grew furious. It always happened.

To remember that we are hated, wanted dead? Were these our heirlooms?

One of my mother's friends, Bella Gold, trapped me as I tried to be inconspicuous, walking down a side aisle of the Temple. She had teased blond hair with wings. "Your mother made for you that dress? Very nice." She fingered the fabric. "Like silk.Your parents are sitting on the other side," she pointed. "It's so good that you came. We need the Second Generation to know."

I tried to free myself.

"My Hela isn't interested," she continued tragically. "Today she goes to a stupid baseball game with her boyfriend. On Yom Hashoah. Have you ever heard such a thing?"

I recalled that it was Hela who had coined the term "Lodz beige" to describe the strange color, never seen in nature, that transformed these women from Holocaust brunettes to Hollywood blondes.

Suddenly, a nervous hush filled the sanctuary. The spotlight caught the dark, hollowed sockets of his eyes, the thin wisps of hair, his deeply lined face and gaunt body. Elie Wiesel.

"Let us tell tales..." he began softly. Temple Emanu-El reverberated with his chilling voice. I closed my eyes. All I could hear were the words, spinning in turbid soup of suffering. SURVIVOR REMEMBER THE UNSPEAKABLE NIGHT DARKNESS GOD SIX MILLION DEATH NIGHTMARES FORSAKEN SILENCE TO BEAR WITNESS LEGACY NOT FORGET SURVIVOR.

Survivor. As a child, we were DPs, despised by others, including American Jews. Certainly, my parents thought of themselves as victims. I was the child of victims. The ones bullied in the schoolyard, decimated by pogroms, and then, the Final Solution. They didn't get out soon enough, when they still could. I never understood why a single sibling, aunt, or uncle in either of my parents' families hadn't packed up and left on the first train out of Poland.

"Tata wanted to go, but my mother said no. 'What will we do with the furniture? We can't just leave everything,'" my mother told me. "Now I spit on things. We lost everything anyway."

"Where would we go?" my father responded when I asked him. "You think in Germany it was better? Austria? Hungary? There was nowhere to go." He looked like a Ben Shahn drawing of a workingman in American clothes. "Do you how many generations we lived in Lodz?" he said, shrugging in his blue velvet yarmulke. "We knew no one, we had no place to go."

Some years later, history was revised, and my parents were anointed survivors. Their perception of themselves as victims shifted, and they began to think of themselves with a newfound pride. But it seemed such a fiction to me. Now people admired my parents, and even me, because I had parents who had survived concentration camps and I was Second Generation, capitalized like the word Holocaust.

The memorial candle lighting was about to begin. The women in black huddled near the altar. Long white tapers lit up faces that were now deeply wrinkled.

The line began to move. My mother rose up the steps gravely. She floated across the stage in her good black dress with pearl buttons. Her black lace veil fluttered as she lit a candle for the Czestochowa dead.

Our eyes met for moment. I could see her tears. She was still the white-scarved beauty chosen from the Selection line to live, but now she wore black lace. My chest felt tight.

Afterwards, as I approached, she stared up at me. "I'm so glad you're here." She hugged me.

I turned away from my mother's moist green eyes, which threatened to drown me. Her voice was near worshipful. "I knew you would look beautiful in the dress," she whispered. "The color matches your eyes."

I slipped into their row, taking a seat between my parents. "Zosha," my mother sighed. Her mother's name.

The Yeshiva Day School children, dressed in white shirts, navy blue skirts and pants, marched to the center. They began to sing. "'Shtiller, shtiller' — softer, softer, let's be silent, graves are growing here ..."