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Then "in 1986, I had a dream just like I was back [in Auschwitz-Birkenau], and my father was being killed. I was screaming," Judd, 74, said in a recent interview.

She decided it was time to unleash the events from cloistered memory by writing them down. The stories came in a flood that just hasn't stopped.

For the past year, she has been fine-tuning her version of the Shoah — which killed her entire family with the exception of one sister — in an autobiography workshop for Jewish seniors. The class is co-sponsored by Santa Rosa Junior College and Congregation Beth Ami.

The students, ranging from their 70s to 90s, meet at the Santa Rosa synagogue for three hours every Friday morning to share their life stories and learn writing techniques.

Each week, the group leaves the classroom with a writing assignment — a lucky break, rite of passage or the story of an old photo. They return sleep-deprived from late nights of writing, said the group's instructor, Suzanne Sherman.

Since the class began a year ago, the seniors have unearthed family skeletons and recollected the most joyous moments of their lives. Class members impart condolences and admiration for a well-written story over coffee and pastries.

Though many were strangers to one another in the beginning, the students are now more comfortable revealing themselves. The group has also shared a housewarming, a summer party and a death. They brought food and warm wishes to Judd's husband while he recovered from a car accident and attended his funeral when he died a few months ago.

While these students take their writing seriously, there's no doubt that the camaraderie and storytelling have been therapeutic.

"In the beginning, people were moving through their most painful stories," Sherman said. "I read them out loud, and we talk about how they could be [edited or] rewritten.

"It's a way to relate. The person gets to express themselves in the privacy that exists when you're writing."

Like human threads in the tapestry of history, the seniors reminisce about tenement living, boat trips to America, the Yiddishkeit of New York's last Jewish "appetizing shops" (which sold pickled foods such as olives and herring), childbirth and horse-drawn carriages grappling with cable cars for control of San Francisco's streets.

Some pen open letters to adult children. Others tell of events they haven't otherwise been able to express.

Writes Ben Schwartz, an active man who resists the inevitability of aging: "I always knew that in time I would have to substitute the challenge to my physical body with a viable replacement…to allow me to give up a piece of the burden when my physical being said, `Let go.' My writing has begun to fill the void of letting go."

Gertrude Kern, 90, wrote to her middle-aged daughter about why she pursued a career instead of being a stay-at-home mom. It was time for an explanation, she told Sherman.

Many of the seniors were not born in the United States, and come from countries including Czechoslovakia, South Africa and Germany. Some left their native lands after World War II by no choice of their own. At least six of the American-born students discovered they were from the same neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Ralph Cutler, 80, of Penngrove jolted a few memories when he waxed poetic about 1920s city life.

"Street musicians would croon [for] tenement dwellers. Their captive audience watched and listened from flats, high-rise theater seats…at different levels…Itinerant entrepreneurs used the [concrete] backyard to advertise their services. Loudly projecting their voices to the tenants in the upper reaches of this coliseum, they offered to buy old clothes, rags or appliances, or clean windows, or fix anything that didn't work."

Cutler, a retired high school wrestling coach, fondly recalled the street games of "swat tag, Chinese handball, dodge handball, regular handball, hand tennis, hide and seek, kick the can, one-o-cat, ring-a-levio, Johnny-on-the-pony, spinning tops, checkers, chess, pinochle, chess, poker and craps…

"The girls played hopscotch, jacks, word games and jump rope…"

Most of the seniors have the beginnings of a book in their class notebooks, and some, like Lillian Judd, intend to finish it.

"Next," she quips, "is to find a publisher."