LOS ANGELES — Every Tuesday at 2 p.m., Bella Friedman sits at the dais at the Museum of Tolerance and looks out at the audience that has gathered to hear about the Holocaust.

She is 82, and wears clothes that hide the tattoo on her left forearm. She is the only member of her immediate family to survive. Her mission: to make sure the world does not forget. But Friedman suffers from dementia and has trouble speaking. Museum staffers project an interview she gave in 1995 on the wall above her silhouette. The digital woman tells the story the flesh-and-blood survivor from Radom, Poland, no longer can: “The whole ghetto was liquidated. They pushed us into cattle cars. … We couldn’t breathe.”

Six days a week, a small cadre of survivors — average age, early 80s — gives testimony here to the Holocaust’s horrors. Each year, the group dwindles as aging survivors die.

These days, many of the 30 or so survivors who volunteer at the museum feel increasing pressure to speak to as many listeners as possible before being silenced by disease or death. In less than a generation, they all will be gone.

Few people have been more aware of that fact than Bella Friedman (Tuesdays at 2 p.m.), Lion Cohen (every other Thursday at 3 p.m.), and Eva Brown (usually Tuesdays at 3 p.m.).

“I was so silent for 50 years and kept everything bottled in, and now I don’t know how to shut up,” said Brown, 81, whose leukemia is back after remission. “It’s so critical to tell our story. Because you’re here today and gone tomorrow.”

‘It meant a lot’

Cohen, 82, a former chef, described years as a Dutch teenager hiding from the Nazis in a rural attic, flat on his back or stomach. By the time he was liberated by the Canadian army, his legs no longer worked. Most of his family was dead.

Cohen gave his last talk in the museum’s Wosk Theater on July 31. Five days later, he died of a massive heart attack. He was buried near his sister, Henriette From, an Auschwitz survivor, at Mount Sinai Memorial Park. He had been scheduled to speak again on Aug. 14.

“There would have been nothing stopping him,” said his niece, Eveline Bermudez, of Mission Viejo, Calif. “I know my mother wanted to do it, too, but she wasn’t well enough. It’s very important for them to be heard, listened to, for their story to be told. It’s important for us to know, too.”

Cohen came late to telling his story. The talks, Bermudez said, were the highlight of his last years.

“It meant a lot for the children to respect him and listen to him and ask questions,” Bermudez said.

“It was a therapeutic way for him to express himself and let young people know that this actually did happen and there was no disputing that.”

Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, said that only in the last decade or so have survivors in their 70s, 80s and 90s begun to speak out in great numbers.

By talking publicly and regularly about the most painful experiences of their lives, he said, “they return again and again to gain mastery and, in a certain respect, to salvage from the ashes something not wholly negative. Those who don’t, endure in trauma.”

The women and men most compelled to tell their stories despite frailty and increasing age, Berenbaum said, probably share a similar motivation: “Do you want to be a teacher, or a person who is diminished and destroyed and whose vitality is robbed from them by pain?”

That would have been an easy question for Friedman before dementia stole her voice.

‘She still needs to tell it’

A dozen years ago, she went on the March of the Living, a trek by teenagers and Holocaust survivors to concentration camp sites in Poland, then on to Israel. Around the same time, she began appearing regularly at the Museum of Tolerance.

“The last time she spoke at the museum when I was there, she didn’t actually speak. I read her notes,” said daughter Marianne Cohen, who lives in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “That was about a year ago … But she still needs to tell it.”

These days, all Friedman can do is hand out aging family photos when her video presentation ends. She tries her best to answer questions. Her voice barely rises above a whisper. And then she goes home.

Eva Brown takes the floor when Friedman is finished. A Hungarian woman with salt-and-pepper hair, Brown figures she has told her story thousands of times in the last seven years.

She’s spoken at the museum and in churches, at schools and universities, in person and via video conference. She’s addressed children, teachers, law-enforcement officers, religious officials and tourists.

Her West Hollywood bungalow is filled with thank-you notes from people who have heard her story.

Talking, she says, is like forgiveness: Hard to do, but harder not to.

“I want people to hear my cry, my sadness, my losses, and it’s very hard,” she said. “But I choose to do that. … Keeping silent? It’s not good enough just to remember. You have to verbalize your pain.”

She understands those who choose not to speak; her late husband, Ernie, was among them. The only member of his family to survive the Holocaust, he was consumed with bitterness, Brown said, even turning away from his daughters when they asked him what happened during World War II.

“He said, ‘Your mother speaks for me,’” Brown recounted. “‘It’s too painful, and I’m too angry.’”

Their ‘sacred duty’

In the Museum of Tolerance, Brown’s voice is eerily even, whether she is describing happy years in Putnok, Hungary, or the corpses that littered Auschwitz, or the wisdom of her father, a rabbi, or the death march during which dehydration pushed her to drink her own urine. Forgiveness or fear.

As she narrates her way through 10 concentration camps and the loss of 60 loved ones, Brown is completely present: “They shaved my hair.” “I lost my identity.” “That was the last time I saw my family.” “The dog attacked me.”

But when she describes her arrival at Auschwitz, the “I” becomes “you,” as if she still cannot bear to put herself in the awful moment — carrying corpses from a cattle car, seeing guards and dogs and electrified barbed wire for the first time, prisoner suicides and crematoria, knowing what happened there.

“You’re 16 years old,” she tells the audience, microphone gripped in both small hands. “And you had an idyllic childhood, so much love and security. You just … really, you become numb. Your fear was so great that you didn’t feel anything. … And because the circumstances were so uncertain and you couldn’t really plan or you couldn’t think, you had no emotion and no feeling anymore.”

What opens her up is what she describes as her “sacred duty to tell our story.” That duty, she told a hushed audience in late August, has three equally important parts.

To honor the 6 million victims “who have no voice.” To rebut those who would debunk the Holocaust. And “the third reason — to ask all of you to be tolerant. … This is our solemn duty to emphasize that. Not to be a bystander.”

In October 2007, Brown published her memoir, “If You Save One Life.” In November, she was diagnosed with leukemia. She finished two months of chemotherapy in June 2008 and hoped for a cancer-free year. It was not to be. Chemotherapy began again in September. Life now is day-by-day.

Brown figures faith will get her through these next weeks. After all, it worked during the Holocaust.

Or as she told one woman who heard her story and asked how a survivor could continue to believe in God: “That’s all that’s left. Everything was taken away from me. The only thing left is God.”