These siblings fled the Holocaust for the U.S. almost 80 years ago. The war in Ukraine hits home.

Images of refugees fleeing war-torn Ukraine feel particularly vivid to Isak Danon, and to his sisters Sarah Meller and Esther Kaidanow.

When the siblings were children, they experienced Nazi sympathizers bursting into their synagogue in the Yugoslavian city of Split, wielding bayonets, beating people and burning sacred texts. Their family was forced to separate and survive unspeakable things, but eventually reunited and were offered a place at Fort Ontario in Oswego, N.Y., the only U.S. refugee camp established during World War II.

“I deeply feel for those people,” Kaidanow said of those leaving Ukraine. “It’s not easy to be a refugee, to leave your home and possessions and family behind.”

These days, the siblings live the comfortable lives of retirees surrounded by their children and grandchildren, Meller just outside Philadelphia and Danon and Kaidanow in Maryland. But the memories of what they survived are never far.

“It’s something you never forget,” said Meller, who has been telling her Holocaust survivor story for the last 30 years. “Sometimes it feels like it happened yesterday.”

Lise Marlowe, a Holocaust educator and teacher at Elkins Park School in Cheltenham, fell in love with Meller’s story and her spirit when they first met. When Marlowe heard that Meller’s brother and sister were still alive and also still sharing their memories of the Holocaust, she knew she had to arrange a way for them to publicly speak together.

“It’s the most incredible American refugee story, immigrant story,” said Marlowe, who wrote a book, Sarah’s Survival, about Meller’s escape from Yugoslavia. They were among the first Holocaust survivors to come to the United States.

The siblings are now up in years — Danon is 93, Kaidanow is 86 and Meller declines to divulge her age with the same sort of spirit and verve she employed as a 13-year-old escaping the Germans — and don’t see each other that often, but Marlowe managed to coordinate one speaking event, in Baltimore, before COVID-19 hit. And on Thursday she brought Kaidanow and Danon to Philadelphia for the second.

The siblings told their story to a documentary filmmaker and met with Cheltenham students.

The family grew up in Split, a small city off the Adriatic. Life grew increasingly difficult for them after Germany invaded Yugoslavia in 1941. Eventually, they were forbidden from going to theaters, the beach, even school.

The week after Danon’s bar mitzvah, pro-Nazi Italians destroyed the synagogue, looted stores, and beat Jewish people bloody.

“That was our Kristallnacht,” Danon said, referring to the “Night of Broken Glass,” similar to actions in 1938 in Germany and elsewhere.

His father decided that he and Danon should join the resistance fighters, known as partisans, in the mountains. Though he was just 13, Danon was put to work, ferrying messages between groups of partisans, carrying ammunition, detonating hand grenades, working in a machine shop.

After Danon and his father left Split, conditions deteriorated even further for Jews. Spirited Meller tried to persuade her mother to seek refuge with the woman who delivered their milk, who had taken a shine to Meller and invited her to come spend time on her farm.

“I said, ‘Mom, we cannot sit here until the Germans take over,’” Meller said. Her mother refused to leave but told Meller to go. Eventually, Meller packed a bag with two sweaters, two pairs of shoes, and a blanket, took Kaidanow by the hand and walked away.

“She was a hero,” Kaidanow said of her sister. “She wanted us to leave, and that saved our lives.”

Watching the girls walk away, their mother had a change of heart. She came with them, and the milk lady did take them in. They lived in her closet for six months, forbidden to speak.

“When you have to survive, you do it,” Meller said. “We didn’t have a choice, otherwise, we would be killed.”

Kaidanow was 7, but she said it wasn’t hard for her to keep quiet.

“When you live in those circumstances in the middle of the war, you grow up fast,” she said. “I knew what was going on — not a word escaped my lips.”

Eventually, the Germans began asking too many questions, and the family had to leave. The milk lady’s husband offered to take them to a cousin’s house, on a nearby island, where they stayed for three more months. But when that grew too dangerous, they were put out.

Their only option was to climb into the mountains. The climb was hard, without a path; the girls wore dresses and their legs quickly grew bloody. Meller remembers gripping Kaidanow’s hand as hard as she could.

“I was holding her for my life,” said Meller.

Partisan fighters took in refugees, and the mother and two sisters spent months with them. During the day, they would hide from the Germans who patrolled the skies; at night, they would move in lines, with resistance fighters in the front and back with rifles, to protect them.

Their food was flour mixed with water; sometimes there was nothing to eat. Once, it rained for a week straight — the family used their single blanket as a makeshift roof when they could.

Even now, nearly 80 years later, Meller tears up when she remembers the day her mother grew too weak to continue walking.

“She said, ‘Promise me, you’re going to save yourself and your sister.’ It was the worst day of my life,” said Meller.

They were separated only for a short time; another partisan fighter saved her mother. Soon after, the British sent help and a ship to rescue the women and children. As they rowed across the Adriatic to a waiting battleship, German gunfire was all around.

Eventually, they made their way to an Italian refugee camp, where they got word that Danon and his father were in a nearby city and had been chosen to go to the U.S. camp.

When they arrived in the U.S., in the fall of 1944, the ship tilted a little as they neared the Statue of Liberty, with everyone on board rushing to one side to see the symbol of freedom.

“I can’t describe the feeling of the people,” said Danon. “We were jumping from joy.”

No one knew what to look at: the buildings, the lights, the cars in every color, not just the drab black of vehicles at home.

“There were so many things to be amazed about,” said Kaidanow. She was 7; Meller was 13, and Danon, 14.

Fort Ontario felt forbidding at first, a camp with barbed wire keeping the outside world out for a time. But there were things to love: abundant food, friendly Americans who tossed things to them over the fence, and eventually, school. Kaidanow joined a Brownie troop formed in the camp, and held Eleanor Roosevelt’s hand when the first lady visited.

The family had gained admittance to the U.S. only by promising to go back to Europe after the war, but, eventually, pressure from aid groups caused President Harry S. Truman to let families such as the Danons stay. HIAS, then known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, helped the family settle in Philadelphia.

They got a third-floor apartment on Fourth Street between Lombard and Pine, then a down-on-its-heels neighborhood. There was no heat, but the family found joy where they could, such as when Meller, who liked to sunbathe, jumped several feet from their roof to the flat roof of a nearby building.

“She was always gutsy,” Kaidanow said of her sister.

They built American lives. Danon worked and graduated from night school, then Temple University. He served in France during the Korean War and became an accountant, working for the federal government.

The sisters graduated from high school, married, and raised families.

Even now, the banter between the three is easy. They bicker like siblings, with great love and deep affection, interrupting each other as they tell their stories. They brag about each other’s children; Meller’s immaculately kept home is adorned with family photos on nearly every wall and surface.

“It’s a history here,” Meller said, proudly showing off a photograph with a place of honor, the first one taken of the family in America, in Philadelphia in 1946.

That history is what keeps the three telling their story, even as they approach and go past their 90th birthdays.

“God forbid, that should never happen again,” Meller said of her family’s experience. “Young people should be upstanding, and put a stop to hate.”