Norman Abelson sometimes has trouble remembering what happened five minutes ago, but stories from decades ago stick like glue.

He recalls with incredible detail the time his local rabbi knocked on his front door at midnight in the 1950s, John F. Kennedy’s funeral in 1963, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which he saw firsthand.

He remembers all the details of the stories of his life and everything he ever learned about Auschwitz from his late wife, Dina, and her family.

Dina survived Auschwitz as a young woman before she and her remaining family were able to escape to the United States. Abelson, a former writer for the Associated Press, has spent decades learning and telling her story, doing his best to make sure nothing like it ever happens again.

So has Ellen Oppenheimer, with her own story. She and her immediate family narrowly escaped Nazi Germany in 1942 after it became perilous to be Jewish. Oppenheimer, who lives in Concord — where Abelson spent most of his life — published the story of her family’s journey in a memoir called “Flight to Freedom,” which came out in 2017.

The 38,000 or so Holocaust survivors left in the U.S. are all over the age of 78, and most of them are older than 85, according to the Claims Conference, an organization that provides resources to those survivors around the world. English is rarely a first language for them, and the Washington Post reported in 2021 that a third of the survivors in America live in poverty. Their numbers are shrinking; their stories are drifting away.

The dwindling Holocaust survivor population coincides with record-high reports of antisemitism in the U.S. Not including incidents at protests or rallies about the Israel-Hamas war, the Anti-Defamation League reported 2,000 incidents of antisemitism across the country in a three-month period between October 2023 and January 2024. Fifty-six of them, according to NPR, were physical assaults.

Antisemitic sentiment has grown recently among younger generations of Americans — those most removed from the Holocaust, with limited access to first-hand accounts. That scares Abelson and Oppenheimer more than anything, so they write and tell their stories, working to preserve this part of history while they still can.

The storyteller

Abelson boldly disobeys the vintage “No Smoking” sign that hangs in jest in his home office. He puffs half a cigar every afternoon while sitting right across from it. By the time the cigars kill him, his doctor says, he’ll already be dead.

Most 93-year-olds don’t have all that much going on, but Abelson does not feel like most 93-year-olds. Even with the writing and reading and spending time with his life partner, Magdalene, he is often bored.

“I can’t just do crosswords all day,” he said, though he does a crossword every morning.

Before Abelson moved to Wells, Maine from Concord and before he grew his bushy white beard, he did not have time for boredom.

He could never avoid being in charge of things. After that rabbi knocked on his door, Abelson became president of Temple Beth Jacob. He was the chairman and founder of the Greater Concord Interfaith Council, the first chairman of the McKenna House, the second-ever chairman of New Hampshire Humanities, the vice president of the New Hampshire Council on Aging and the co-founder of Uniting Against Hate, which brought together different minorities in support of civil rights after King was assassinated.

Now, however, Abelson is not in charge of any committees. He gave up his driver’s license a few years ago, “Because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re 90.” He sits in an old pair of blue and green plaid pajama pants, wearing long socks under his sandals, usually eating an egg salad sandwich, and he writes.

“The one constant in my life has been writing,” says Abelson. He has published hundreds of thousands of words, in various forms: News articles, personal essays, narratives, even poetry. Dina takes up much of his ink.

His writing took off when Abelson took a job with the Associated Press. The gig moved him to Concord, where he fell rapidly in love with Dina Lipshitz, a dark-haired woman with a charming Polish accent and remarkable kindness. To this day, Dina’s kindness floors Abelson, who wonders often about how a person can be so good after coming out of something so horrible.

He felt like he had to learn everything he could about Dina and her family’s experience. He would stay up at night for hours with Al, Dina’s older brother, listening to stories from Auschwitz. Dina herself didn’t like to talk about it.

He began writing articles for the International Newspaper of Holocaust Survivors, writing about marrying into a family of survivors, about their stories, their new lives.

“They remembered where they came from and they lived their lives,” he says. Dina taught her husband that “bitterness is the greatest self-defeat there is,” so he refuses to be bitter, even when the world makes him angry. He takes on the world, and his anger, wielding his pen. Storytelling keeps him and Dina alive.

‘Grateful for each day’

Her coffee grows cold. Oppenheimer has so much to say that every time she lifts the mug to her lips, it doesn’t quite make it. A half-hour, at least, passes before she takes a sip — like Abelson, she lives in stories.

Oppenheimer sits at the kitchen table in her small apartment, one of many units in her senior living community in Concord. She takes her coffee with skim milk, which someone brings with her groceries every week, and a plate of tea biscuits.

Oppenheimer preserved her memories from the Second World War in “Flight to Freedom,” but even after writing it down, she tells the story out loud. She talks about her family’s escape from Germany and their ensuing journey from France to New York. At 94, she recalls details from days when she was 11 years old. Sometimes, she loses track of chronology — she stops, sighs, says in frustration, “I’m skipping things” — but the details don’t get away.

She steeps herself in memories. Oppenheimer does not shy from loss, though she’s lost a lot. The past walks with her like a shadow, but one that she keeps around by choice. She has no interest in forgetting. That’s what killed her husband, Martin, four years ago; he died after a battle with Alzheimer’s. Oppenheimer has learned how to endure. “Us humans are not weaklings,” she says.

Losing Martin has meant that Oppenheimer is often lonely. “I keep the radio on all day because it feels like someone is talking to me,” she says.

Nothing that she experienced as a child made her anything of an introvert; she used to do summer stock theater, stage-fright free. Since moving to her retirement community, she has made friends with her neighbors, who join her for Bridge and Bananagrams four times a week. Even in her 90s, new relationships come easily to Oppenheimer.

“I like people. I like to learn about their families and where they’re from,” she says. Because of what she endured as a child — fleeing the Nazis, living a difficult life as an immigrant in the U.S. — Oppenheimer keeps her mind wide open. She will be friends with anybody, as long as they’re decent and kind.

“I am always ready to give someone a hug,” she says. “We all have our ups and downs and sideways.”

She has learned how to be happy. She says she is “grateful for each day.”

Gratitude reigns because of all the reasons Oppenheimer might not be here. When she was a kid, she didn’t expect anything bad to really happen. But Nazi police arrested her father and made him walk around the streets of Germany with a sign that read “I am a dirty Jew” before letting him go. Then her father’s brother, his wife and their two boys died in a concentration camp.

When she talks about the Holocaust, Oppenheimer fiddles with a pen and stares down at her kitchen table, quiet for a moment. “If you don’t learn from history,” she says, “you’re bound to repeat it.”

Oppenheimer and her immediate family, however, made it to Toulouse, France, and then to Paris, and then, eventually, to Manhattan. On Jan. 13, 1942, when she was 12, her boat arrived at Staten Island.

In memoriam

Exactly a month after arriving in New York, Oppenheimer’s father died of a heart attack. She and her mother and sister found an apartment on 170th Street and kept going.

These are the difficult memories. Others are easier. When her husband introduced her to his father, the older Oppenheimer looked at Ellen and said, “I know who you are. You look just like your father.” The two men had worked together as apprentices in Germany, though it was a total coincidence that their children fell in love in America.

Oppenheimer never called her husband by his name. He was “Honey,” or “Pussycat,” to her, “Marty” to everyone else. They were married for 66 years before his death in November 2020. Remnants of him hold pride of place all around Oppenheimer’s apartment: Three baseball caps line the top of a bookshelf, two for the Red Sox and one for his service in the World War II. Photographs mount the walls, pictures of the couple with their parents or their three children over the span of decades. Martin’s paintings hang in every room; he did a watercolor of the canyons out West, an oil-painting of a view in Austria. Oppenheimer’s favorite hangs to the left of her door: A red and orange depiction of fall, the woods in watercolor, Martin’s signature scribbled in the corner. Reminders, everywhere.

“I talk to him,” she says. She won’t say what they talk about, though. It’s nobody’s business.

When Dina died — in August 2001 — Abelson would drive from Concord to Maine and sit in silence. His children were grown and his wife, after 47 years of marriage, was gone. Parkinson’s disease killed her slowly.

“I used to come over here by myself and sit on the beach and not know what the Hell was going on,” he says.

Abelson has plenty to be angry about. It comes from a long-brewing storm of frustration that began somewhere around 1939 and culminated when he lost Dina. The anger started young; it wasn’t easy to be Jewish in the U.S. while Abelson was growing up. He has an old baseball glove in his house but can’t remember why; he never seriously played sports in school because the people around him would say that Jews were no good as athletes. Kids at school would hit him. The day after his parents moved their family to a new neighborhood, 10-year-old Abelson walked outside and saw that someone had written “Jews not wanted here” on the sidewalk. He tried to rub it off with his shoe so his father wouldn’t be upset.

There was much more to be angry for, on Dina’s behalf. She still wouldn’t let him be bitter.

“She conquered the Germans by the way she came out of Auschwitz,” Abelson says now. He has learned how to channel his anger so that it never turns into bitterness. As a journalist, he filled local newspapers with the truth about the world. Then he took a job with the Johnson Administration to fight poverty. In Concord, as the chairman of everything, he advocated for religious, racial and economic justice.

“Don’t curse the darkness. Light one small candle,” he says often, attributing the words to Eleanor Roosevelt. She’s his hero.

Now, nearly 80 years after the Holocaust, antisemitic sentiment grows again, and Abelson’s storm still rages. Yet he still holds on to hope. “Don’t give up,” he says. “There are going to be enough good people.”

If someone like him, or someone like Oppenheimer, or someone like Dina, can hope, so can everyone.

A year after Dina’s death, Abelson did what he thought she would want him to, and fell in love again. He switched his wedding ring to his right hand so he could hold onto Dina without hurting Magdalene.

“Dina taught me that it’s okay to mourn, but you have to overcome,” he says.

It has been that way for 22 years, and Abelson is happy. He misses Dina — like Magdalene misses her late husband and like Oppenheimer misses hers — but he feels confident that he will find her again.

“You cannot kill the human spirit,” he says many times over. He learned that, too, from Dina. She was always able to hope, even when doing so might seem impossible.

Abelson has taken that idea and decided that the soul lives on, even if the body dies. He is his own proof of that: At 93, his physical strength is fading, and he spends a lot of time laid back in his reclining chair.

His mind, however, has never dulled. He still writes prolifically, telling stories from his own life, voicing his opinion where he feels it is needed, and reminding the world what Dina endured. Retired from a life of leadership, Abelson has taken on one final appointment — Chairman of Dina’s Memories.

When he finishes with his daily half-cigar, he cracks open his enormous laptop and, with just two fingers, types away.